How many people died trying to cross the Berlin Wall?

Where the number comes from

The figure of at least 140 comes from a research project of the Berlin Wall Memorial and the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, led by Hans-Hermann Hertle and Maria Nooke. They checked each case against the surviving records, East and West, and wrote a biography for every name. Their list, last revised in 2017, runs from 1961 to 1989.

Of the 140, 132 died while fleeing or were killed in the border area with no plan to flee, people from East and West alike, among them West Berlin children who drowned in border waters. Eight were East German border soldiers. Higher totals circulate, from counts that use wider criteria; the Memorial’s list holds only the deaths its researchers could document at the Wall itself. At the memorial on Bernauer Straße, a Window of Remembrance keeps their names and, where they survive, their photographs.

Some of the names

• Ida Siekmann, 58, on August 22, 1961, nine days after the wire: she jumped from her window on Bernauer Straße toward the Western sidewalk and died of her injuries, the first death at the Wall.
• Günter Litfin, 24, on August 24, 1961: the first person shot dead, while trying to swim across the Humboldthafen, a harbor basin in the city center.
• Peter Fechter, 18, on August 17, 1962: shot near Checkpoint Charlie, he lay at the foot of the Wall for almost an hour before he died. A memorial marks the place.
• Egon Schultz, 21, a border soldier, on October 5, 1964, at an escape tunnel: East Germany blamed the escape helpers, but records later showed the bullet came from a comrade.
• Chris Gueffroy, 20, on February 5, 1989: the last person shot dead at the Wall, at a canal in south Berlin. He and a friend had heard that the order to shoot had been lifted. It had not.
• Winfried Freudenberg, 32, on March 8, 1989: the last name on the list, killed when the balloon he had built to fly out came down.

The order to shoot

In public, East Germany denied that its guards had any order to shoot. Its own minutes say otherwise. At a meeting of the National Defense Council on May 3, 1974, Erich Honecker, then the country’s leader, was recorded as saying:

As before, firearms must be used ruthlessly against attempts to break through the border, and the comrades who have used their firearms successfully are to be commended.

The dead were not only escapees. Of the eight soldiers, one was shot by a West Berlin escape helper in 1962, three by deserters, one was struck down by escapees, one was hit by a ricochet from a West Berlin policeman’s gun, and two, Egon Schultz among them, died from a comrade’s bullet. After reunification, German courts tried border guards who had fired and the leaders who gave the orders. Günter Schabowski, a former Politburo member, was convicted in 1997 for his share in the killings at the border. Honecker himself was charged, but his trial was halted in 1993 because he was dying of cancer, and he died in Chile in 1994.

About 5,000 who made it

Against those deaths stand about 5,000 successful escapes, by the count of the West Berlin police. People went over on ropes and ladders, swam the Spree, rammed barriers with trucks and crawled through tunnels dug by escape helpers. One of the first famous escapes was a guard’s own, Conrad Schumann’s leap, and the barrier they all had to beat is described in How long was the Berlin Wall?