Victims of the Wall

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Erich Kühn

1903–1965

Erich Kühn, a 62-year-old transport and warehouse worker from East Berlin, was shot while trying to cross the railway grounds at Kiefholzstrasse in Treptow in November 1965 and died of his wounds on 3 December 1965.

Two tall glass panels in steel frames printed with text and small portrait photographs, with a wreath and flowers at their foot beside a street
Memorial at Kiefholzstraße 79 in Berlin-Plänterwald for Heinz Jercha, Walter Hayn, Erich Kühn, Gerald Thiem, René Gross and Manfred Mäder, photographed in 2011 Photo: OTFW, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Erich Kühn was born on 27 February 1903 in Landsberg an der Warthe, a town that is now part of Poland. At the age of nine he moved to Berlin, where he spent most of his life. Without a trade, he got by on casual work. Only fragments of his life can be pieced together from official records, and they show a life marked by hardship and conflict.

According to Stasi records he was in trouble with the law from an early age: a criminal police file shows that in 1917, at 14, he served four weeks in prison for theft, and he was imprisoned several times in later decades for theft and forgery. After the war the authorities in the Soviet sector first noticed him because of black-market dealing. In November 1953 he was sentenced to six years and three months in a penitentiary for a sexual offence against a child. He was released in June 1959, at the age of 56.

The years that followed brought poor health, frequent changes of job and a third marriage that ended in divorce in 1964. From February 1963 he worked for several East Berlin firms as a transport and warehouse worker. In the weeks before his escape attempt he was in hospital: he had spent a long time in the Protestant Queen Elizabeth Hospital before being moved on 27 September to the Herzberge Municipal Hospital, a psychiatric institution. Sent home on two days' leave on 13 November, he did not return. Papers found in his flat point to a crisis: an unsent letter protesting against his dismissal and the apparent threat of enforcement over maintenance demands. On 24 November he took a suit to a pawnshop. As far as the records show, by the time he decided to flee he was lonely, ill and poor, and all this suggests that he hoped to escape his plight by fleeing to West Berlin.

After dark in late November he approached the railway grounds where disused tracks crossed Kiefholzstrasse, between Treptower Park and Sonnenallee stations, keeping below the embankment. The two soldiers posted on the bridge heard a noise from the embankment but in the dark could not tell whether it was an escapee, and they were reluctant to intervene. The guard leader telephoned the company's platoon leader, who ordered him to act; he then told the other guard to shoot, and, as the press reported when the three soldiers stood trial decades later, the guard fired blindly into the bushes. Erich Kühn was badly wounded in the stomach.

He was operated on that night at the People's Police Hospital and was conscious in the days that followed, but his condition grew steadily worse. The wound led to peritonitis, and he died on the evening of 3 December 1965, aged 62. He apparently left no relatives to mourn him; at least, the East German authorities could find no one willing to arrange his funeral, and at the instigation of the East Berlin public prosecutor his urn was buried in an anonymous grave at the Baumschulenweg Cemetery.

His fate became public only after the East German archives were opened, and the trial attracted much public interest. In 1995 the Berlin Regional Court found three former border soldiers guilty of manslaughter and incitement to manslaughter and gave each a suspended one-year prison or youth sentence.

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

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, “Erich Kühn”, 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

Image credits

  • Memorial at Kiefholzstraße 79 in Berlin-Plänterwald for Heinz Jercha, Walter Hayn, Erich Kühn, Gerald Thiem, René Gross and Manfred Mäder, photographed in 2011. OTFW, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.

Cite this page

“Erich Kühn”, Victims of the Berlin Wall, Berlin Experiences. https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/kuehn-erich/

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.