them. “Remember, all of us are Germans. And I hope we will all get out of this dilemma by peaceful means.” One of the Vopos laughed; the other spat.
According to a knowledgeable member of the United States Mission in Berlin, there used to be a number of places on the border where one could arrange an escape by bribing the Vopos, but pay-as-you-leave exits now seem to be a thing of the past. Today, a person who tries to buy his way across the border runs a grave risk, as the East German press likes to point out every so often in stories about Vopos who have covered themselves with glory by spurning bribes. Not long ago, for example, Neues Deutschland, the principal East German newspaper, reported that one night four Vopos on guard duty at an outlying section of the wall were approached by two young women, who offered them four thousand marks to let them and their families through to West Berlin. The Vopos agreed, took the money, and set the time and place for the planned escape. Then they reported the details to the Staats Sicherheitsdienst, or S.S.D—the State Security Service—and when the young women and eight of their relatives turned up as planned, before dawn the following day, agents of the S.S.D. put them under arrest. Each of the Vopos was decorated with a medal and given a reward of a hundred marks. Rewards are also given to children for informing against East Germans who they fancy are trying to escape. Recently, the East German newspaper Das Volk published a long article praising members of the Young Pioneers (the Communist organization for children between ten and fourteen) who had “assisted the police in their task of defending the rampart against aggression.” Heidi Mallowitz was congratulated because “as soon as she noticed a stranger walking near the border, she reported to her father, and he alerted the police, who arrested the criminal border violator.” As a reward, Heidi received a track suit. Another Young Pioneer, Horst Bratke, detected a stranger in the fog and immediately called the border guards, 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