Escape attempts and victims of the inner German border

There were numerous escape attempts and victims of the inner German border during its 45 years of existence from 1945 to 1990.

Between 1950 and 1988, around 4 million East Germans migrated to the West. 3.454 million of them left between 1950 and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The great majority simply walked across the border or, after 1952, exited through West Berlin. After the border was fortified and the Berlin Wall was constructed, the number of illegal border crossings fell drastically. The numbers fell further as the border defenses were improved over the subsequent decades. In 1961, 8,507 people fled across the border, most of them through West Berlin. The construction of the Berlin Wall that year reduced the number of escapees by 75% to around 2,300 per annum for the rest of the decade. The Wall changed Berlin from being one of the easiest places to cross the border, from the East, to being one of the most difficult. The number of escapees fell further to 868 per annum during the 1970s and to only 334 per annum between 1980 and 1988. However, escapees were never more than a small minority of the total number of emigrants from East Germany. Far more people left the country after being granted official permits, by fleeing through third countries or by being ransomed by the West German government. During the 1980s, only about 1% of those who left East Germany did so by escaping across the border.

Escapees had various motives for attempting to flee East Germany. The vast majority had an essentially economic motive: they wished to improve their living conditions and opportunities in the West. Some fled for political reasons, but many were impelled to leave by specific social and political events. The imposition of collective agriculture and the crushing of the 1953 East German uprising prompted thousands to flee to the West, as did further coercive economic restructuring in 1960. Thousands of those who fled did so to escape the clearance of their villages along the border. By the 1980s, the number of escape attempts was rising again as East Germany's economy stagnated and living conditions deteriorated.

Attempts to flee across the border were carefully studied and recorded by the East German authorities to identify possible weak points. These would be addressed by strengthening the fortifications in vulnerable areas. The East German Army (NVA) and the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) carried out statistical surveys to identify trends. In one example, a study was carried out by the NVA at the end of the 1970s to review attempted "border breaches" (Grenzdurchbrüche). It found that 4,956 people had attempted to escape across the border between 1 January 1974 and 30 November 1979. Of those, 3,984 people (80.4%) were arrested by the People's Police in the , the outer restricted zone. 205 people (4.1%) were caught at the signal fence. Within the inner security zone, the Schutzstreifen, a further 743 people (15%) were arrested by the border guards. 48 people (1%) were stopped – i.e. killed or injured – by landmines and 43 people (0.9%) by SM-70 directional mines on the border fence. A further 67 people (1.35%) were intercepted at the border fence (shot and/or arrested). The study highlighted the effectiveness of the SM-70 as a means of stopping people getting across the fence. A total of 229 people – just 4.6% of attempted escapees, representing less than one in twenty – made it across the border fence. Of these, the largest number (129, or 55% of successful escapees) succeeded in making it across the fence in unmined sectors. 89 people (39% of escapees) managed to cross both the minefields and the border fence, but just 12 people (6% of the total) succeeded in getting past the SM-70s.

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