Amidst the wreckage of his downed aircraft, the pilot faces a challenging predicament in the village
On a fateful day in August 1965, the quiet village of Sassen was forever changed. On Friday the 13th of that month, one of the MiG-21 fighters took off from Tutow, but during takeoff, it experienced a serious problem.
The plane, under the control of Lieutenant Werner Döhnert, performed strange up-and-down movements instead of quickly ascending into the sky as usual. A minute after takeoff, the pilot abandoned the aircraft, and it crashed near the village center, exploding between a chicken farm and the parsonage.
The explosion sparked a fire that engulfed the "pastor's barn" and a neighboring chicken coop. The fire department took a significant amount of time to arrive due to everyone being out harvesting and the lack of nearby water.
Despite the chaos, the village suffered major damage but only one fatality and no injuries beyond property damage. The storage building filled with hay was destroyed by the fire, and the chickens from the nearby chicken farm ran around like living torches.
In the midst of it all, a young boy named Detlef Behm was having lunch with his grandmother on a nearby parental farm. They had meatballs for lunch, unaware of the tragedy unfolding nearby. As they heard the explosion, Detlef and his family ran outside to see what was happening, and a huge cloud of smoke rose.
Agathe Behm, mother of Detlef, was one of the first at the crash site and found the pilot. Meanwhile, her son Detlef and his classmate Martin Diedrich found debris from the MiG-21 not only in the immediate vicinity but also over 500 meters away.
For decades after the accident, there was a clearly visible, deep depression at the crash site. It took more than a day to extinguish the last embers of the fire. Detlef's grandmother ushered the children back into the house and locked them in, but they tried to see as much of what was happening outside as possible through the windows.
The Fighter Squadron 9 of the National People's Army (NVA) was stationed in Tutow since spring 1965 due to construction work at its home base in Peenemünde. The unit, responsible for air defense in the eastern Baltic Sea region of the GDR, trained almost daily with the latest generation of Soviet jet fighters, the MiG-21.
The memory of that fateful day in Sassen remains a poignant reminder of the dangers and uncertainties that can arise even in the most peaceful of settings.
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