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After the border was fortified and the Berlin Wall was constructed, the number of illegal border crossings fell drastically. The numbers fell further as the border defenses were improved over the subsequent decades. In 1961, 8,507 people fled across the border, most of them through West Berlin.
On 15 August 1961, 19-year-old Schumann was sent to the corner of Ruppiner Straße and Bernauer Straße to guard what would become the Berlin Wall on its third day of construction. Schumann and his unit arrived at 4:30 a.m., where an officer ordered them to "take control and protect the border from the enemies of socialism."
At the Vienna summit on 4 June 1961, tensions rose. Meeting with US President John F. Kennedy, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev reissued the Soviet ultimatum to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany and thus end the existing four-power agreements guaranteeing American, British, and French rights to access West Berlin and the occupation of East Berlin by Soviet forces. [1]
In 1961, when fleeing the republic became more and more frequent, the SED passed legislation closing the West Berlin borders, and by unleashing a witch-hunt for West cross-border commuters for propagandist reasons, portraying them in public events and a press campaign as traitors, criminals and parasites. A series of new regulations, effective ...
On 15 August 1961, Conrad Schumann was the first East German border guard to escape by jumping the barbed wire to West Berlin. [ 97 ] On 22 August 1961, Ida Siekmann was the first casualty at the Berlin Wall: she died after she jumped out of her third floor apartment at 48 Bernauer Strasse . [ 98 ]
Barbed Wire Sunday (German: Stacheldrahtsonntag), is the name given to 13 August 1961, when the military and police of East Germany closed the border between East and West Berlin and began the construction of what would become the Berlin Wall. The intention of closing the border was to prevent the migration of East Germans to the West. [1]
The Berlin border crossings were border crossings created as a result of the post-World War II division of Germany. Prior to the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, travel between the Eastern and Western sectors of Berlin was completely uncontrolled, although restrictions were increasingly introduced by the Soviet and East German ...
The East German regime's distrust of its own citizens extended to its border guards, who were in a better position to defect than almost anyone else in the country. Many did in fact flee across the border; between 1961 and 1989, around 7,000 border guards tried to escape. 2,500 succeeded but 5,500 were caught and imprisoned for up to five years ...