Who was Conrad Schumann?

Two days after the wire

Conrad Schumann came from Saxony, in the south of East Germany. In August 1961 he was nineteen, a border policeman posted to the new line in Berlin that East Germany had sealed on the night of August 12–13, for reasons of its own. On Tuesday, August 15, he stood guard at the corner of Bernauer Straße and Ruppiner Straße, where the barrier was still only a roll of barbed wire about 80 centimeters high.

West Berliners across the wire shouted at him to come over. A West Berlin police van stood about ten meters away with its door open. Schumann paced, tested the wire with his boot, then ran, jumped and dropped his submachine gun in midair. Within seconds he was in the van and gone.

The photograph and the film

Peter Leibing’s camera caught him in midair, above the wire. A cameraman, Dieter Hoffmann, filmed the same moment from almost the same spot. Leibing’s picture, often captioned in German Sprung in die Freiheit, the leap into freedom, went around the world and became one of the best-known photographs of the Cold War.

The two sides read it in opposite ways. In the West, it was taken as proof that the Wall’s builders could not count even on their own guards. East Germany called Schumann a deserter and drew a practical lesson: wire can be jumped. Within days concrete blocks went down along the line. Most guards stayed at their posts, some because they believed in the border, others because they feared prison, and the border units began sending men out in pairs, each one watching the other.

A life in Bavaria

In the West, Schumann settled in Bavaria and worked for many years in a car factory. His family stayed behind in Saxony, and as a deserter he could not go back to see them.

The night the Wall opened changed that. After November 1989 he could travel home to Saxony again, and he later said: “Only since 9 November 1989 have I felt truly free.” He died in Bavaria in 1998.

Where the leap happened

Bernauer Straße was the street where the border ran along the house fronts, and it saw more than one famous moment in those first weeks. People climbed out of their windows into the nets of West Berlin firemen before the doors and windows were bricked up, and a week after Schumann’s leap, a woman who jumped from her window there became the first person to die at the Wall, as told in How many people died at the Berlin Wall?

Today the street is home to the Berlin Wall Memorial, where a stretch of the border strip and a watchtower have been kept, and where the layers of the Wall can still be seen in place.