The Wall by Christopher Hilton

Author:Christopher Hilton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752466989
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2011-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

4 November 1963 Klaus Schröter, 23, was seen swimming the Spree towards the Western bank at 4.01 a.m. After several warning shots he was fatally hit. His body was found at about 7.45.

25 November 1963 Dietmar Schulz, 24, jumped out of a moving S-Bahn train at 10.20 at night as it passed close to the border. He suffered head injuries and died in hospital.

Kurt Behrendt, the resident of Steinstücken, watched the noose and its tightening. ‘From the top of my house I had a very good view of the wall. They only began to build it in December 1963. Before that we had a special border, what are called Spanish riders: wooden crosses and barbed wire around them about a metre high – a sportsman could easily have jumped over. To reach Steinstücken you had to come through two controls. The first was from West Berlin – a little hut painted white with a window. It was like a mini-barracks for the Border Guards and had a pole across the way. It was manned by two Border Guards. When they raised the pole you walked about a kilometre along a path to the second control which was similar to the first. After that you were in Steinstücken.

‘At first it was a very quiet place, almost lonely, although there were forty houses here. Of course it was a special situation since there were Border Guards all around us. We were the best supervised place in Berlin and we never needed to use our front doors to lock our houses! You could wander into anyone’s living room. Women walked around in complete safety – nobody would harm them. We did, however, use to hear gunfire.’1

Because of its location as an enclave butting onto the East, and because an east-west railway line ran through it as well, Stein-stücken became and remained a potential weak link in the wall, and one evening more than a decade hence two lovers and an accomplice would try to exploit that, posing as GDR officers. Ingenuity there certainly was on those sad streets.

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