Manfred Gertzki

Manfred Gertzki (born May 17, 1942 in Danzig ; † April 27, 1973 in Berlin ) was a victim of the Berlin Wall . Members of the GDR border troops shot him while trying to escape from the GDR and then pushed him into the Spree, where he sank.

Life

Born during the Second World War, his mother fled with him from Gdansk in 1945, first to Eisenach and then to Chemnitz. His father died in the war as did his brother. In Chemnitz , he completed an apprenticeship as a locksmith. He then did his military service in the Air Force of the National People's Army . After his service he continued his training and became a mechanical engineer. The VEB Robotron in Karl-Marx-Stadt hired him and made it possible for him to study in the evening at the Technical University, which he completed in 1972 with a diploma. With the death of his mother in 1967 he lost the last living relative in the GDR.

Manfred Gertzki began to prepare his escape to the West in the following period. He sent some personal items to the Federal Republic. He wanted to build a bulletproof vest with two millimeter thick metal plates that he riveted to a cloth and sewn into his jacket . He also fitted a motorcycle helmet with a steel face mask. His protective equipment weighed about 50 kilograms.

On the evening of April 27, 1973, he went with his protective equipment to the border area near the Reichstag building in Berlin-Mitte. Due to construction work on the Spree , the border installations were in a provisional state. Gertzki broke open a lock. His plan was to go along the wall to the bank and climb around the wall there. On the way he had to briefly cross the field of vision of the watchtower (“record”) in front of the Reichstag presidential palace 15 meters away . Another watchtower was about 300 meters away on the Kronprinzenbrücke . The crews of both watchtowers became aware of the refugee through the border reporting system. The guards opened fire from the “Schallplatte” watchtower on Manfred Gertzki, who fell to the ground and crawled further towards the bank. On his further way he came into the field of fire of the second watchtower. He stopped about two meters from the border with West Berlin. His last obstacle would have been a chain link fence .

On the western side, passers-by, police officers and British military personnel noticed the incident, which prompted the GDR border guards to rescue the body as quickly as possible from the immediate border area and, above all, the field of vision of the west. A border guard tried in vain to pull him back while a customs boat came to the rescue, which could not tie up on the bank. The boat crew asked the border guard to throw Gertzki into the water. The weight of his protective equipment pulled Gertzki to the bottom of the Spree. Two hours later, divers from the GDR fire brigade found the body, attached it to a boat so that it could not be seen from the west, and transported it away.

The incident was the subject of reporting in Western media as a "murder on the Reichstag". After German reunification, the Berlin public prosecutor's office started investigations into the death, which in 1997 led to a wall shooter trial against three shooters. The proceedings against the two posts of the watchtower "Schallplatte" ended in acquittals because no individual guilt could be proven. The third border guard, he shot from the distant watchtower, was sentenced to twelve months suspended prison sentence.

literature

• Hans-Hermann Hertle , Maria Nooke : The victims of the Berlin Wall 1961 - 1989. A biographical handbook. Edited by the Center for Contemporary History Potsdam and the Berlin Wall Foundation. Links, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86153-517-1 .

Web links

• Portrait of Manfred Gertzki at chronik-der-mauer.de
• Information from the BStU on the Gertzki case