# How Many People Died at the Berlin Wall?

> At least 140 people died at the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989: 101 escapees, 30 people with no intent to escape, a Soviet soldier and eight border guards.

Published 24 September 2026, updated 28 September 2026. Web page: https://victimsofthewall.com/articles/how-many-people-died-at-the-berlin-wall/

At least 140 people died at the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989. They were 101 people trying to escape; 30 people from East and West who had no intention of escaping, together with one Soviet soldier; and eight East German border soldiers killed on duty. The figure comes from a research project of the Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF) and the Berlin Wall Foundation, and its findings, dated August 2017, were written up by Hans-Hermann Hertle and Maria Nooke.

The same research found that at least 251 travellers, most of them elderly, died at Berlin's border checkpoints, before, during or after the border check. They are not part of the 140 and are discussed separately below. Every one of the 140 has a profile in the [list of victims](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/).

## Earlier estimates

When the project began in 2005, 15 years after the East German archives had been opened, there was still no reliable count. The figures in circulation varied with the basis, purpose and date of the counting: 78 (the Central Registry of State Judicial Administrations in Salzgitter), 86 (the Berlin Public Prosecution Service), 92 (the Berlin Police President) and 122 (the Central Investigation Office for Government and Unification Criminality), while the Working Group 13 August put the number at more than 200. Many of the victims' names, and the circumstances of their deaths, were still largely unknown.

## How the GDR tried to conceal deaths

Many deaths at the Wall became known to the public and to relatives and could not be covered up, but the GDR tried to keep shootings as secret as possible. To that end, the Ministry of State Security (Stasi) was made responsible for dealing with the dead. In more than 30 cases, relatives were informed of a death, usually without being told the exact circumstances, and were then either obliged to stay silent or give others a false account, or were themselves lied to about the cause of death. In at least 11 cases, even in response to enquiries, the death was not confirmed or was denied, and the victim's name was kept secret although the Stasi knew it. One of them was [Roland Hoff](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/hoff-roland/), shot in the Teltow Canal in August 1961, whose name the East German authorities never disclosed.

## How the 140 were counted

The researchers first had to decide who counts as a victim of the Berlin Wall. The deciding criterion is either an escape background or a link in time and place between the death and the border regime. Deaths caused by force of arms and deaths from accidents in the border installations both count, whether the person died directly in the death strip or in the border area, or in hospital hours, days, weeks or months later. [Herbert Mende](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/mende-herbert/) died years later: he was shot at the Glienicke Bridge on 8 July 1962 and died of the effects of his gunshot wounds on 10 March 1968. The definition therefore also takes in deaths that the criminal prosecutions of violence at the border did not cover, because those prosecutions concentrated solely on cases in which the involvement of another person could be proven.

Between 2005 and 2009 the team looked into 576 deaths and suspected cases in all. It was also the first project able to use the files that the public prosecutors in Berlin and Neuruppin had compiled on violence at the Wall: more than 150 investigation files and over 70 preliminary investigation files. The Stasi records archive supplied files on more than 100 deaths and suspected cases, and some 300 cases were researched in the records of the GDR defence ministry, the border troops and the military prosecutors at the Federal Archives Military Archive. The team also sought contact with victims' families and friends, and succeeded in more than 70 cases.

Among the findings of the case reviews:

- **At least 140** people were victims of the Berlin Wall.
- **24 cases** could not be classified either way: 16 in which the surviving archive material did not settle the question, all of them unidentified bodies recovered from the water, and eight for which no archive material could be found.
- **164 suspected cases** were ruled out, because there was neither an escape background nor a link in time and place with the border regime, or because nobody had died. They include escapees who survived shootings with severe injuries.

The project ended in 2009, but further suspected cases were investigated afterwards, and four people were added to the list: [Peter Grohganz](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/grohganz-peter/), [Czesław Jan Kukuczka](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/kukuczka-czesaw-jan/), [Vladimir Ivanovich Odintsov](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/odintsov-vladimir-ivanovich/) and [Hans-Joachim Zock](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/zock-hans-joachim/). The study presents its figure as a minimum ("at least 140"), and the 24 cases that could be neither confirmed nor ruled out are not included.

## Who the 140 victims were

### 101 escapees

Of the 101 people who died trying to escape, 68 were shot dead. Thirty died in accidents during their escape, among them people who fell to their deaths on Bernauer Strasse and people who drowned in Berlin's border waters. Three took their own lives after their escape attempts had failed. All but two of the escapees were citizens of the GDR, and ten of them were military deserters; the two exceptions were Polish citizens. Eight of the 101 were women.

Most escapees came from East Berlin and the surrounding area. The researchers note that those who tried to escape in the first period after the Wall was built belonged mainly to the war and post-war generation, who had known the open border, while later escapees belonged to a generation largely raised in the GDR that had not consciously experienced it.

### 30 people with no intent to escape, and a Soviet soldier

The second group is made up of 30 people from East and West who were killed, or died in accidents, although they were not trying to escape, and one Soviet soldier. Twenty-two of these 31 were residents of or visitors to West Berlin. Fifteen of them were shot, among them escape helpers, and seven died in accidents, five of them children (see [children who died at the Berlin Wall](https://victimsofthewall.com/articles/children-who-died-at-the-berlin-wall/)). The group also includes eight GDR citizens who were shot in the border area although they had no intention of escaping, and the 18-year-old Soviet soldier Vladimir Ivanovich Odintsov, of whom the study says there is no sign that he wanted to flee: he was shot dead in the immediate vicinity of the border area after People's Police officers searching for a deserter mistook him for the wanted man; according to the policemen's own statements, quoted in his biography, one of them fired on the order of the other.

### Eight border soldiers

The third group consists of eight GDR border soldiers killed on duty: by military deserters, fellow soldiers, escapees, an escape helper or, in one case, a ricochet from a West Berlin police officer's gun. Their stories, and how the GDR portrayed seven of them as heroes, are told in [border soldiers killed at the Berlin Wall](https://victimsofthewall.com/articles/border-soldiers-killed-at-the-berlin-wall/).

## Where the victims died

About two thirds of the deaths happened on the sector border running through the city. The other 47 people died on the "outer ring", the border between West Berlin and the surrounding GDR territory in Brandenburg: 34 escapees, eight people from East and West with no intention of escaping, the Soviet soldier and four border guards.

## When the deaths happened

According to the study, roughly half of the 140 deaths happened in the first five years of the Wall's existence; counting 1966 as well, the share is just under 60 per cent. Twelve people died in 1961, in the four and a half months after the border was sealed, and 22 in 1962, the highest figure of any year. The first to die was [Ida Siekmann](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/siekmann-ida/) on 22 August 1961, and two days later [Günter Litfin](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/litfin-guenter/) became the first person to be shot dead at the Wall (see [the first victims of the Berlin Wall](https://victimsofthewall.com/articles/first-victims-of-the-berlin-wall/)).

The researchers identify two turning points. From 1967 the number of deaths fell significantly, mainly because of the technical modernisation of the border begun in 1966, the so-called "modern border". A second change came from 1976. Between 1961 and 1975, 120 people died in connection with the border regime (85.7 per cent of all victims); in the almost equally long period from 1976 to 1989 there were 20 (14.3 per cent). The study attributes this mainly to further technical upgrades such as the electronic "border signal fence 74" and the "border wall 75", and to tighter guarding of the area in front of the Wall. It also points to the Helsinki Accords of August 1975: escape attempts fell, while applications to emigrate, which were less dangerous, rose. The study's table records no deaths at all in 1976, 1978, 1985 and 1988.

The last deaths came in 1989. [Chris Gueffroy](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/gueffroy-chris/), shot on 5 February 1989, was hit by what his biography calls the last fatal bullets fired at the Berlin Wall. [Winfried Freudenberg](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/freudenberg-winfried/) fell to his death from a balloon over Berlin-Zehlendorf on 8 March 1989; his biography calls him "the last person to die in Berlin as a consequence of the Berlin Wall" (see [the last victims of the Berlin Wall](https://victimsofthewall.com/articles/last-victims-of-the-berlin-wall/)).

## The 251 travellers who died at the border checkpoints

Separately from the 140, the study found that at least 251 travellers from East and West, most of them elderly, died at a Berlin checkpoint, before, during or after the border check, mostly of heart attacks. The Friedrichstrasse Station crossing alone accounted for at least 227 of these deaths. Of those 227, 164 were citizens of the GDR, 40 were West Berliners and 20 came from West Germany; one was a Czechoslovak citizen, and two were GDR citizens who had been given permission to emigrate to West Germany and were about to cross.

In most cases the records say nothing about exactly where or how these people died, and whether a death happened before, during or after the checks, or even in the course of an interrogation, often cannot be established. For that reason, the researchers write, not every one of these deaths was necessarily linked to the border regime. At the same time, they stress that these deaths cannot be seen in isolation from the Wall, and that more research is needed.

The 140 do include people who died after being shot at a crossing point in connection with an escape. [Klaus Brueske](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/brueske-klaus/) was shot at the wheel of a lorry as he broke through the Heinrich-Heine-Strasse crossing in April 1962 and died after it crashed on the West Berlin side; [Burkhard Niering](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/niering-burkhard/) was shot at Checkpoint Charlie in January 1974, and Czesław Jan Kukuczka at the Friedrichstrasse Station crossing in March 1974. [Heinz Schöneberger](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/schoeneberger-heinz/), a West German, had entered East Berlin as a visitor to bring two women out hidden in a car; when the hiding place was discovered at the Heinrich-Heine-Strasse crossing in December 1965, he tried to break through and was shot a few metres short of the border line.

## What about the inner-German border?

The 140 cover only the Berlin Wall. A separate study by the Research Association SED State (Forschungsverbund SED-Staat) at the Free University of Berlin, presented in 2017, counted 327 deaths caused by the border regime on the GDR's western border between 1949 and 1989, after checking 1,492 suspected cases. That study counts differently: it begins in 1949, well before the Wall, and it also includes, for example, 44 suicides of border police and soldiers with a service-related background and people who were arrested in the border area and executed in Moscow. According to the university, 262 of the 327 deaths fall into groups that correspond to the categories of the Berlin study. The researchers argued that the executions and suicides also belong among the victims of the border regime: for the executions, they pointed out that all the arrests had been made in the border area and that the verdicts referred to border service or to escapes; for the suicides, they cited indications of a possible link with the pressures of everyday service at the border.

Its count has been disputed. In a review published in 2019 in the Federal Agency for Civic Education's *Deutschland Archiv*, the historian Michael Kubina criticised the inclusion of suicides of border guards and of people executed in Moscow, as well as the counting of deaths from before the Wall was built, most of which, by his count, were not escape attempts. He also argued that the study interpreted a causal link ("kausaler Zusammenhang") with the border regime considerably more broadly than Hertle and Nooke had for Berlin. The 327 concern the border between Lübeck Bay and the former Czechoslovakia, not Berlin, and the two studies do not define their victims in the same way.

## Remembering the 140

The researchers wrote a biography of every one of the 140 people. Their stated aim was to give each victim a face and a story, and to rescue them from the oblivion imposed by the SED regime or, in the case of the border soldiers killed on duty, from the regime's use of them for its own purposes. Those biographies are the basis of the profiles on this site. Places in Berlin where the victims are remembered are described in [Berlin Wall victims memorials](https://victimsofthewall.com/articles/berlin-wall-victims-memorials/), and surviving sections of the Wall itself can be found at [Where Is the Wall](https://whereisthewall.com).

## Questions and answers

**How many people died at the Berlin Wall?**

At least 140 people died at the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989, according to the joint research project of the Berlin Wall Foundation and the Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (findings as of August 2017).

**Who were the 140 victims of the Berlin Wall?**

101 were escapees who were shot, had fatal accidents or took their own lives after a failed escape. 31 form a second group: 30 people from East and West who had no intention of escaping, and one Soviet soldier of whom the study says there is no sign that he wanted to flee. Eight were East German border soldiers killed on duty.

**How many people were shot at the Berlin Wall?**

The study states that 68 of the 101 escapees were shot dead. Of the 31 people in the second group, 15 West Berlin residents or visitors, eight GDR citizens and the Soviet soldier were shot. These figures do not include the eight border soldiers killed on duty.

**Are the at least 251 travellers who died at Berlin checkpoints included in the 140?**

No. The researchers counted at least 251 travellers, most of them elderly, who died at a Berlin checkpoint, before, during or after the border check, mostly of heart attacks. They are listed separately from the 140; the records rarely show exactly where or how these people died, and the researchers write that not every one of these deaths was necessarily linked to the border regime. The 140 do include people who died after being shot at a crossing point in connection with an escape: for example Czesław Jan Kukuczka at Friedrichstrasse Station in 1974, and Heinz Schöneberger, a West German who had entered East Berlin as a visitor and was shot at the Heinrich-Heine-Strasse crossing in December 1965 while trying to bring two women out hidden in a car.

**Why were earlier estimates so different?**

Before the project began in 2005, figures ranged from 78 to more than 200; according to the study, they varied with the basis, purpose and date of the counting. Many of the victims' names, and the circumstances of their deaths, were still largely unknown.

## Sources

1. Hertle/Nooke, The Victims at the Berlin Wall, 1961–1989: Findings of a Research Project (2017): https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/
2. Chronik der Mauer: Herbert Mende: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180554/mende-herbert
3. Chronik der Mauer: Chris Gueffroy: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180603/gueffroy-chris
4. Chronik der Mauer: Roland Hoff: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180481/hoff-roland
5. Chronik der Mauer: Winfried Freudenberg: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180604/freudenberg-winfried
6. Chronik der Mauer: Olga Segler: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180483/segler-olga
7. Chronik der Mauer: Günter Litfin: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180480/litfin-guenter
8. Freie Universität Berlin press release on the inner-German border study (2017): https://www.fu-berlin.de/presse/informationen/fup/2017/fup_17_155-studie-opfer-des-ddr-grenzregimes/index.html
9. Michael Kubina, Wer war Opfer des Grenzregimes? Eine andere Sicht, Deutschland Archiv (bpb), 2019: https://www.bpb.de/themen/deutschlandarchiv/295024/wer-war-opfer-des-grenzregimes-eine-andere-sicht/

Cite as: “How Many People Died at the Berlin Wall?”, Victims of the Berlin Wall, Berlin Experiences. https://victimsofthewall.com/articles/how-many-people-died-at-the-berlin-wall/