The Berlin Wall bricklayer whose death became instrumental in its destruction

The fatal shooting of Peter Fechter created a simmering fury that was only becalmed when, on an astonishing night 30 years ago, Berliners tore down the despised wall with their bare hands. Mick O’Hare remembers the tragedy that kickstarted it all

A bloodied and dying Fechter is carried away by the East German guards who shot him down as he tried to flee to the west (AP)

Gruesome is probably the most apposite word to sum up the death of Peter Fechter. Alongside, perhaps, cowardly. Fechter died at about 3pm on 17 August 1962 at a point near Zimmerstrasse in East Berlin. At least that’s when he stopped screaming. He was the 27th known person to die trying to cross the Berlin Wall.

The wall had been built a year earlier in August 1961. After Germany had been partitioned into four zones by the victorious allies at the end of the Second World War, two nations had been created. The Federal Republic of Germany (the FRD or West Germany) was born out of the British, American and French-administered zones while the communist state of the German Democratic Republic (DDR or East Germany) had been created from the Soviet Union’s zone. Berlin was wholly within the DDR but it too was divided into four, leaving a tiny exclave of West Germany inside the east once more formed from the British, American and French zones of Berlin.

And this was proving to be a headache for the East German authorities. People in East Germany were fleeing en masse to the west, tempted by its freedoms and living standards. Between 1949 and 1961, 2.7 million East Germans had fled to the west, most of them young and educated. And while the oppressive DDR stiffened up the border between East and West Germany, Berlin was proving to be a safety valve that wasn’t easy to shut off. Essentially you could defect from east to west simply by walking down the street – by 1961, nine out of 10 defectors were fleeing through Berlin. The order was given to build the wall.