Peter Fechter

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Portrait photograph of Peter Fechter

Peter Fechter (14 January 1944 – 17 August 1962) was a bricklayer from East Berlin, who at the age of 18 became one of the first of the victims of the Berlin Wall's border guards.

1 Background
2 Death
3 Commemoration
4 Trial
5 External links

[edit] Background

Main article: Berlin Wall

After World War II, Germany was governed jointly by an Allied Control Council consisting of the four victorious Allied nations, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Governmental decisions had to be unanimously approved by all four Allies. Germany was divided into Allied Occupation Zones to be administered directly by the military of each Allied state. The German capital, Berlin, was itself specially divided into four zones, one for each Ally, due to its importance.

As the Cold War escalated, the Potsdam Agreement on managing Germany disintegrated, and the Allied Control Council became ineffective. The country was de facto divided into democratic West Germany and Communist East Germany, corresponding to the areas occupied by the western Allies and the Soviet Union, respectively. Berlin, which lay entirely within the territory of the new East, was divided into West Berlin and East Berlin. Despite tensions, open borders were more or less maintained within Berlin itself for some time. But the increasing flight of many refugees from East Berlin to the West, along with a large number of West Berliners undermining the east's economy by travelling to the East to buy extremely cheap subsidized food from government-run shops, prompted the Communist government to build the Berlin Wall, beginning in 1961. Though officially billed by the government as an "Anti-Fascist Protection Wall," ostensibly to keep lingering elements of the former Nazi regime harbored by the West out of East Berlin, the wall, in contrast to usual border fortifications, was primarily designed to prevent East German citizens from escaping into West Berlin and seeking political asylum. It was manned by armed border guards, under shoot to kill orders.

[edit] Death

Peter Fechter lies dying after being shot by East German border guards.

About one year after the construction of the wall, Fechter attempted to flee from the GDR (German Democratic Republic) together with his friend Helmut Kulbeik. The plan was to hide in a carpenter's workshop near the wall in Zimmerstrasse and, after observing the border guards from there, to jump out of a window into the so-called death-strip (a strip running between the main wall and a parallel fence which they had recently started to construct), run across it, and climb over the 2 m (six foot) wall topped with barbed wire into the Kreuzberg district of West Berlin near Checkpoint Charlie.

While both reached the wall, guards fired at them. Although Kulbeik succeeded in crossing the wall, Fechter, still on the wall, was shot in the pelvis in plain view of hundreds of witnesses. He fell back into the death-strip on the Eastern side, where he remained in view of Western onlookers, including journalists. Despite his screams, he received no medical assistance either from the East or the West side. He bled to death after about an hour. Hundreds in West Berlin formed a spontaneous demonstration, shouting "murderers" at the border guards.

The lack of medical assistance for Peter Fechter was attributed to mutual fear: western bystanders were apparently prevented at gunpoint from assisting him (although according to a report in TIME magazine, a U.S. second-lieutenant on the scene received specific orders from the US Commandant in West Berlin to stand firm and do nothing). Likewise the head of the GDR border platoon stated that he was afraid to intervene, because of an incident just three days earlier when a GDR soldier Rudi Arnstadt had probably been shot by a Western soldier. Nonetheless, the GDR border soldiers did retrieve Peter Fechter's dead body an hour after he had fallen.

[edit] Commemoration

A cross was placed on the western side near the spot where Fechter was shot and bled to death. At the invitation of Willy Brandt, the then mayor of West Berlin, the Yale Russian Chorus sang a German translation of Mozart's Ave verum Corpus near the site in the week following the shooting. On the first anniversary, a wreath was placed there by Willy Brandt and US Commander Polk. After German reunification in 1990, the Peter-Fechter-Stele memorial was constructed on Zimmerstrasse, at the actual spot where he had died on the Eastern side, and this has been a focal point for some of the commemorations regarding the wall. The shooting has also been the subject of documentaries on German television. Cornelius Ryan dedicated his book The Last Battle to the memory of Fechter. Composer Aulis Sallinen wrote an orchestral work Mauermusik to commemorate Fechter.

[edit] Trial

In March 1997 two former East German guards, Rolf Friedrich and Erich Schreiber, faced manslaughter charges for Fechter's death, at which they admitted to his shooting. They were both convicted, and sentenced to one year's imprisonment on probation.

It also emerged during the trial that any aid attempt from the West had indeed been made impossible, but according to a report from forensic pathologist Otto Prokop, "Fechter had no chance of survival. The shot in the right hip had caused severe internal injuries." ^{[citation needed]}