Chris Gueffroy, shot dead at the Berlin Wall
Chris Gueffroy was shot dead at the Berlin Wall just a few months before it fell 25 years ago.
His mother heard the shots that night in February 1989. She didn’t realize that it was her own son who had been killed not far from her apartment in East Berlin. He was trying to cross the Wall and flee to West Berlin. Chris Gueffroy, 20 years old, was the last GDR refugee to be shot dead by the regime’s border troops. Nine months later, in November 1989, the inner-German border was opened and the Wall fell.
At the beginning of 1989, Gueffroy had heard from a supposedly reliable source that the order to shoot at the border had been lifted. It was a fatal mistake. The escape attempt ended in the young man’s death. A friend who accompanied him was badly injured but survived. At first the GDR leadership tried to keep the deadly shooting secret. Gueffroy’s death was officially declared as “an attack on military installations”. But Karin Gueffroy, the victim’s mother, managed to pass news of the events to media in the west along with a photo of her son, thus publicizing his fate. “I didn’t want my child to be anonymously buried in some cemetery like so many others who were killed at the Wall,” she said in 2011 in an interview marking the 50th anniversary of the building of the Wall.
Chris Gueffroy wanted to discover the world
Karin Gueffroy describes her son as courageous and a freedom lover who wanted to discover the world beyond the Wall. Chris Gueffroy first attended a school specializing in sport and dreamt of a professional career. But this goal could only be achieved if you were exceptionally loyal to the political system in the GDR. This also applied to his second career choice, which was to become a pilot. Instead, Gueffroy trained as a waiter. During his work he met representatives of the western Allies and gained impressions of their attitude to life. This only strengthened his dream of a future in freedom.
His death, says Karin Gueffroy, wasn’t in vain. Nor were the deaths of the many other people who died at the inner-German border and whose exact numbers are still unknown. According to figures provided by the judiciary, historians and victims’ representatives, the numbers range from 280 to more than 1,600 fatalities. After Chris Gueffroy’s death, GDR citizens continued to die in escape attempts, but he was the last to be shot dead at the Wall. They drowned in the Baltic Sea or crashed, like Winfried Freudenberg who was attempting to fly to West Berlin in a homemade hot air balloon in March 1989. Karin Gueffroy says: “All of those who died removed a brick, and that finally resulted in the fall of the Wall.”
On 5 February 1989, the last fatal shots fell at the Berlin Wall
www.bundesstiftung-aufarbeitung.de
