The Wall claims its victims

One of the very lucky, early escapees. This young man simply cut the first wire fence and ran through to freedom. There was, as yet, no death strip, and the crowd of people standing looking through the wire probably gave him some cover. It could easily have been fatal. Others were not so lucky. The Grenzer, from early in the Wall’s history, were required to “shoot-to-kill” anyone trying to escape the DDR over the Wall, who did not respond to a single warning shot, a requirement that was later dropped.

Above: Günter Litfin, 24, was shot while trying to escape by swimming across the Teltow canal, 24th August 1961. Right: Litfin is fished, dead, out of the waters of the Humboldt harbour. He was the first fatality of the Wall. He was shot by a Trapo [Transport Police] patrolling the bridge nearby. Below: A Trapo patrols a bridge in Berlin’s Osthafen [Eastern Harbour].

The first victim of the Wall…

Peter Fechter [inset], 18, is shot while trying to climb over the Wall, 17 th August 1962. 1: Fechter lies at the foot of the Wall, crying out for help, for fifty minutes before he bleeds to death. He had been shot in the femoral artery. West German police tried to help at risk to their lives; the East Germans held them off with automatic fire. They eventually dropped first-aid packages over the Wall, but it was too late. 2: Grenzer arrive to take the body away. 3: Fechter is carried off by Grenzer – the fear and tension can be seen in their faces and gestures. 4: Though they tried to hide their actions as best they could, there was no way of escaping the publicity of Fechter’s death. 5: The last-known view of Fechter’s body as he is carried beyond the death strip into East Berlin. Fechter’s harrowing death provoked outrage, and angry demonstrations in West Berlin. It finally exposed the true nature of the “anti-fascist protection wall”, and occasioned major revisions in policy by the DDR. Never again was anyone left to die of his wounds.

“Helft mir doch!” The most infamous Wall death of all…

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Death by “natural causes” – Wolf-Olaf Muszynski drowned in the cold waters of the Spree river, 1st April 1963, while attempting to swim to freedom. His body was pulled out of the water on the Western side. He was not shot. Statistics on the number of deaths caused by the Wall range from 86 [shot] to 227, depending on the criteria used. Although the number shot seems small, these Wall deaths have the power to shock because each one was a considered individual act of cold-blooded killing. Worse, all the victims were desperate to escape the claustrophobic, oppressive country in which they lived, and were killed by their own fellow citizens for trying to do so. The consequences of Honecker’s shoot-to-kill order amply illustrate the truth of Stalin’s well-known quip: “A single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.”

The last victim of the Wall. The DDR’s shoot-to-kill order was a secret one, never officially acknowledged. Chris Gueffroy [inset], a 20-year-old barman, had heard from a young Grenzer that the order had been rescinded. He was due to be conscripted into the NVA in May 1989 (the year the Wall fell), and did not want to serve in the army of a state he despised. On the night of 5th February, he and a friend attempted to cross the Wall. Unfortunately for them, the order was still in place. The two friends had almost reached the Western marker, when Gueffroy received ten fatal bullets in the chest. His friend was wounded, but survived. There was such an outcry in the West that Erich Honecker, then Head of State, actually did, finally, rescind the order. A simple memorial marks the place where Gueffroy died [above]. The Wall, of course, is gone. Gueffroy’s death, and its effects, was one of the events presaging to the collapse of the DDR later that year.

The Wall cuts through the Potsdamer Platz, formerly one of Berlin’s busiest squares, focus of the 1953 uprising. Later, many of the buildings on the eastern side [left] would be levelled. Note the disused entrance to the U-Bahn station, R, once one of the busiest East-West crossing points. It was blocked off when the border was sealed.

Blocked-off buildings on the Bernauer-strasse. Here, the sector ended at the house fronts, rather than down the middle of the street. These forcibly emptied buildings show, with a particular pathos, the tragedy of the Berlin Wall. The tank-trap-like objects above the ground floor roofs are called Höckersperrn, “dragon’s teeth”. They are intended to prevent escapers jumping down from above.

Border-zone sign at Charlottenstrasse, now blocked by the Wall, beyond which construction-work is in progress. In this early form, a determined escapee still had a chance of crossing the Wall, though it was dangerous, and often fatal, to do so.

The Wall was penetrated with elaborate fortified crossing points, such as this one on Heinrich Heinestrasse. The overlapping barrier walls prevented an escaping vehicle from being driven straight through at speed.

The cinder-block Wall under construction. In front, West Berliners have erected a hoarding with a photograph of East German leader Walter Ulbricht and his fatuous statement: “No-one has the intention of building a wall.”

Nikita Khrushchev visits the eastern side of the Wall, 1962. Here, he rides with its political architect Walter Ulbricht, Secretary of the Council of Ministers of the DDR. It was he who eventually pushed Khrushchev into allowing the Wall to be built.Inset: Time magazine’s cover portrayal of Ulbricht on 25 th August 1961, two weeks after the border was sealed.

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy visits the western side of the Wall, June 1963. He rides with Willi Brandt, centre, Mayor of West Berlin, and Konrad Adenauer, right, Chancellor of West Germany. It was on this visit that Kennedy included [incorrectly] the definite article, “Ich bin [ein] Berliner”, thus apparently proclaiming himself a jam doughnut rather than a citizen of West Berlin.

Two Grenzer patrol the Wall, keeping a watchful eye on the decadent capitalists on the Western side. The Grenzpolizei [Border Police, or Grenzer] were a special corps, originally NVA, later directly under the control of the Ministry of Defence, established to patrol the DDR’s borders in order to stop East Germans from escaping to the West. There were also Volkspolizei [Vopos, the “regular” police] and Transportpolizei [Trapos], one of whose tasks was to ensure that the transport system did not provide a ready means of exit fom the DDR]. The comment made by Peter Tannhoff in his account of his military service, Sprutz, that the DDR was in fact a giant prison, is a just one.

Grenzer inspect the documents of an elderly West-Berliner crossing to the East.

Another pair of apparently very bored dog-handlers – or is it the photographer who is bothering them? The dog has no such inhibitions, and is making its feelings amply clear.

At the Chausseestrasse crossing-point, a French border-guard gazes across the painted white line at his East German counterpart. The Wall was actually built five metres inside DDR* territory. The guard could easily have escaped to the West, except that the DDR still had power over his family.

*DDR = Deutsche Demokratische Republik, the official name for East Germany.

The same crossing-point. The car is entering East Berlin. Grenzer tended to be surly; over-friendliness towards Westerners was regarded with great suspicion by Communist authorities, and could be career-destroying. Notice how this Grenzer folds his arms and pointedly turns his back towards the photographer in both pictures.

The lighter side of the Wall: A sentry converses smilingly with a small boy looking through his binoculars. Not even totalitarian leaders of the type who ruled the DDR were able to eliminate the normal instincts and interactions of human nature.

The many and varied duties of a DDR border-guard

The length and varied terrain of the Wall necessitated many different types of border-duties for the Grenzer, in order to protect DDR citizens from escaping into the decadent arms of the waiting West. Here are a few of them:

[1] A fast patrol-boat on the Spree. Some of the sector-borders were canals and rivers.

[2] Patrolling a wooded area of the Wall. Note the character-istic peaked, green-banded uniform cap, marking this man as a Grenzer.

[3] The view from inside one of the big guard-towers.

[4] Vigilance on a wharf at Berlin’s Osthafen.

[5] Guarding an U-Bahn [underground] station in Berlin.

[6] Keeping watch over a hole broken through the Wall by escapees in a vehicle.

[7] Patrolling a bridge-crossing over a river or lake.

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The headquarters of the feared Stasi [Ministerium für Staatssicherheit - Ministry for State Security], the DDR’s secret police, in Normannenstrasse, East Berlin. One in five East Germans is believed to have supplied them with information. The civilian wearing a hat at the extreme left of the photograph, inset, is without doubt a Stasi agent.