Victims of the Berlin Wall

Revealed: Tragic victims of the Berlin Wall

By Tony Paterson in Berlin
The Independent
Published: 12 August 2006

Siegfried Noffke wanted nothing more than to be reunited with his wife and baby daughter. It was the summer of 1962 and less than a year earlier, the 22-year-old had been separated from his family by a momentous, tragic event that took the world by surprise.

On the night of 12 August 1961, armed units of Communist police and militiamen began cordoning off the eastern sectors of Berlin with barbed wire, and started reinforcing the divide with hastily erected breezeblock barriers.

That was the beginning of Berlin's infamous Wall, the concrete and barbed wire Cold War barrier that divided Germany's biggest city for 28 years until its fall in the winter of 1989.

Noffke, an East Berliner, had been visiting relatives in capitalist West Berlin that evening. Like hundreds of others, he returned to a crossing point into East Berlin on the morning of 13 August but found it barred by border police with machine guns. His only chance of contact with his wife and daughter, left in the east, was to wave at them across the barbed-wire divide.

He decided his only chance was to to smuggle his family into the West. He joined a group that had started to dig a tunnel from West Berlin's Sebastianstrasse in the rundown district of Kreuzberg that aimed to break through under the Wall into East Berlin's Heinrich Heine Strasse, a distance of some 200 yards. On the morning of 28 June 1962, the tunnel diggers had almost reached their goal. Less than a yard of earth separated them from a cellar in a house in the East Berlin street. But when Noffke and his team broke through, they were met by East Germany's notorious Stasi secret police.

Noffke, one of the first out, instantly machine-gunned to death. His colleagues were arrested and put on trial for "anti-state provocation". Unbeknown to the tunnel-diggers, Jürgen Henning, a Stasi mole had joined the group early on and had kept the East Berlin authorities fully informed of their activities. Noffke's wife was jailed in East Germany for "anti-Communist conspiracy".

Then came scores of similar acts of murder perpetrated by the former East German authorities at the Berlin Wall. They were formally confirmed this week, 16 years after its collapse, to coincide with the 45th anniversary tomorrow of the Wall's construction.

The findings are the result of extensive research by a German government-backed commission into deaths at the Berlin Wall which has established that at least 125 people were killed trying to cross the barrier that divided the city during the Cold War.

"These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg," said Hans-Hermann Hertle, a director of the commission organised by the Potsdam Centre for Historical Research. "The numbers are certain to rise, given that an estimated 100,000 people were jailed in East Germany for trying to flee to the West."

Dr Hertle said his researchers had combed East German archives and interviewed scores of witnesses during their investigation into 268 suspected Wall deaths. Sixty-two cases were dismissed as hearsay and 81 others are still being investigated. "It is often very difficult to confirm that individuals were killed because the East German authorities often tried to cover up the circumstances because they were a serious embarrassment for the regime," Dr Hertle said.

Statistics on the number of people killed at the Wall vary. Berlin's privately run Checkpoint Charlie museum puts the toll at 238 and estimates more than 1,000 people were killed at the Wall and in the heavily fortified and mined former East-West German border between 1961 and 1989.

But even if the Potsdam commission's tally is conservative, the circumstances of its now officially confirmed Wall deaths make grim reading. In scores of cases, would-be East German escapers were shot dead at point-blank range or left in the no man's land between the Wall's fortifications to bleed to death from wounds inflicted by Kalashnikov assault rifles or machine guns.

Most of those killed were in their early twenties. Twenty-one year-old Christian Buttkus and his fiancée Ilse were typical victims. Both were working as chemists in an East Berlin state-owned company and both wanted to escape to a better life in the West.

On the night of 3 March 1965, a year after their engagement and three years after the construction of the Wall, they drove to the East Berlin suburb of Kleinmachnow and began their attempt to breach the barbed wire and watchtower fortifications on the south western edge of the city.

It was snowing heavily and the pair hoped that by wearing their white chemists' coats they would be able to escape detection by the border guards. They managed to penetrate the first fence with wire-cutters, but when they reached the middle of the barrier, they set off a wire trip-alarm. Christian Buttkus died in a hail of bullets. A total of 199 shots were fired. Ilse suffered a leg wound and was sentenced to 20 months in prison.

The last person to be shot dead at the Wall was Chris Güffroy, a young East Berliner who decided to try his luck at escaping on 5 February 1989, months before the Wall finally fell. He had wrongly assumed the East German regime had suspended its order to shoot would-be escapers on sight.

Yet Chris Güffroy was not the Wall's final victim. Four weeks later, 33-year-old Winfried Freudenberg died fleeing East Berlin in a gas-filled balloon.

Freudenberg's balloon crashed in the West Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf and killed him instantly.

Study: At least 125 people died at Wall

By LAM THUY VO, Associated Press Writer
Tue Aug 8, 9:13 PM ET

BERLIN - At least 125 people were killed along the Berlin Wall during the 28 years it stood as the symbol of Cold War divisions, researchers said Tuesday, citing witness reports and official documents.

The numbers come from a government-sponsored commission that has been studying 268 deaths along the wall that divided what is now the German capital from 1961-1989, in an attempt to come up with a definitive number of how many lost their lives there.

Sixty-two previously suspected cases have been discounted, some as being based on hearsay, while another 81 possible cases still need to be examined, according to the commission.

East German authorities erected the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961 in order to solidify the separation of their capital, East and West Berlin, a capitalist enclave isolated deep inside the communist state, and prevent easterners fleeing.

Among the 125 deaths now confirmed was that of locksmith Wernhard Mispelhorn, an 18-year-old who had spent much of his time in West Berlin before the Wall went up in 1961.

According to the commission, East Germany's secret police ?- the Stasi ?- classed him as "unreliable" because he listened to Western radio, wore Western clothes and, along with his brother, kept an Opel car.

On Aug. 17, 1964, after an evening of drinking with two friends in East Berlin, he jumped the wall into the border's "death strip" and was shot in the back of the head by border guards as he ran for the West, the commission said. He died two days later at a police hospital in the east.

Another victim, 32-year-old electrician Herbert Halli, had worked on the Palace of the Republic, a communist-era landmark that housed East Germany's rubber-stamp parliament.

His fatal attempt to cross the Wall on April 3, 1975 appeared was related to his depression over an impending divorce, the commission said.

After a drinking spree with colleagues, he scaled the eastern side of the barrier and was shot by guards, the commission said.

Although the majority of those who died were East Germans trying to flee the former communist country, 32 people ?- including eight soldiers killed on duty ?- had no intention of crossing the border, the commission said.

"The victims of the Berlin Wall were only the tip of the iceberg that was the cruelty of the East German regime," said Hans-Hermann Hertle, the head of the Potsdam-based Center for Historical Research, which participated in the panel. "In total, approximately 80,000 to 100,000 people were imprisoned because they attempted to escape East Germany."

For its research, the commission interviewed witnesses of the events and studied various public records, some of which were only recently made available to researchers.

Berlin seeks to preserve Wall remains

By LAM THUY VO, Associated Press Writer
Sat Aug 12, 5:27 AM ET

BERLIN - Wolfgang Mueller remembers exactly where the Berlin Wall snaked through what is now the massive mall at Potsdamer Platz. He remembers standing near Checkpoint Charlie as a 15-year-old, at a special spot where he could peer through into a cafe in the West.

The 61-year-old auto mechanic remembers the day East German officials began building the Berlin Wall on Aug. 13, 1961 ?- 45 years ago Sunday ?- and the day it came down, on Nov. 9, 1989.

He is among those who lament that city officials and developers have erased most traces of the barrier in the reunified German capital.

Almost 17 years after its demise, Berlin officials have realized the importance of preserving the most tangible symbol of its Cold War history, making a $51 million proposal to protect the remaining parts of the wall.

"The people that tore down the wall in the center of Berlin are criminals," Mueller said, wandering through a memorial photo exhibit at the former Checkpoint Charlie crossing point in the city's central Mitte district.

"So much of this monument has been destroyed. Tourists should be able see the wall here in Mitte, they should remember," Mueller said.

In the euphoria that accompanied the wall's fall in 1989, few bothered to think about it as a monument to history ?- or a tourist attraction.

"Many of the people who had lived with it for decades wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible," said Christina Lauer, a spokeswoman for the team of experts at the Berlin Wall Association, which oversees the Berlin Wall Documentation Center.

Between city workers and developers who tore down and built over stretches of the 12-foot high concrete barriers, and tourists eager to chip away their own piece of the wall, only a few strips remain scattered around the city.

The new project will include money for better preserving those stretches and building an information booth at the new Brandenburg Gate subway station. A clearly marked path will trace the former West Berlin's 96-mile perimeter. Approved by the Berlin city government in June, the project is scheduled for completion by the 50th anniversary of the wall's building in 2011.

Tourists are often fascinated with the city's past as the point where the Cold War superpowers stood nose-to-nose for four decades. In October 1961, U.S. and Soviet tanks faced off at Checkpoint Charlie ?- a crossing between East and West Berlin for foreign tourists, diplomats and military personnel established by the U.S. Army that year.

President Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev resolved the dispute, caused by an American diplomat's being stopped at the crossing.

"For me, the wall is a symbol for the second part of Germany's 20th century history," said 27-year-old Matthias Awad of Chile. "Only seeing it you can imagine what the whole thing was like."

From chunks smeared with graffiti amid the bustle of the new Potsdamer Platz, to stretches that run along subway tracks in the former eastern neighborhood of Friedrichshain, 25 of 34 remaining strips of the original barrier are now under preservation as national historical monuments.

At the Berlin Wall Documentation Center in Bernauer Strasse, visitor numbers have doubled since 2003. Roughly half of them are foreign tourists.

At the East Side Gallery, Aviv Netter, an Israeli who lives in Berlin, showed a friend a nearly mile-long stretch of the wall that international artists commissioned after its fall covered with graffiti.

For him, the Berlin Wall recalls Israel's controversial separation barrier in the West Bank, which the Israeli government says is intended to keep out suicide bombers, but which Palestinians criticize as a land grab.

"As a guy from Israel, where they have a wall as well, I find it important to see this and remember what happened in the past," he said. "Only then can we learn from our mistakes."