Killing of Peter Fechter

In March 1997, seven years after the reunification of Germany and 35 years after Fechter's death, two former East German guards, Rolf Friedrich and Erich Schreiber, faced manslaughter charges for Fechter's death. Both admitted to the shooting after an intense investigation. They were both convicted and sentenced to 20 and 21 months' imprisonment on probation. Due to a lack of conclusive evidence, the court was unable to determine which of three gunmen (one of whom had already died) had fired the fatal bullet. After pleading guilty to the crime, during sentencing, both guards apologized for killing Fechter, saying that if they could take it back, they would, and that they were honestly remorseful for their actions.

After German reunification in 1990, the Peter-Fechter-Stelle memorial was constructed on Zimmerstrasse, at the precise spot where he had died on the Eastern side, and this has been a focal point for some of the commemorations regarding the wall. The shooting has also been the subject of documentaries on German television. Cornelius Ryan dedicated his book The Last Battle to the memory of Fechter. Composer Aulis Sallinen wrote an orchestral work Mauermusik to commemorate Fechter. In 2007, artist Mark Gubb was commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Arts to create a performance based on the death of Peter Fechter. The performance was a one-hour live piece that was later recorded and screened at the ICA with a discussion panel at the end consisting of the artist, and actor Dominik Danielewicz who played the part of Peter Fechter. The 1972 ballad Libre ("Free") – a recording famous in all Ibero-America – by Spanish singer Nino Bravo, remembers this event. In 2012 Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill's play Peter Fechter: 59 Minutes, a poetic re-imagining of the final hour of Fechter's life, was produced in Canada and Berlin.

On 17 August 1962, around one year after the construction of the Berlin Wall, Fechter and Helmut Kulbeik attempted to flee from East Germany. The plan was to hide in a carpenter's workshop near the wall on Zimmerstrasse and, after observing the border guards from there, to jump out of a window into the "death-strip" (a strip running between the main wall and a parallel fence which they had recently started to construct), run across it, and climb over the two-metre (6.5 ft) wall topped with barbed wire into the Kreuzberg district of West Berlin near Checkpoint Charlie.

The story of Peter Fechter was the headline of American news magazine Time in August 1962. In this article was used the noun "Wall of Shame" (Mauer der Schande), and this became a synonym for the wall.

Peter Fechter (14 January 1944 – 17 August 1962) was a German bricklayer who became the twenty-seventh known person to die at the Berlin Wall. Fechter was 18 years old when he was shot and killed by East German border guards while trying to cross over to West Berlin.

Peter Fechter was born on 14 January 1944, in Berlin, Germany, during the final years of World War II. Fechter was the third of four children, and raised in the Weißensee district of Berlin. His father was a mechanical engineer and his mother was a saleswoman. Fechter finished school at the age of 14, and graduated as a bricklayer. After World War II had ended, Weißensee was located in the Soviet occupation zone of Berlin when the city was divided during the Allied Occupation, with the Soviet zone later becoming East Berlin in East Germany. Fechter's eldest sister had married and now lived in West Berlin, where she was regularly visited by her parents and siblings. On 13 August 1961, the East German authorities abruptly closed the border and began construction of the Berlin Wall, effectively separating Fechter and his family from his sister in West Berlin. Fechter's colleague, Helmut Kulbeik, later stated that he and Fechter had been contemplating defecting to West Berlin for a while, and that they had also explored the border installations, but no concrete planning was ever made at the time. Shortly after, Fechter was denied a legally sanctioned trip to West Germany by his company, despite receiving good judgement.