Heinz Schmidt (victim of the wall)

Heinz Schmidt (born October 26, 1919 in Berlin ; † August 29, 1966 there ) was a victim of the Berlin Wall in West Berlin . Members of the GDR border troops shot the mentally ill homeless man while he was swimming in the Berlin-Spandau shipping canal .

Heinz Schmidt lived with his wife and three children in the Wedding district until 1962 . Due to a mental illness, he became unemployed and an alcoholic. In the same year, the Wedding District Court appointed a frail nurse for him. After a long separation, he divorced his wife in 1966. He moved to a homeless shelter in the neighborhood. Schmidt was noticed several times for petty offenses , and in 1965 he crossed the sector border at the Oberbaum Bridge to insult GDR border soldiers.

On August 29, 1966, Schmidt, heavily drunk and only wearing his underpants, went into the water in the northern harbor . Without responding to calls from passers-by, he swam into the shipping canal, whose water surface belonged to East Berlin . GDR border guards discovered him and fired warning shots . After arriving West Berlin police officers called out to them that the swimmer was a drunk West Berliner, they shot Schmidt from their position at the Invalidenfriedhof . Schmidt swam on to the East Berlin bank and went ashore there to seek shelter behind a protruding loading ramp. Despite the West Berlin police officers' request to stay under cover, Schmidt went back into the water and swam to the west bank under fire from the border guards. He got there, though hit by five bullets. The fire brigade pulled Schmidt out of the water and took him to the Rudolf Virchow Hospital around 1:45 p.m. , where only his death could be determined. His body was buried on September 8, 1966 in a cemetery in Wedding.

Numerous eyewitnesses had observed the events from West Berlin. Bullets hit walls, a car and an apartment there. A spokesman for the Berlin Senate described the incident as "particularly tragic, cruel and inhuman". The Berlin press reported in detail on the case. The central organ of the SED Neues Deutschland described it as a provocation against the GDR and underlined the "inviolability of the state border".

One member of the GDR border troops received the " Medal for exemplary border service " and three others received the "Border troops' performance badge". Citizens filed criminal charges against the West Berlin police officers for failing to provide assistance because they had not given Schmidt the fire protection permitted in such cases, despite the impact of GDR bullets on West Berlin territory. The proceedings did not take place because the impacts, which were about 150 meters away from the police officers' location, could not have been noticed by them. After German reunification, there were investigations into the former border guards. They had to be stopped because the GDR files did not clearly identify a shooter and the border guards in question had refused to give evidence.

Web links

• Brief portrait on www.chronik-der-mauer.de

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. 245 f .