It all happened overnight. The people of East Berlin became prisoners of their government. The government was oppressive, and people wanted to leave. The government could not have that, so walls were put up encircling the city virtually overnight. East Germany was now a part of the Eastern Bloc, and it was separated from West Germany in the Western Bloc by the inner German border and the Berlin Wall, which were heavily fortified with watchtowers, land mines, armed soldiers, and various other measures to prevent illegal crossings. The people were prisoners, and the East German border troops were instructed to prevent defection to West Germany by all means, including lethal force (Schießbefehl; “order to fire”). Many people attempted escape, and many people died trying.

One of the people who refused to give up and settle for imprisonment was Peter Strelzyk (born 1942), an electrician and former East German Air Force mechanic. Strelzyk, along with his friend, Günter Wetzel (born 1955), who was a bricklayer by trade, were determined to get out of East Berlin. The men had been colleagues at a local plastics factory for four years. They had long shared a desire to get out of the country and make a better life for their families. They began discussing, albeit very quietly, how they might make their escape. On March 7, 1978, they decided that they were done living that way and began to plan an escape. Their first thought was to build a helicopter. Then, they realized that they would be unable to acquire an engine capable of powering such a craft. Then, their imaginations alighted on the thought of building a hot air balloon. That idea came about after they watched a television program about ballooning. Some say that they got the idea after a relative shared a magazine article about the International Balloon Festival in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It really doesn’t matter where the idea came from, because they main thing is that they cose a hot air balloon as their escape vehicle.

The decision made, Strelzyk and Wetzel began research into balloons. The plan was to escape with their wives and a total of four children, aged 2 to 15. This was going to have to be a big balloon to hold eight passengers and the basket they would ride in. They calculated the weight of the eight passengers and the craft itself to be around 1,650 pounds. With that in mind, they knew that would need a balloon that could carry the weight would need to hold 71,000 cubic feet of air heated to 212 °F. The next calculation was the amount of material needed for the balloon itself, estimated to be 8,600 square feet.

The pair lived in Pößneck, a small town of about 20,000 where large quantities of cloth could not be obtained without raising attention. There were a number of things that raised suspicion, and a number of people in East Berlin who were all too willing to tell the authorities what they saw and heard. The two men tried neighboring towns of Rudolstadt, Saalfeld, and Jena without success. They travelled 31 miles to Gera, where they were finally able to purchase 3 feet 3 inch wide rolls of cotton cloth totaling 850 2,790 feet in length at a department store after telling the astonished clerk that they needed the large quantity of material to use as tent lining for their camping club.

Wetzel spent two weeks sewing the cloth into a balloon-shaped bag, 49 feet wide by 66 feet long, using a 40-year-old manually operated sewing machine. Strelzyk spent the time building the gondola and burner assembly. The gondola was made from an iron frame, sheet metal floor, and clothesline run around the perimeter every 5.9 inches for the sides. The burner was made using two 24-pound bottles of liquid propane household gas, hoses, water pipe, a nozzle, and a piece of stove pipe.

Finally, in April 1978, the balloon was ready to be tested. For several days, the men searched for just the right spot for the test. The site had to be secluded and yet have a good-sized clearing. They settled on a forest clearing near Ziegenrück, 6.2 miles from the border and 19 miles from Pößneck. Unfortunately, when they tried to inflate the balloon, the heated air from the burner would not move into the balloon. They thought the problem might stem from the fact that they had laid the balloon on the ground. After weeks of additional searching, they found an 82-foot cliff at a rock quarry where they could suspend the balloon vertically before inflation. Unfortunately, that plan also failed.

In the most dramatic invention to date, the men decided to fill the bag with ambient-temperature air before using the burner to raise the air temperature and provide lift. For this, the men constructed a blower with a 14 horsepower 250 cc 15 cubic inch motorcycle engine, started with a Trabant automobile starter powered by jumper cables from Strelzyk’s Moskvitch sedan. The engine, which was quieted by a Trabant muffler. The engine turned 3.3 feet fan blades to inflate the balloon. They also used a home-made flamethrower, similar to the gondola’s burner, to pre-heat the air faster. With these modifications in place, they returned to the secluded clearing to try again, and again the plan failed to inflate the balloon. At this point, they discovered that the cotton material was the problem. It was just too porous, and the heated air quickly seeped out. That unsuccessful attempt had cost them 2,400 DDM. Strelzyk disposed of the cloth by burning it in his furnace over several weeks.

The men went back to the drawing board. Strelzyk and Wetzel purchased samples of different fabrics in local stores, including umbrella material and various samples of taffeta and nylon. Then they used an oven to test the material for heat resistance. They also created a test rig from a vacuum cleaner and a water-filled glass tube to determine which material would allow the vacuum to exert the most suction on the water, and consequently which was the most impervious to air. Of the materials tested, the umbrella covering performed the best, but it was also the most expensive. In the end, they instead selected a synthetic kind of taffeta.

Once again, the men traveled to a distant city to make their purchases so they wouldn’t arouse suspicion. This time they travelled over 100 miles to a department store in Leipzig. Their new cover story was that they belonged to a sailing club and needed the material to make sails. They were extremely worried that the purchase could alert East Germany’s State Security Service (Stasi). Nevertheless, they returned the next day and picked up the material without incident. They paid 4,800 DDM (US$720) for 2,600 feet of 3-foot 3-inch fabric. On the way home, they also purchased an electric motor to speed up the pedal-operated sewing machine they had been using to sew the material into the desired balloon shape.

Wetzel spent the next week sewing the material into another balloon. The new motor made the work much faster. Before long they were ready. Soon afterwards, they returned to the forest clearing and inflated the bag in about five minutes using the blower and flame thrower. It was amazing!! Unfortunately, there was s glitch. The bag rose and held air, but the burner on the gondola was not powerful enough to create the heat needed for lift. The pair continued experimenting for months, doubling the number of propane tanks and trying different fuel mixtures. Disappointed with the result, Wetzel decided to abandon the project and instead started to pursue the idea of building a small gasoline engine-powered light aeroplane or a glider.

Strelzyk, however, refused to give up. He continued trying to improve the burner. In June 1979, he discovered that with the propane tank inverted, additional pressure caused the liquid propane to evaporate, which produced a bigger flame. He modified the gondola to mount the propane tanks upside down, and returned to the test site where he found the new configuration produced a 39-foot-long flame. Strelzyk was ready to attempt an escape.

Now down to just four people, the Strelzyk family chose July 3, 1979, and go-day. The weather and wind conditions were favorable. The entire Strelzyk family lifted from a forest clearing at 1:30 am and climbed at a rate of 13 feet per second. They reached an altitude of 6,600 feet according to an altimeter Strelzyk had made by modifying a barometer. A light wind was blowing them towards the border. The balloon then entered clouds, and atmospheric water vapor condensed on the balloon, adding weight which caused it to descend prematurely. The family landed safely…but they were approximately 590 feet short of the border, at the edge of the heavily mined border zone. It was a terrifying situation. At first, they weren’t sure where they were, but Strelzyk explored until he found a piece of litter…a bread bag from a bakery in Wernigerode, an East German town. The terrified family spent nine hours carefully extricating themselves from the 1,600-foot-wide border zone to avoid detection. They also had to travel unnoticed through a 3.1-mile restricted zone before hiking back a total of 8.7 mile to their car and the launch paraphernalia they had left behind. Amazingly, while the balloon was found, their car had not been. They made it home just in time to report absent due to sickness from work and school and go to be to get some much-needed rest.

The abandoned balloon was discovered by the authorities later that morning, and Strelzyk destroyed all compromising evidence and sold his car, fearing that it could link him to the escape attempt. On August 14th, the Stasi launched an appeal to find the “perpetrator of a serious offence” and listed in detail all the items recovered at the landing site. Strelzyk felt that the Stasi would eventually trace the balloon to him and the Wetzels. He agreed with Wetzel that their best chance was to quickly build another balloon and get out as soon as possible.

At this point, Wetzel again joined Strelzyk. They doubled the balloon’s size to 140,000 cubic feet in volume, 66 feet in diameter, and 82 feet in height. They needed 13,500 square feet of taffeta, and purchased the material, in various colors and patterns, all over the country in order to escape suspicion. Wetzel sewed a third balloon, using over 3.7 miles of thread, and Strelzyk rebuilt everything else as before. They worked feverishly, because they knew their time was very limited. The authorities were closing in on them. In six weeks, they had prepared the 400-pound balloon and a payload of 1,210 pound, including the gondola, equipment, and cargo of eight people. Confident in their calculations, they found the weather conditions right on September 15, 1978, when a violent thunderstorm created the correct winds. The two families set off for the launch site in Strelzyk’s replacement car (a Wartburg) and a moped. Arriving at 1:30 am, they needed just ten minutes to inflate the balloon and an additional three minutes to heat the air.

They lifted off just after 2:00 am, and in their hurry, the group failed to cut the tethers holding the gondola to the ground at the same time, tilting the balloon and sending the flame towards the fabric, which caught fire. They quickly got the fire out, because they had prepared for such an emergency. Then the balloon climbed to 6,600 feet in nine minutes, drifting towards West Germany at 9 miles per hour. The balloon flew for 28 minutes, with the temperature plummeting to 18 °F in the unsheltered gondola, which consisted solely of clothesline railing. Nevertheless, they pressed on.

A design miscalculation resulted in the burner stovepipe being too long, causing the flame to be too high in the balloon, creating excessive pressure which caused the balloon to split. While they had to use the burner more that they had hoped, they kept the balloon in the air. At one point, they increased the flame to the maximum possible extent and rose to 8,200 feet. They later learned they had been high enough to be detected, but not identified, on radar by West German air traffic controllers. They had also been detected on the East German side by a night watchman at the district culture house in Bad Lobenstein. The report of an unidentified flying object heading toward the border caused guards to activate search lights, but the balloon was too high and out of reach of the lights. God had protected the families.

When the propane ran out, the balloon descended quickly, landing near the town of Naila, in the West German state of Bavaria and only 6 miles from the border. The only injury was suffered by Wetzel, who broke his leg upon landing. Various clues indicated to the families that the balloon had made it across the border. These included spotting red and yellow colored lights, not common in East Germany, and small farms, in contrast to the large state-run operations in the east. Another clue was modern farm equipment, unlike the older equipment used in East Germany. Two Bavarian State Police officers saw the balloon’s flickering light and headed to where they thought it would land. There they found Strelzyk and Wetzel, who first asked if they had made it to the west, although they noticed the police car was an Audi…another sign they were in West Germany. Upon learning they had, the escapees happily called for their families to join them.

Of course, East Germany immediately increased border security, closed all small airports close to the border, and ordered the planes kept farther inland. Propane gas tanks became registered products, and large quantities of fabric suitable for balloon construction could no longer be purchased. Mail from East Germany to the two escaped families was prohibited.

Erich Strelzyk learned of his brother’s escape on the ZDF news and was arrested three hours after the landing in his Potsdam apartment. The arrest of family members was standard procedure to deter others from attempting escape. He was charged with “aiding and abetting escape”, as were Strelzyk’s sister Maria and her husband, who were sentenced to 2½ years. The three were eventually released with the help of Amnesty International.

The families decided to initially settle in Naila where they had landed. Wetzel worked as an automobile mechanic and Strelzyk opened a TV repair shop in Bad Kissingen. Due to pressure from Stasi spies, the Strelzyks moved to Switzerland in 1985. After German reunification in 1990, they returned to their old home in their hometown of Pößneck. The Wetzels remained in Bavaria. Peter Strelzyk died in 2017 at age 74 after a long illness. In 2017, the balloon was put on permanent display at the Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte: Museum in Bavaria.