Victims of the Wall

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Anton Walzer

1902–1962

Anton Walzer, a 60-year-old varnish maker from East Berlin, was shot dead by East German border guards on 8 October 1962 while swimming across the Spree near the Oberbaum Bridge towards West Berlin.

Glass memorial panel with a column of names, dates and small portrait photographs, standing on a riverside promenade with the river and buildings behind it
Memorial panel for the victims of the Berlin Wall on the May-Ayim-Ufer in Berlin-Kreuzberg, listing Anton Walzer among others, photographed in 2012 Photo: OTFW, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Anton Walzer was born on 27 April 1902 in Weiler in Upper Swabia, near Ravensburg. From the mid-1920s he lived in Berlin-Weissensee with his first wife, and they had two daughters. A varnish maker by trade, he worked for many years at the Weissensee paint company Warnecke & Böhm, where under the Nazis he saw the firm 'aryanised' and later using Jewish forced labourers. After 1945 the company was nationalised, and around this time he married again.

In 1955 he fled East Germany with his second wife and their children and settled in Offenbach am Main. When his mother-in-law became seriously ill, the family moved back to East Berlin in 1958 at his wife's wish. As a returnee he was treated as politically unreliable: he was taken back by his old company, but only in a poorly paid job far below the knowledge and skill of an experienced master varnish maker. He apparently could not cope with this humiliation, drank more and more, and his marriage broke down. A divorce date had already been set.

On the evening of 8 October 1962, after drinking to steady his nerves, he went to the Spree bank near the Oberbaum Bridge in Friedrichshain, slipped unseen onto a moored barge and, at around 10:15 p.m., jumped into the water to swim to the West Berlin bank. Two guards at a nearby observation post noticed him immediately and opened fire. Shots struck the Gröbenufer on the western side, and a West Berlin police officer returned fire. An East German border boat was already closing in and he could hardly have escaped arrest, yet the guard leader on the bank kept shooting, firing 18 aimed shots in all. A bullet to the back of the head killed him instantly, and he sank.

Kreuzberg residents gathered on the bank as the search went on. When his body was lifted from the river at about 8:30 the next morning, boats were placed to block the view from the West; the name of the dead man was not immediately known there. For days people protested on the Gröbenufer, where Udo Düllick had died a year before. Two young people put up another wooden cross right beside the cross and memorial stone for Udo Düllick and took up the motto that they could be strong without violence.

East German authorities described the shooting as an armed provocation by the enemy and praised the guards. Some thirty years later, when the killings at the Wall were prosecuted, the guard leader admitted what he had done, saying he was in a moral conflict he could no longer live with, though he denied having aimed at the swimmer and claimed that he had wanted the shots to make him turn back. In August 1994 the Berlin Regional Court convicted him of manslaughter and imposed a suspended sentence of one and a half years in prison. The court accepted his remorse as mitigating but stressed his personal responsibility for killing a defenceless man in the water.

Read more

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, “Anton Walzer”, 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 panel for the victims of the Berlin Wall on the May-Ayim-Ufer in Berlin-Kreuzberg, listing Anton Walzer among others, photographed in 2012. OTFW, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.

Cite this page

“Anton Walzer”, Victims of the Berlin Wall, Berlin Experiences. https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/walzer-anton/

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.