Winfried Freudenberg (29 August 1956 – 8 March 1989) was the last person to die in an attempt to escape from East Germany to West Berlin across the Berlin Wall as he fell from an improvised gas balloon at high altitude over West Berlin. Biography Freudenberg was born in Osterwieck and grew up in the Saxony-Anhalt town of Lüttgenrode, near what was then the border between West Germany and his native East Germany, a part of the communist Eastern Bloc, as a satellite state of the Soviet Union. After completing an apprenticeship as an electrician, he obtained his secondary education diploma in night school, then trained in information technology and received a diploma as an electronics engineer. In the autumn of 1988 he married his wife Sabine, a chemist he had met while both were students at Ilmenau University. With the erection of The Wall, East Germany cut them off from the professional opportunities that existed in the West, and the couple, especially Winfried, had become increasingly disappointed about being unable to cross the border. Immediately after the wedding the two began planning their escape to the West via a homemade balloon filled with natural gas (because its main component, methane, is lighter than air, natural gas can serve as a lifting gas). Escape attempt and death As part of their plan, Freudenberg took a job in a public utility that supplied natural gas, and the couple took an apartment in the East Berlin neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg. In January and February 1989, they began assembling a 13 metre (43') tall by 11 metre (36') diameter balloon envelope out of polyethylene, which they cut into strips, taped together, and engirded with a string net. There was no basket, only a narrow wooden beam. On the evening of 7 March, they decided that the wind conditions were favourable for their escape. They drove to a pressure regulating station in the Blankenburg neighborhood to which Freudenberg had the keys and at midnight began to fill their balloon with gas. From some time after 1:00 a.m. the balloon was visible from a distance. A waiter on his way home from work, which had ended at 1:30 a.m., noticed the balloon and called the Volkspolizei. When the couple heard a patrol car arriving shortly after 2:00 a.m., the balloon was not yet completely filled. Because they feared it would not lift both of them,