The Berlin Wall and East Germany's Deadly Border

By D. R. Ashworth · November 24, 2024 · Updated October 17, 2026 · 5 min read

• Eastern Europe
• Walls, Borders and Flight
• Camps and Repression
• Cold War

Most fortified borders are built to keep people out. East Germany’s was built to keep its own citizens in. Between 1949 and 1961 about 2.7 million people fled the German Democratic Republic for West Germany. The ruling party’s answer was the Berlin Wall, a fortified border with mines and automatic firing devices, and an order to shoot those who tried to leave. At least 140 people died at the Berlin Wall alone, and hundreds more along the rest of the border (Berlin Wall Foundation).

A country emptying out

Between the founding of the GDR in 1949 and the building of the Wall in 1961, roughly 2.7 million people left for the Federal Republic — out of a population of just under 18 million. They were mostly young and qualified: scientists, doctors, lawyers and skilled workers. The exodus weakened the East German economy massively. The regime’s response was more control: from the end of 1957, under an amended passport law, “Republikflucht” — “flight from the republic”, as the ruling party called it — became a criminal offense (Schäkel, bpb).

“Nobody has any intention of building a wall”

The decisive escape route ran through Berlin, where the border between the Soviet sector and the western sectors of the city was still open. The ruling Socialist Unity Party had wanted to seal off West Berlin since 1958, under the code name “Operation Chinese Wall”, to stop the GDR from bleeding to death. On 15 June 1961, at an international press conference, party leader Walter Ulbricht declared: “Nobody has any intention of building a wall.” In the night of 12–13 August 1961 the plan became reality (bpb). In the months that followed the barriers were built up in concrete, as in the photograph at the top of this page, taken near the Brandenburg Gate in November 1961.

The death strip and the order to shoot

The cornerstone of the border regime was the order to fire on anyone trying to cross it. Its logic was spelled out in the formula that “border violators are to be arrested or destroyed”: the threat of death was meant to deter a population that would otherwise leave (bpb).

Along the inner German border with West Germany, the regime added minefields and automatic firing devices. Only in October 1983 did party leader Erich Honecker announce that the roughly 60,000 SM-70 devices would be dismantled — by the end of 1984 — and the landmines removed by 1 July 1985, after an international convention restricting such weapons came into force for the GDR (Chronik der Mauer). The order to shoot remained.

Who died

Counting the dead has taken decades of research, and the totals depend on who is counted.

In addition, at least 251 travelers died during or after passing through checks at Berlin’s border crossings (Berlin Wall Foundation). The Free University study’s categories — which include, for example, border guards who took their own lives — remain disputed, which is one reason the figures differ (Free University of Berlin; Berlin Wall Foundation).

The last person shot dead at the Wall was Chris Gueffroy, aged 20, on 5 February 1989 — nine months before the Wall fell. He had heard from someone he trusted that the order to shoot had been lifted. It had not. The friend who tried to cross with him was badly wounded but survived (deutschland.de).

Escape by air

Some East Germans tried to fly over the border. The Stasi’s own records list hot-air and gas balloons, home-built aircraft and hang gliders among the attempts it tracked. The most famous succeeded. Two families from Thuringia, the Strelzyks and the Wetzels, built their own hot-air balloon; after a first attempt failed in July 1979 — the Stasi found the abandoned balloon in the border area — they built another. On 16 September 1979 they flew for 28 minutes and 18 kilometres, at up to 2,000 metres, and landed at about 3 a.m. in the Bavarian border town of Naila. The Stasi regarded the escape as a humiliation and a “propaganda success for the enemy” (Bundesarchiv).

Selling people

The regime that shot people for leaving also sold them. Between 1963 and 1989 the West German government bought the freedom of 33,755 political prisoners from the GDR, paying almost 3.5 billion Deutschmarks — mostly in goods such as copper, crude oil, rubber and coffee. The East German side of the trade was handled by the lawyer Wolfgang Vogel, himself a secret Stasi collaborator (German Federal Government).

The end

In 1989, faced with a new exodus of its citizens, the regime tried to relieve the pressure by easing travel rules, and on the night of 9 November 1989 the Wall was opened (bpb). The border that had been built to hold a country together could not survive the moment its people were free to leave.

Why it matters

A government confident of its people’s loyalty does not need to shoot them for crossing a line. The Berlin Wall and the inner German border were among the clearest admissions any communist state ever made: given the choice, millions of its citizens would leave. The regime’s answer — concrete, mines, automatic guns, a standing order to shoot, prison for “flight from the republic”, and a trade in prisoners for hard currency — tells you what it was.

Further reading on this site

• The Stasi — the secret police that watched those who stayed.
• Cuban exit restrictions — how another communist state controlled who could leave.
• Cuban refugee waves — the exodus by sea from Castro’s Cuba.
• All articles on walls, borders and flight and on Eastern Europe.