Compelling attempts to escape the GDR

Not everyone in the former East Germany waited until the Wall came down to go west. In 1977, a truck driver from Dresden daringly set out with his wife and daughter in a tiny rubber boat across the Baltic Sea. Fifteen hours later, a fisherman took them on board his trawler and brought them safely to Lübeck in the West. It should be noted, however, that many others died trying to flee by sea.

In 1974, biologist Carmen Rohrbach swam out from the GDR into the Baltic with her boyfriend, a rubber boat in tow. Before they could make it to Denmark, a search light went on. They released the boat and continued swimming. Captured by East German guards, Rohrbach then spent two years in prison. Today, she's still an adventurer, traveling far and wide for her research and book-writing.

Axel Mitbauer, a GDR national swim team member, used pure muscle to flee. In 1969, the 19-year-old swam across the Baltic Sea from Boltenhagen to Lübeck's bay area when guards turned search lights off to allow them to cool. "I had one minute to cross both the first and second sandbanks," he recalled. He smeared himself with masses of petroleum jelly to protect himself against the icy temperatures.

Over 5,000 people tried to escape the GDR via the Baltic — by boat, air mattress, swimming or even submarine. At least 174 adults and children died in the endeavor. According to Bodo Müller, who wrote a book with his wife Christine entitled "Across the Baltic Sea to Freedom," 901 people actually succeeded between the Berlin Wall's construction in August 1961 and its fall on November 9, 1989.

There were the more classic escape attempts, such as by this woman, who is pictured being pulled out of a West Berlin shaft in October 1964. The shaft led to an escape tunnel connecting East to West Berlin. One of several ingenious underground border crossings, 57 people escaped through the so-called "Tunnel 57" over two days before it was discovered in an East Berlin street.

19-year-old East German policeman Conrad Schumann escaped on August 15, 1961 by jumping the hastily-constructed barbed-wire fence that made up the new border erected just two days before. The image circulated around the world, with Schumann ostensibly the first of over 2,000 East German police and soldiers who made the attempt. Schumann committed suicide 37 years later in 1998.

In September 1961, this woman first pushed her dog and then her shopping bag out of this window and into a rescue net provided by West German fire fighters. Though some people tried to pull her back into the building that stood on the border in East Berlin, she persisted and climbed out a back window to freedom in West Berlin.

While most attempted escape by foot, thus risking being shot or stepping on mines, one group was exceptionally inventive. In September 1964, 14 East Germans, among them children, were smuggled across the border in a refrigerated truck as they lay under the carcasses of slaughtered pigs being transported to the West.

Surely the most compelling of escape attempts was by hot air balloon. In September 1979, two daredevil families — including four children aged 2 to 15 — successfully floated across the sky from Pößneck, Thuringia to Naila, Bavaria, then situated eight kilometers (five miles) south of the Iron Curtain. They reached a height of 2,500 meters (8,200 ft.) in the homemade balloon.

That endeavor inspired both the 1982 British-American film, "Night Crossing," as well as the 2018 thriller, "Balloon," directed by Michael Herbig.