NewsMax.com Wires
Saturday, Aug. 11, 2001

The new research published by two historians portrays a dramatic increase over government figures, which put the number at only 5,000 captured. In general, it finds, one person was caught fleeing to the West on average every 3-1/2 hours. About 800 people were killed trying to cross over to the West.

Historians Bernd Eisenfeld and Roger Engelmann have based their research on thousands of Stasi files now in the custody of the agency that has been set up to control the release of these files to journalists and academics. The Stasi was the special force of border guards deployed around the Berlin Wall.

The 60-mile-long wall came up suddenly 40 years ago, shocking residents of East Berlin as well as the world. The concrete and steel curtain split Berlin and Germany into two during the Cold War until it was brought down in 1989.

The communist East German regime, which denied permission to its citizens to travel abroad unless they were close to the ruling party, used the Stasi to nab anyone attempting to cross the border and to invoke fear in approaching it in the first place. The border guard also encouraged people to spy on friends, colleagues and neighbors to prevent residents of the East to flee west, the research concludes.

The two historians report the East German police devoted all its resources during 1961 to seal off the border and find methods to improve surveillance around the wall.

Nevertheless, about 5,500 East German border guards were also caught trying to escape to the West, say Eisenfeld and Engelmann. Such prisoners had to serve a harsher sentence ranging up to five years. But nearly 2,500 border guards were successful in escaping the East German rule.

Giving the figures of those killed in the attempt to flee west, the historians have said that 250 were killed at the Berlin Wall, 189 died trying to escape through the Baltic Sea, while 370 were perished on the German-German border. In all 809 people were killed trying to escape the East German communist dictatorship.

Many of the figures put forth by Eisenfeld and Engelmann are much higher than the official figures given out by the government after the collapse of the wall in 1989. The official figures say that 200 people were killed while attempting to cross the wall and the East German government caught 5,000 people crossing the wall.

But the historians said the government figures would eventually be updated as their research had thrown new light on the statistics of deaths and imprisonment.

Three million Germans moved from the East to the West between 1945 after the end of the World War II and before the wall came down in 1989.

The 40th anniversary of the construction Berlin Wall has sparked off a euphoria in the country. Television channels have begun screening short films about the wall and the division of the country in 1961. The newspapers too are doing their bit by carrying articles about the wall and publishing interviews of those who successfully crossed it.

"It was East Germany´s confession of defeat. The only way to stop people from leaving was to lock them up in East Germany," said Marianne Birthler, head of the government agency that is the custodian of the East German secret files.

Speaking at the function organized to release the research report, Birthler described the construction of the wall as one of the most painful hours in Germany's history.

"We were hermetically cut off from the west. It's a mystery to me how we were able to supress the pain of that separation," Birthler said. She was 13 when the wall was built.

Along the remains of the Berlin Wall still stands the Checkpoint Charlie, the gate manned by American soldiers during the Cold War period. A museum next to the checkpoint, Checkpoint Charlie museum, has on diplay the ingenious methods adopted by East Germans to escape. Ladders, balloons, gliders, barrels and catapults are some of the items displayed at the museum, which has a special section devoted to Mahatma Gandhi and the former Polish President Lech Walesa.

Copyright 2001 by United Press International.

All rights reserved.

A product that might interest you:
Own a Piece of Authentic Ronald Reagan!