Victims of the Wall

All 140 people

Silvio Proksch

1962–1983

Silvio Proksch, a 21-year-old from Pankow who had trained as a bricklayer, was shot at the Pankow municipal cemetery on Christmas Day 1983 while trying to reach West Berlin and bled to death in the death strip.

Tall glass panel in a metal frame among trees, listing names, dates and small photographs of four victims next to explanatory text
Glass memorial panel on Klemkestraße in Berlin-Reinickendorf for Horst Frank, Wernhard Mispelhorn, Horst Einsiedel and Silvio Proksch Photo: OTFW, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Silvio Proksch was born in East Berlin on 3 March 1962. After school he trained as a bricklayer and then worked for a carpentry and joinery firm. He lived in Pankow with his parents and a brother; nine of his siblings had already left home. For a long time he had felt hemmed in by life in East Germany, but he had never told anyone of any concrete plan to escape.

At about 7 p.m. on 25 December 1983 he left his parents' house with his brother. Both had been drinking heavily. Without any preparation, he decided to go to West Berlin; his brother later said he had spoken of wanting freedom. Perhaps family tensions over Christmas played a part. He took only his identity card, his training certificate and his social security card. It was raining and misty. On the way his brother tried to talk him out of it.

At the Bürgerpark in Pankow, by the old Niederschönhausen pumping station near the Panke, his brother stayed behind in front of the cemetery that lay directly on the border. Silvio climbed the cemetery fence and set off an alarm at the signal fence at about 7.30 p.m. A guard in a watchtower called out and fired two warning shots, then shot at him as he kept going towards the concrete wall. A bullet struck his hip and severed an artery and vein. He ran a few more metres and collapsed just short of the concrete wall.

It was a long time before he received medical help, and he bled to death in the death strip. He was pronounced dead at around 9.15 p.m., when he was brought into the People's Police Hospital in Mitte. In 1992 a report from the Franziskus Hospital found that prompt treatment in a properly equipped hospital would very likely have saved his life. The guard was awarded a bronze medal of merit; in November 1994 the Berlin Regional Court convicted him of manslaughter and gave him a prison sentence of a year and nine months, suspended on probation.

His brother heard the shots and told their older siblings, but nobody came to inform the family. Because the incident had gone unnoticed in West Berlin, a Stasi commission decided to cover it up. A sister reported him missing on 28 December; there was no response until 20 January 1984, when the Stasi began interrogating relatives, even a 14-year-old nephew at his school. The Stasi denied that any escape attempt, death or arrest had taken place, threatening the family if they kept asking. His brother was later jailed for more than two years on minor charges, sworn to silence and banned from Berlin.

Only in August 1990, after many letters and complaints, did the East German military prosecutor tell the family what had really happened. The Stasi had taken his body to the military forensic institute at Bad Saarow the day after Christmas. He was never recorded in any East German death register, and his body has been missing without trace since 30 December 1983.

Glass panel with a Berlin Wall 1961–1989 logo, multilingual text columns and a faded photograph of a barbed-wire fence
Text panel of the memorial on Klemkestraße in Berlin-Reinickendorf, with texts in German, English, French and Russian about the four victims, including Silvio Proksch Photo: OTFW, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Also died on the sector border between Berlin-Pankow and Berlin-Reinickendorf

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. Udo Baron, “Silvio Proksch”, 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

  • Glass memorial panel on Klemkestraße in Berlin-Reinickendorf for Horst Frank, Wernhard Mispelhorn, Horst Einsiedel and Silvio Proksch. OTFW, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.
  • Text panel of the memorial on Klemkestraße in Berlin-Reinickendorf, with texts in German, English, French and Russian about the four victims, including Silvio Proksch. OTFW, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.

Cite this page

“Silvio Proksch”, Victims of the Berlin Wall, Berlin Experiences. https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/proksch-silvio/

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.