More than three decades after it fell, historians still disagree about how many people the Berlin Wall killed. About the Wall itself there is no doubt. It was a guarded concrete barrier that East Germany (the GDR) began building on 13 August 1961, around the whole of West Berlin: about 156 kilometres of fortifications, 43 of them running through the middle of the city. Its purpose was to stop East Germans escaping to the West. It stood until the night of 9 November 1989, when a garbled announcement opened the checkpoints, and its fall led to German reunification on 3 October 1990. The death toll, somewhere between 140 and 245 depending on who is counting, is the clearest way into how it worked.
98, 140 or 245: The Unsettled Death Toll
Before the most thorough research began, official figures listed 98 people killed at the Wall. The standard figure today comes from a research team at the Centre for Contemporary History (ZZF) in Potsdam, a state-funded institute. It has confirmed that “at least 140 people” were killed at the Wall or died in circumstances directly connected to the GDR border regime. That number includes people shot while escaping, people who drowned or fell, border guards killed on duty, and bystanders. The project reviewed 575 deaths before arriving at it, and found that 99 of the 140 were shot.
The Checkpoint Charlie Museum publishes a much higher number: 245 deaths. Its director, Alexandra Hildebrandt, widow of the museum’s founder, has argued that the official count is too low. Her Working Group 13 August calls its results temporary, adds and drops cases as evidence comes in, and presents them each 13 August, the anniversary of the Wall’s construction. The difference comes mostly from what each side counts. The museum includes suicides by border guards and bodies found in the rivers and canals even when there was no clear evidence that the person had been trying to escape. The ZZF counts only deaths it can link to the border regime. Both counts are far smaller than the number who got through. Around 5,000 people escaped over, under or through the Wall, out of more than 100,000 who tried.
The names behind these numbers mark the Wall’s timeline. Ida Siekmann was the first to die, on 22 August 1961, after jumping from her third-floor flat at 48 Bernauer Strasse, a street where the apartment blocks were in the East and the street below them was in the West. Two days later, Günter Litfin, a 24-year-old tailor, became the first person shot dead, while trying to swim the Spree. On 17 August 1962 guards shot 18-year-old Peter Fechter near Zimmerstrasse and left him to bleed to death in the death strip while West Berliners and the Western press watched. The last person shot was Chris Gueffroy, on 6 February 1989. The last to die was Winfried Freudenberg, whose home-made gas balloon crashed on 8 March 1989, eight months before the Wall opened.
3.5 Million Departures and the Berlin Loophole
The Wall was the answer to a problem that had been bleeding East Germany since the end of the Second World War. After 1945 Berlin was divided into four sectors, American, British, French and Soviet, even though the whole city lay inside the Soviet zone. The Soviet blockade of 1948–49, broken by the Western airlift, made West Berlin a symbol. The creation of two German states in 1949 then made it a way out. By 1961 about 3.5 million East Germans, roughly 20 per cent of the population, had left.
In 1952, on Stalin’s advice, the GDR fenced off the inner German border between the two states. Berlin, still under four-power control, stayed open, and it became the obvious exit. A new passport law on 11 December 1957 cut the overall number of people leaving, but it pushed nearly all of those who still left through West Berlin. By the end of 1958, more than 90 per cent of departures went through the city, up from 60 per cent. Those who left were disproportionately young and skilled: engineers, doctors, teachers, technicians. By 1960 only 61 per cent of East Germany’s population was of working age, down from 70.5 per cent before the war.
There was also a practical reason the city was not sealed sooner. East German railways ran through West Berlin, and closing the sector boundary would have cut the network. A bypass line, the Berlin outer ring, was begun in 1951 and completed in 1961, the year the border was closed.
Barbed Wire Sunday and the Grenzmauer 75
On 15 June 1961 the East German leader Walter Ulbricht told a press conference that nobody had any intention of building a wall. It was the first time the word Mauer had been used in public in this context. On Saturday 12 August he signed the order to close the border at a government garden party at Döllnsee, north of the city. At midnight, police and army units started tearing up streets and stringing barbed wire. By Sunday morning, 13 August, West Berlin was cut off, and Germans still call that day Barbed Wire Sunday. The first concrete elements went in on 17 August. The whole barrier was built on East German territory, generally a little inside the legal line, so that it never encroached on West Berlin.
The Wall went through four versions. The last, known as Grenzmauer 75 or Border Wall 75, was begun in 1975 and completed around 1980. It was built from 45,000 reinforced concrete sections, each 3.6 metres high and 1.2 metres wide, topped with a smooth pipe that was hard to grip. Behind it lay the death strip: a second, hinterland wall added from June 1962 about 100 metres further in, with the houses in between demolished. The strip was covered in raked sand so that footprints showed, and it had anti-vehicle trenches, signal fences, dog runs, more than 116 watchtowers and 20 bunkers. Unlike the inner German border, the Berlin Wall had no landmines. There were nine official crossings between East and West Berlin, the best known being Checkpoint Charlie at Friedrichstraße and Zimmerstraße, which was reserved for Allied personnel and foreigners.
People still found ways across. At least 70 tunnels were dug under the Wall. Only 19 succeeded, carrying about 400 people west. Others escaped by stolen armoured car, light aircraft, zip-line and hot-air balloon. Conrad Schumann, an East German border guard, jumped the wire on 15 August 1961, two days into the closure.
Schabowski’s Note and the Night of 9 November 1989
The Wall came down because the rest of the Iron Curtain was already failing around it. Hungary began dismantling its fence with Austria in June 1989. After a border gate was opened at the Pan-European Picnic on 19 August, more than 13,000 East German holidaymakers crossed through Hungary to Austria in September. Demonstrations spread across East Germany. Erich Honecker resigned on 18 October, and on 4 November about half a million people rallied on Alexanderplatz.
On 9 November the new leadership under Egon Krenz approved rules that let East Germans travel directly to the West, due to take effect the following day. Günter Schabowski, the Politburo spokesman, had not been part of the discussions. He was handed a note just before an evening press conference. When the journalist Riccardo Ehrman asked when the rules applied, Schabowski hesitated and then said, as far as he knew, immediately. West German television carried the story that evening, and East Germans, who watched it too, headed for the checkpoints. At 10:45 pm Harald Jäger, the officer in command at Bornholmer Straße, gave up trying to hold back the crowd and opened the gates. Nobody in authority would take responsibility for ordering guards to shoot, and crowds were soon standing on top of the Wall.
Krenz in Court and the Wall at Bernauer Straße
The death toll became a legal question after reunification, and the court cases are one reason the figures were examined so closely. Through the 1990s, German courts tried both the guards who fired and the officials who set border policy. In 1997 Egon Krenz, East Germany’s last communist leader, was sentenced to six and a half years for the manslaughter of four people shot at the Wall. Defence minister Heinz Kessler, his deputy Fritz Streletz, Günter Schabowski and Günther Kleiber were also jailed. The cases against Honecker and the Stasi chief Erich Mielke were dropped because of their poor health, and Honecker died in 1994. The last case against a border guard closed on 12 February 2004. The heaviest sentence went to the guard who shot Walter Kittel after he had tried to surrender: ten years for murder.
Demolition began officially on 13 June 1990 and finished in 1994, so little of the Wall survives where it stood. A stretch of the outer, westernmost wall still stands on Niederkirchnerstraße beside the Topography of Terror. A longer stretch of the inner wall along the Spree near the Oberbaumbrücke became the painted East Side Gallery. In many parts of the city centre, a row of cobblestones set into the street marks the line, and since 2001 the Berliner Mauerweg has turned the old patrol road into a walking and cycling trail.
The most complete picture is at Bernauer Straße, where Ida Siekmann jumped in 1961. The Berlin Wall Memorial, created there in 1998, keeps a 60-metre section of the border strip with its walls intact, along with a documentation centre, the Chapel of Reconciliation and a window of remembrance for those who died. How the barrier fitted into the city’s streets and rivers is set out in our geography of the Berlin Wall, and the landmark that stood just behind the Wall for 28 years has its own guide to the Brandenburg Gate. The Wall was the most famous stretch of a much longer line across Europe, and you can trace that line in our explainer on what the Iron Curtain was.