Peter Fechter Was Shot at the Berlin Wall
On this day · 17 August 1962
He bled to death in plain sight at the foot of the Wall, becoming its most public early victim and a symbol of the Cold War's cruelty.
On 17 August 1962, just a year after the Berlin Wall went up, an 18-year-old East Berliner named Peter Fechter tried to escape into the West. With a friend he dashed across the so-called death strip near Checkpoint Charlie, hoping to scale the barrier into West Berlin’s Kreuzberg district.
As the pair began to climb, East German border guards opened fire. Roughly 35 shots were fired; Fechter was hit in the pelvis and fell back into the no-man’s-land between the two halves of the city. His companion made it over, but Fechter could not.
He lay bleeding for nearly an hour, crying for help, while guards on neither side intervened.
For about 50 minutes he lay in full view of hundreds of witnesses and Western journalists, receiving no aid before East German guards finally carried his body away. He was pronounced dead soon after. The shooting was filmed and photographed, and Fechter became the Wall’s best-known early victim, a lasting emblem of a regime that punished the desire for freedom with death.
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