Jörg Hartmann

Jörg Hartmann was born in East Berlin on 27 October 1955 and grew up in Friedrichshain. Because his mother was ill and could not look after her children, Jörg and his two younger siblings lived with their grandmother in a small flat in a rear building on Schreinerstrasse. His third-grade teacher, Ursula Mörs, remembered him as a quiet, shy boy, small and slight, with blond hair and pale blue eyes. School was hard for him, and he was very pleased whenever he was praised. He had never met his father, who lived in West Berlin.

On 14 March 1966 Jörg left home to buy fresh bread rolls and did not come back. That day he was with Lothar Schleusener, 13, whom he had known since they were small, when both families lived in the same neighbourhood. His classmates later told his teacher that Jörg had said he wanted to go to his father in West Berlin.

After dark the two boys reached the border area in Treptow unnoticed. According to the report that the East Berlin city commandant made to Erich Honecker, at about 7.15 p.m. border soldiers near the "Sorgenfrei" garden colony saw two figures who had passed the inner barrier. When they did not respond to a warning shot, the report said, fire was opened. Jörg, aged ten, died at once. Lothar was taken to the People's Police Hospital in Mitte and died of his injuries that same evening. Thirty years later one of the guards who fired said he had seen a shadow from his watchtower and had opened fire because he believed it was his duty.

East Germany's political and military leaders were unwilling to acknowledge that border guards had fired on children, and the truth was covered up. His grandmother reported him missing that evening but was told nothing. Two weeks later the East Berlin public prosecutor's office informed her that he had drowned and been recovered from a lake in Köpenick. The family did not believe it; an aunt told relatives in Australia that the police had summoned his grandmother and mother and threatened them, telling them to say nothing. Jörg had been cremated and buried anonymously at the Baumschulenweg Cemetery before his family had been informed of his death. His grandmother later had the urn reburied in a grave with a headstone.

The shots had been heard in Neukölln, and in March 1966 radio and newspapers in the West reported that children had been fired on; through channels that remain unknown, even Jörg's name reached the West. His teacher, who heard the report on RIAS radio, began asking questions until the school director told her to stop; she escaped to the West that same year. In the 1990s investigators were able to establish what had happened, and in November 1997 the Berlin Regional Court convicted a former border guard of manslaughter for the deaths of both boys and gave him a twenty-month suspended sentence; he had admitted firing on the two children together with another guard who had since died. A memorial to Jörg Hartmann and Lothar Schleusener, for which Ursula Mörs had campaigned, was dedicated on Kiefholzstrasse in 1999.

Read more

• The Children Who Died at the Berlin Wall

Also died on the sector border between Berlin-Neukölln and Berlin-Treptow

• Georg Feldhahn 19 December 1961
• Heinz Jercha 27 March 1962
• Wolfgang Glöde 11 June 1962
• Horst Kutscher 15 January 1963
• Siegfried Widera 8 September 1963
• Dieter Berger 13 December 1963
• Walter Hayn 27 February 1964
• Hans-Joachim Wolf 26 November 1964
• Erich Kühn 3 December 1965
• Lothar Schleusener 14 March 1966
• Michael Kollender 25 April 1966
• Max Sahmland 27 January 1967
• Gerald Thiem 7 August 1970
• Christian Peter Friese 25 December 1970
• Werner Kühl 24 July 1971
• Johannes Sprenger 10 May 1974
• Manfred Mäder 21 November 1986
• René Gross 21 November 1986
• Lutz Schmidt 12 February 1987
• Chris Gueffroy 5 February 1989

Sources

This profile is a summary written for this site. Every fact in it is taken from source 1, which also gives the full account with archival references.

1. Christine Brecht, “Jörg Hartmann”, biography in Chronik der Mauer, Federal Agency for Civic Education, Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam and Deutschlandradio. Accessed 23 September 2026. Read online. Basis for every fact in this profile, including the dates and place of death.
2. German version of the same biography. Accessed 23 September 2026. Read online.
3. Hans-Hermann Hertle and Maria Nooke (eds.), The Victims at the Berlin Wall, 1961–1989: A Biographical Handbook. Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam and Berlin Wall Foundation, Berlin 2011. The printed handbook from which the online biography is taken.
4. Hans-Hermann Hertle and Maria Nooke, “140 Victims at the Berlin Wall, 1961–1989” (list), Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam and Berlin Wall Foundation, August 2017. PDF. Used to cross-check names and dates.
5. Hans-Hermann Hertle and Maria Nooke, “The Victims at the Berlin Wall, 1961–1989: Findings of a Research Project”, August 2017. PDF. Source of the classification into escapees, people with no intent to escape, and border soldiers.

Further reading

• Wikipedia (Deutsch)

Image credits

• Memorial for Jörg Hartmann and Lothar Schleusener by Rüdiger Roehl and Jan Skuin (1999), Kiefholzstraße 333, Berlin-Plänterwald, photographed in 2011. OTFW, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.
• Inscription on the memorial at Kiefholzstraße 333: fifteen people died at the Wall in Treptow, among them two children, Jörg Hartmann, aged 10, and Lothar Schleusener, aged 13, shot on 14 March 1966. OTFW, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.
• Glass memorial panel at Kiefholzstraße 100 for Wolfgang Glöde, Jörg Hartmann and Christian-Peter Friese, photographed in 2014. OTFW, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.

Cite this page

“Jörg Hartmann”, Victims of the Berlin Wall, Berlin Experiences. https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/hartmann-joerg/

Map

The pin position is based on the place of death described in source 1. Base map © OpenStreetMap contributors; course of the Wall in 1989 from Geoportal Berlin (dl-de/zero-2.0). Accessed 23 September 2026.