Escape attempts and victims of the inner German border
The imposition of collective agriculture and the crushing of the 1953 East German uprising prompted thousands to flee to the West, as did further coercive economic restructuring in 1960.
[3] Attempts to flee across the border were carefully studied and recorded by the East German authorities to identify possible weak points.
The East German Army (NVA) and the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) carried out statistical surveys to identify trends.
From 1953, the regime described the act of escaping as Republikflucht (literally "flight from the Republic"), by analogy with the existing military term Fahnenflucht ("desertion").
Those who attempted to escape were called Sperrbrecher (literally "blockade runners" but more loosely translated as "border violators").
Is it not despicable when for the sake of a few alluring job offers or other false promises about a "guaranteed future" one leaves a country in which the seed for a new and more beautiful life is sprouting, and is already showing the first fruits, for the place that favors a new war and destruction?
Is it not an act of political depravity when citizens, whether young people, workers, or members of the intelligentsia, leave and betray what our people have created through common labor in our republic to offer themselves to the American or British secret services or work for the West German factory owners, Junkers, or militarists?
Does not leaving the land of progress for the morass of an historically outdated social order demonstrate political backwardness and blindness?
[10] Those who helped escapees were also subject to punishment, facing prison terms or deportation to internal exile in faraway towns.
An escapee in 1987 used meat hooks to scale the border fences,[13] while in 1971 a doctor swam 45 kilometres (28 mi) across the Baltic Sea from Rostock almost to the Danish island of Lolland before he was picked up by a West German yacht.
[18] An unusual mass escape occurred in September 1964 when 14 East Germans, including eleven children, were smuggled across the border in a refrigerated truck.
For the border guards, this presented special dangers, as their colleagues were under orders to shoot without warning if an escape attempt was made.
When he reached the West German side, Lange found that his rifle had been sabotaged by his NCO to prevent him firing in the first place.
The East German press described such individuals as "west zone refugees" who were fleeing "political pressure", "growing unlawfulness", or "worsening economic conditions".
Research carried out by the West German government found more prosaic reasons, such as marital problems, family estrangement, and the homesickness of those who had lived in East Germany in the past.
[22] A number of Allied military personnel, including British, French, West German, and United States troops, also defected.
[23] By the end of the Cold War, as many as 300 United States citizens were thought to have defected across the Iron Curtain for a variety of reasons[24] – whether to escape criminal charges, for political reasons, or because (as the St. Petersburg Times put it) "girl-hungry GIs [were tempted] with seductive sirens, who usually desert the love-lorn soldier once he is across the border."
A regulation issued to East German police 27 May 1952 stipulated that "failure to obey the orders of the Border Patrol will be met by the use of arms."
General Heinz Hoffmann, the GDR Minister of Defence, declared in August 1966 that "anyone who does not respect our border will feel the bullet."
In one typical example, the killers of one would-be escapee in East Berlin in February 1972 were rewarded by being decorated with the "Order of Merit of the Border Troops of the GDR" and a bonus of 150 marks.
[30] It is not known how many people died on the inner German border or who they were, as East Germany treated such information as a closely guarded secret.
August (2) Figures from the Zentrale Erfassungsstelle für Regierungs- und Vereinigungskriminalität There were many ways to die on the inner German border.
On 13 October 1961, Westfälische Rundschau journalist Kurt Lichtenstein was shot on the border near the village of Zicherie after he attempted to speak with East German farm workers.
His death aroused condemnation across the political spectrum in West Germany; he was a former parliamentary representative of the German Communist Party.
[37] An apparent mix-up over papers at a border crossing point led to the shooting of Benito Corghi, an Italian truck driver, in August 1976.
[38] In one notorious shooting on 1 May 1976, a former East German political prisoner, Michael Gartenschläger, who had fled to the West some years before, was ambushed and killed by a Stasi commando squad on the border near Büchen as he tried to dismantle an SM-70 anti-personnel mine.
The Stasi's after-action report, however, declared that "before he could carry out the act [of removing the mine], Gartenschläger was liquidated by security forces of the GDR".
[42] The regime named schools, barracks and other public facilities after the dead guards and used their memorials as places of pilgrimage to signify that (as a slogan put it) "their deaths are our commitment" to maintaining the border.
One notable exception was Helmut Kleinert, a 23-year-old from Quedlinburg in Saxony-Anhalt who was machine-gunned to death on 1 August 1963 as he and his 22-year-old pregnant wife attempted to cross the border near Hohegeiß in the Harz mountains.
The East German regime strongly objected and erected a watchtower nearby, from which threats and communist propaganda were broadcast across the border.
