Siegfried Krug (victim of the wall)

Siegfried Krug (born July 22, 1939 in Stettin , † July 6, 1968 in Berlin ) was a West German victim at the Berlin Wall . He was shot dead by members of the GDR border troops on Pariser Platz in East Berlin in front of the Brandenburg Gate .

Life

As a child, Krug and his family were expelled from Szczecin . He settled in Erfurt in 1961 as a high-voltage electrician . Before the Wall was built , he left the GDR via West Berlin . He first went to Marburg , then to Frankfurt am Main . There he got engaged.

On July 6, shortly before his wedding, he traveled to Berlin with another woman. He left his fiancée with the news that he still had something to do. He didn't know when he would return yet. He announced to his sister that he would not marry, but would rather disappear for a long time.

Krug entered the GDR on the S-Bahn via the border crossing at Friedrichstrasse station . After an hour, he took a taxi to Pariser Platz, ten minutes away. He walked with a white briefcase with 1,100  D-Marks in large denominations into the cordoned-off border area at Pariser Platz in front of the Brandenburg Gate, according to a witness statement from a border guard, because he wanted to go to the (inaccessible) Brandenburg Gate. Krug did not react to a volley of warning shots and warnings from three members of the GDR border troops ; instead, he walked unmoved between armed guards. In response to further warning shots, he finally turned back and approached the then 20-year-old border guard Paul H. His calls to stop, ignored Krug, whereupon H. opened fire from about three meters away. All three bullets shot hit Krug, including in the chest and stomach. He was taken to the People's Police Hospital around 7:40 p.m. , where he succumbed to his injuries at around 8:55 p.m.

The incident was noticed in the West, but Krug was mistaken for an East German refugee. Neither his fiancée in West Germany nor his sister living in Marburg were notified of the incident by the GDR authorities. Krug was believed to have been lost and his relatives continued to hope for his return. You only found out about the events in 1991. The shooter was only informed during a police interrogation in 1992 that he had killed a person. In 1993 he was sentenced to two years probation in a wall rifle trial.

literature

• Werner Filmer , Heribert Schwan : Victims of the Wall. The Secret Logs of Death . Bertelsmann, Munich 1991, ISBN 978-3-570-02319-8 .
• 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 .

Web links

• Short portrait on chronik-der-mauer.de