Peter Fechter Memorial

You might walk past it without even noticing, so modest is the Peter Fechter Memorial. And yet, he is one of the most well-known victims of the Wall, if not the most symbolic. One year into life behind the Iron Curtain, Peter, then 18 years old, decided with a friend, to risk everything. They jumped from a carpenter’s workshop window straight into the death strip—that fatal zone that connected the main Berlin wall to a parallel barrier still under construction. Their plan was to dash across it and climb over the two-meter-high wall on the other side to reach the American sector. But as they reached the second wall, the two friends were attacked by East German border guards. Helmut, Peter’s friend, managed to make it to the other side unharmed, but Peter was shot and fell back into the death strip, on the eastern side of the wall. It was his publicised agony, in the eyes of all those who were powerless to help, that made his death so symbolic. The people of West Berlin cried out, calling the border guards murderers, but they couldn’t enter the zone, as they were scared of triggering the zone’s automatic weapons or causing the guards to shoot back at them. West German soldiers didn’t try to intervene and help him, fearing it would spark a military conflict. Likewise, East German soldiers also claimed that they were afraid to retrieve the young man due to a recent incident. Three days earlier, a GDR border guard, Rudi Arnstadt, had been shot dead by a West German soldier providing cover to a fugitive. Peter Fechter’s body lay against the wall for an hour before the border guards finally removed it. His death caused an international outcry and remains one of the most striking and earliest tragedies of the Wall. A cross was placed on the western side at the spot where he was shot. After German reunification, the memorial you see before you was put up in the exact place where he was killed. You are now standing before one of the main sites commemorating the Berlin Wall.