Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The taboo in East Germany surrounding escapees meant that the great majority of deaths went unpublicised and uncommemorated. The border guards who died on the frontier were, however, portrayed as "martyrs" by the East German regime. Four stone memorials were erected in East Berlin to mark their deaths. [42]
On 16 September 1979, eight people from two families escaped from East Germany by crossing the border into West Germany at night in a homemade hot air balloon.The unique feat was the result of over a year and a half of preparations involving three different balloons, various modifications, and a first, unsuccessful attempt.
Hundreds of thousands of East Germans found an escape route across the border of East Germany's erstwhile ally, Hungary.The inner German border's integrity relied ultimately on other Warsaw Pact states fortifying their own borders and being willing to shoot escapees, including East Germans, around fifty of whom were shot on the borders of Polish People's Republic, Czechoslovak Socialist ...
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 ...
In February 1989, Chris Gueffroy was the last person shot trying to escape East Germany; he was not, however, the last to die escaping. On 8 March 1989, Winfried Freudenberg became the last person to die in an attempt to escape from East Germany to West Berlin. Freudenberg fell from a hot-air balloon while trying to fly over the Berlin Wall.
A Deutsche Reichsbahn official inspects the escape tunnel beneath Berlin Wollankstraße station in January 1962.. Republikflucht (German pronunciation: [ʁepuˈbliːkˌflʊxt] ⓘ; German for "desertion from the republic") was the colloquial term in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) for illegal emigration to West Germany, West Berlin, and non-Warsaw Pact countries; the official ...
Germany reintroduced temporary controls on its western and northern borders on Monday as part of efforts to combat irregular migration and cross-border crime, the interior ministry said. The ...
Hans Conrad Schumann, also known as Konrad Schumann (28 March 1942 – 20 June 1998), was an East German Bereitschaftspolizist who escaped to West Germany during the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.