Günter Litfin

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Günter Litfin
Information board on the deaths of Günter Litfin and Peter Göring at the Invalidenfriedhof, Scharnhorststr 32 (Berlin-Mitte)

Günter Litfin (born January 19, 1937 in Berlin ; † August 24, 1961 there ) was the first GDR refugee who was killed by targeted shots at the GDR border guards after the Berlin Wall was built .

Life

The East Berlin fire brigade rescued the dead Litfin from the Humboldthafen basin on August 24, 1961

Günter Litfin lived in the East Berlin district of Weißensee and, like his father, master butcher Albert Litfin, was a member of the CDU Berlin , which is illegal in the east of Berlin, and as a cross-border commuter, one of 80,000 Berliners whose residence was separated from their place of work or training by the sector boundary. He had learned the tailoring trade in the West Berlin district of Charlottenburg . Litfin had decided to flee to the West and had already found an apartment in Charlottenburg. On August 12th, he and his brother Jürgen went to West Berlin to furnish the apartment. The following morning, the construction of the Berlin Wall thwarted his plans. Litfin then explored ways of overcoming the blocked sector boundary.

Fatal escape attempt and its consequences

On August 24th around 4 p.m. Litfin crossed the western outer wall of the Charité , presumably to get to the Lehrter Stadtbahnhof via the Humboldthafen Bridge. At around 4:15 p.m., two transport police officers who were stationed on the bridge discovered him . They called him and fired warning shots. Litfin then ran to the southern area of ​​the Humboldthafen , jumped in and swam in the direction of the west bank, about 60 meters away, which formed the border. Now the transport police were shooting at him specifically. A shot hit him in the back of the head before he reached the other bank. Litfin went down fatally. The East Berlin fire brigade was only able to recover his body three hours later. On the west side, around 300 eyewitnesses followed the event.

The shooting of Litfin caused a sensation in the Berlin public. While the West Berlin press reflected the outrage, the central organ of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) , Neues Deutschland , and the chief propagandist of GDR television , Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler , vilified Litfin under the title A Memorial for "Doll" ? as a homosexual offender, as a “criminal figure” and “dark element”.

The day after the shooting, members of the Ministry for State Security (MfS) arrested Litfin's brother Jürgen to interrogate him for one night and ransacked Litfin's home and that of his parents. Like the public, the relatives also learned the details of Litfin's death from a report in the Berliner Abendschau on August 26, 1961. At the funeral service at St. Hedwig's Cemetery II in Smetanastraße in Berlin-Weißensee, the MfS forced relatives and Guests describing Litfin’s death as "a tragic accident".

Sentencing the shooters

After the reunification of Berlin in 1997, the shooters had to answer before the Berlin district court in a wall shooting process . The court sentenced the shooters for manslaughter in less severe cases to imprisonment of 18 months to make it the probation exposed.

Commemoration

Memorial stone at the Kieler Eck memorial

On the morning of August 27, 1961, West Berliners put a banner on the west side of the Humboldthafen with the inscription: "And if Ulbricht is still raging, Berlin stays free, it never turns red". In 1962 a memorial stone for Günter Litfin took its place. On the initiative of Jürgen Litfin, a memorial in memory of Günter Litfin and the other wall dead has been located in the watchtower of the former command post "Kieler Eck" on the Berlin-Spandau shipping canal since 1992. The Günter Litfin Memorial has been part of the Berlin Wall Foundation since summer 2017 . One of the three memorial plaques of the August 13th Working Group in the nearby Invalidenfriedhof is dedicated to Litfin's death. In Litfin's home district of Weißensee, the previous street 209 received his name on August 24, 2000 . On Reichstagufer one remembers White crosses Günter Litfin.

literature

Web links

Commons : Günter Litfin  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Chronicle of the Wall ; Edgar Wolfrum : The Wall. History of a division. Beck, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-58517-3 . Section: 1. The shock: construction of the wall, August 13, 1961.
  2. ^ Quotes from Christine Brecht: Günter Litfin . In: Hans-Hermann Hertle and Maria Nooke (Projektltg): The victims of the Berlin Wall 1961–1989. A biographical manual. Published by the Center for Contemporary History Potsdam and the Berlin Wall Foundation . Links, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86153-517-1 , pp. 37-39. See also murder baiting from the front city . In: Neues Deutschland, September 2, 1961, p. 5 and A monument for “doll”? . In: Neues Deutschland, September 1, 1961.
  3. ↑ Cristiane Brecht: Günter Litfin . In: Hans-Hermann Hertle and Maria Nooke (Projektltg): The victims of the Berlin Wall 1961–1989. A biographical manual. Published by the Center for Contemporary History Potsdam and the Berlin Wall Foundation . Links, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86153-517-1 , pp. 37-39.
  4. ↑ Berlin Wall Memorial | Press. Retrieved April 18, 2018 .
  5. ^ Günter-Litfin-Strasse. In: Street name lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein (near  Kaupert )
personal data
SURNAME Litfin, Günter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION first death on the Berlin Wall
DATE OF BIRTH January 19, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH August 24, 1961
Place of death Berlin