Çetin Mert

Memorial plaque on May-Ayim-Ufer, in Berlin-Kreuzberg

Çetin Mert (born May 11, 1970 , † May 11, 1975 in Berlin ) was a Berlin boy who drowned in an accident in the Spree . Presumably he could have been saved if the special problems of the Berlin Wall had not prevented it. This makes Çetin one of the youngest victims of the Berlin Wall .

Life

Çetin Mert's parents came from the Turkish city ​​of Düzce and lived with Çetin and his two brothers in the West Berlin district of Kreuzberg .

On the morning of his fifth birthday, Çetin played with children from the neighborhood on Kreuzberg's Gröbenufer near the Oberbaum Bridge . While trying to fish out his ball that had fallen into the water, the boy himself fell into the Spree, which at this point belonged to East Berlin in full width .

A few minutes later, around 12:30 p.m., the West Berlin police and fire brigade arrived at the scene of the accident, but were not allowed to intervene because of the state border running along the shore. Çetin received no help from East Berlin either. He drowned.

Around 2 p.m., divers from the GDR border troops recovered Çetin's body. It was only days later that she was handed over to her parents, who buried Çetin in her Turkish hometown. The memorial service for Çetin Mert held in West Berlin turned into a mass protest against the GDR border regime.

Çetin Mert was one of at least five children who lost their lives in this way. Similar fates suffered in the same or nearer place Andreas Senk (6), Cengaver Katrancı (9), Siegfried Kroboth (5) and Giuseppe Savoca (6).

Web links

Commons : Çetin Mert  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Short portrait on Chronicle of the Wall
• Four boys drowned on the Gröbenufer between autumn 1972 and May 11, 1975 . West Berlin then secured the bank with barbed wire and negotiated an agreement with the GDR on rescue measures on the Gröbenufer (published in the Frankfurter Rundschau on January 20, 2010, page 13).

literature

• Hans-Hermann Hertle, Maria Nooke : The victims of the Berlin Wall 1961–1989. A biographical manual . Ch.links, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86153-517-1 , p. 363 ff .