alt Hacker NewsEast Germany balloon escape
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Disney made a movie about this called Night Crossing in the early 1980s. More recently, there's a 2018 German movie about it called Balloon.
The Damn Interesting podcast (no affiliation, just a huge fan) had an episode on this topic if you prefer to listen to this story: https://www.damninteresting.com/up-in-the-air/
One of favorite escapes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Papago_Escape
They built boats to sail down the Salt River, to the Colorado River, and to Mexico. Of course the salt river is almost always just a dry river bed. It's shocking to me that no dramatization of this escape exists
The investment, planning, danger, and dogged persistence… incredible story.
In Eastern Europe in 1979, those were big sums of money. What an extraordinary story
Reminds me of George Gamow and his wife's attempts to escape from the Soviet union by kayaking across the Black sea (first attempt) and the Norwegian sea (second attempt) until he was lucky enough to be given permission to visit the Solvay conference and was able to defect using conventional methods (Simply not returning).
I first read about this in Reader's Digest back in the eighties.
Meanwhile in Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelir_Ant%C3%B4nio_de_Carli
> Propane gas tanks became registered products
Ha. Someone does a thing and the state moves in to regulate. Same as it ever was, apparently.
Item registration… not used to prevent crime, just to make it easier to document after it happens.
Poor family members though
> East Germany immediately increased border security, closed all small airports close to the border, and ordered the planes kept farther inland.[6] 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.[12]
> Erich Strelzyk learned of his brother's escape on the ZDF news and was arrested in his Potsdam apartment three hours after the landing. 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.
People - here in Germany as well as abroad - forget too easily what a sinister but also ridiculous state the GDR was.
Authoritarians everywhere belong on the dustpile of history.
My elementary school showed the Disney movie about this at least once a year.
>hey needed just ten minutes to inflate the balloon and an additional three minutes to heat the air.
That's faster than most professionals by a substantial margin. I guess when it matters you make it work.
I'm amazed most of all they were able to keep it under wraps with 4 children involved. I don't think you could pay my children at that age $1 million to keep their mouth shut even under the same risks.
Odd how nobody ever builds a balloon to fly towards the communist utopias.
One good metric of quality of life (which includes various freedoms) is how many people emigrate or immigrate.
Anybody who defends authoritarians has to explain why so many people want to leave and why the regime wants to keep them in. (With some exceptions such as China which weaponizes emigrants by threatening their families.)
>The family members included:
> Peter Strelzyk, aged 37
> Doris Strelzyk
> Frank Strelzyk, aged 15
> Andreas Strelzyk, aged 11
> Günter Wetzel, aged 24
> Petra Wetzel
> Peter Wetzel, aged 5
> Andreas Wetzel, aged 2
Was/is it common practice to omit the ages of adult women in Germany?
Wait... People want to escape from communist countries?
The GDR was a showcase state that, much like the DPRK, being on the periphery of the communist block, was propped up by USSR so that direct comparisons with its capitalist neighbor wouldn't be so unflattering. One of the most important forms of assistance the GDR and other satellites received was cheap energy. In the case of the GDR, through the Friendship Pipeline. One only need look at the DPRK to see how vital this assistance was; it was only after the USSR collapsed and Russia turned off the spigot that North Korea started regularly suffering famines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_North_Korean_famine
And yet even with the high (in comparison to other communist states) quality of life people in the GDR enjoyed, people still risked life and limb to escape. You could leave Brazil under its various juntas, Chile under Pinochet, Portugal under Salazar, and Spain under Franco, yet the only option for citizens of the GDR and other communist states (in some cases, still today, e.g., Cuba and the DPRK) was escape and defection.
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>Strelzyk and Wetzel began research into balloons. Their plan was to escape with their wives and a total of four children (aged 2 to 15). They calculated the weight of the eight passengers and the craft itself to be around 750 kilograms (1,650 lb).
That feat would be impossible for the average US family
The photo of the balloon here really helps put the story into perspective.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190408181736/https://www.museu...