rds, who arrested the man. Horst received a sports shirt and a soccer ball.
In the course of “defending the rampart,” the Vopos have so far killed at least fifty of their countrymen—some of them children. That is the number of killings at the border that have been witnessed by the West Berlin police; the actual number, in the opinion of Ernst Lemmer, exceeds a hundred. The fiftieth known victim was an eighteen-year-old East German named Peter Fechter. Shortly after noon on August 16, 1962, he was shot in the stomach and the back as he attempted to scale the wall two blocks from the celebrated Checkpoint Charlie, on Friedrichstrasse; he was left unattended for more than an hour, and bled to death. As he lay dying, hundreds of West Berliners assembled close enough to their side of the wall to hear the youth’s screams for help; newspaper reporters and photographers appeared; American military police arrived on the scene but withdrew to Checkpoint Charlie when Vopos threw tear-gas bombs into the crowds; and an American Army helicopter circled over the area. The killing of Peter Fechter set off five days of riotous demonstrations by West Berliners, many of whom were bitterly resentful because no Americans went to the aid of the wounded refugee. Barbarous as the murder of Peter Fechter was, it was no more so than the other killings that the Vopos have been responsible for since August 24, 1961—eleven days after the wall came into existence—when they shot their first refugee, a twenty-five-year-old East Berliner who was trying to reach West Germany by swimming the Humboldt Harbor Canal. Not a week has since passed that they have not killed or wounded another man, woman, or child.
“In Berlin and at the zonal border, Germans shoot at Germans,” the Hamburg newspaper Bild-Zeitung observed after one of the recent killings at the wall. “What are we doing? We take notice and are shocked for a moment. Then we put the newspaper aside—that’s it. What is the matter with Germany in 1962? It is a sick Germany. A Germany which is not indignant about injustice and which is not visibly shocked is a shaking Germany.” One expression of indignation, less fleeting than a newspaper story, is the modest memorial erected by anonymous West Berliners to an unknown refugee, who was killed while attempting to swim the Spree. At about five-thirty one evening, I paid a visit to the memorial, which overlooks the river at the place where the slaying occurred. It had begun to drizzle. Only three people were walking along the riverbank, and there was no activity on the river, which was glassy and looked leaden. On the East Berlin side—some hundred and fifty yards away—the warehouses and other buildings lining the bank had apparently been closed for the day, though there was no way of telling, since all of the doors and windows facing the river had been bricked up. The gaps between the structures had been closed to form the familiar, desolate wall. Somewhere along that bank late one afternoon, a man in his early twenties stripped to the waist, tied a small leather pouch around his neck, slipped into the water, and struck out for the western shore He had reached the middle of the river when the Vopos spotted him and opened fire, first with rifles and then with submachine guns. While West Berliners looked on in horror, the swimmer was struck in the head, and sank. His body was recovered by the West Berlin police. His memorial, set in a small flower bed, consists of a cross made of rough wood painted black; attached to the crosspiece is a festoon of barbed wire. Beneath this is a framed photograph of the unknown refugee lying in a coffin and, at the bottom of the photograph, the hand-lettered words “Du könntest unser Bruder sein” (“You might have been our brother”).
In spite of East Germany’s unremitting and increasingly brutal efforts to keep its citizens locked up, some of the more daring—and more desperate—among them have continued to find a way out. There have been relatively few of them, but the wonder is that there have been any. In the twelve months followi