Victims of the Wall

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Werner Probst

1936–1961

Werner Probst, a 25-year-old driver from Friedrichshain, was shot on 14 October 1961 while swimming across the Spree near the Schilling Bridge; he reached the ladder on the West Berlin quay wall before collapsing, fatally wounded.

Glass panel in a steel frame listing names with small portrait photos, the river behind
Memorial panel for Berlin Wall victims on the May-Ayim-Ufer, Kreuzberg, listing Werner Probst Photo: OTFW, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Werner Probst was born in Berlin on 18 June 1936 and grew up there. He shared his parents' home in Friedrichshain and drove for a state-owned enterprise, having previously been employed by a transport firm in West Berlin before the Wall went up. He is said to have left school early and to have come to the notice of the authorities for theft as a youth.

From February 1959 the Stasi kept him as a secret informant under the code name 'Harry', apparently using his criminal record as one of the grounds for recruiting him. At the time he agreed to work with the Stasi, he had no vocational training and could barely write. He was tasked with reporting on people in the shadier circles of both halves of the city, where he was said to have many contacts, and spent time with cross-border commuters and in West Berlin bars. His motives appear to have been personal advantage rather than conviction: besides his informing, he earned much-coveted western currency and enjoyed a certain freedom of movement.

The Wall ended all this, and he could not or would not accept it. Three days after the border was sealed he was briefly arrested, drunk, trying to get into West Berlin at Friedrichstrasse station. A plan to place him as an informant in the West was dropped, and after that he apparently saw no reason to stay. The Stasi believed he mainly wanted to reach his savings in a West Berlin bank, but he left no explanation, and his real motives are not known.

On the evening of 14 October 1961 he went into the Spree beneath the Schilling Bridge, not far from his parents' flat, to swim to the western bank. At about 10:30 p.m. border guards watching the river from the bridge spotted him. While one of them lit up the water with a searchlight, two others fired signal and warning shots and then opened fire on him. He reached the exit ladder on the West Berlin quay wall and, already wounded in the thigh and temple, was pulling himself up its rungs when he was fatally hit and collapsed. According to one of the surviving reports, aimed shots were fired once he reached the ladder, and he fell right at the bank on West Berlin territory; the water police then pulled him from the bank and took him by boat to the Oberbaum Bridge; he was already dead when they arrived.

West Berlin police registered the shots on the Kreuzberg bank, and over the following days the evidence grew that they had been aimed at a fugitive. According to what his half-sister in West Berlin passed on to the authorities, his parents were told on 16 October that their son had been shot while fleeing, without being told where or when, and were refused permission to see him before burial. Statements by border guards who later deserted to the West linked his death to the shooting at the Schilling Bridge. Thirty years later three former guards were identified as the suspected perpetrators; in May 1995 the Berlin Regional Court convicted them of joint manslaughter, though it could not establish who fired the fatal shot.

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Also died on the sector border between Berlin-Friedrichshain and Berlin-Kreuzberg

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, “Werner Probst”, 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

Cite this page

“Werner Probst”, Victims of the Berlin Wall, Berlin Experiences. https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/probst-werner/

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.