Victims of the Wall

All 140 people

Dorit Schmiel

1941–1962

Dorit Schmiel, a 20-year-old seamstress from Pankow, was shot in the stomach by border guards on 19 February 1962 while crawling with four friends towards the border at Rosenthal, and died shortly afterwards in hospital.

Black-and-white photograph of a smiling young woman with long curly hair behind glass in a rusted steel niche, her name engraved below
Portrait of Dorit Schmiel in the Window of Remembrance, Bernauer Strasse Photo: Brewer Bob, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Dorit Schmiel was born in Berlin on 25 April 1941, during the war. Her father lost his life as a soldier in the Second World War, and she and her older brother grew up with their mother and stepfather in Pankow, in East Berlin. As a girl she often went to the western part of the city to see relatives, shop, go to the cinema or go dancing, and she felt the closing of the sector border as a painful break in her life.

Known as Dorle, she was 20 when the Wall went up. She worked as a seamstress in a state-run factory and had recently moved in with her fiancé, Detlef T. Neither she nor her fiancé nor three friends in their circle could identify with the political conditions and ideological demands of the East German state, and the building of the Wall made their situation unbearable. Once it became clear early in 1962 that the division would last, they decided to leave. One of Dorit's cousins had got through the barbed wire in the north of the city, and they planned to try at the same spot on the night of 18 to 19 February 1962.

After midnight, on a misty, overcast night, the five approached the border with Reinickendorf from Rosenthal, watched the guards for a while from a safe distance, and then moved along the edge of a cemetery towards the barriers. They cut a hole in the first fence, crawled through one by one and edged forward, flat on the snow and slush. They were close to the last two fences when three guards saw them and fired, without any call or warning shot, whatever the official reports later claimed. A bullet struck Dorit in the stomach. Her friends got up on the guards' order, 16-year-old Eberhard B. despite a wound to his shoulder, but she could not. Her fiancé recalled that she was finally seized by her arms and legs and carried away.

She was laid on the ground on the nearest street, Wilhelmsruher Damm, and it was at least 30 minutes before an ambulance came. On the way to the People's Police Hospital in Mitte she kept asking whether she had to die, Eberhard B. remembered; by the time they arrived she made no sound and was breathing only weakly. She died of internal bleeding a short time later.

Her friends were questioned for hours that night and tried a month later; the Pankow district court sentenced them to between ten months and two years in prison. Thirty years later they appeared as witnesses and joint plaintiffs when the three guards were tried. It could not be established whose bullets had struck, but the court found that all three had accepted that the fugitives might die, convicted them of joint manslaughter together with attempted manslaughter, and sentenced each of them to 18 months in prison, suspended on probation.

Everyone who knew her was deeply shaken. For the rest of her life her mother wrongly blamed Dorit's cousin in part, believing he had persuaded the young people to try. Through relatives, news of her death reached West Berlin, where, while the Wall still stood, several memorials kept her memory alive.

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. Christine Brecht, “Dorit Schmiel”, 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

“Dorit Schmiel”, Victims of the Berlin Wall, Berlin Experiences. https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/schmiel-dorit/

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.