As West Berliners watched Ulbricht’s barbed wire fence mutate into a concrete wall, they began to get unruly, combining their curses against the East with jeers aimed at the do-nothing West. At a rally outside the Schöneberg Rathaus people hoisted signs saying “Betrayed by the West” and “Where Are the Protective Powers?” Berlin schoolchildren sent Kennedy a black umbrella, reminiscent of the one Neville Chamberlain had carried when he sold out the Czechs at the Munich Conference in 1938. More dangerously, a group of West Germans attacked the Soviet War Memorial that lay in the British sector just to the west of the Brandenburg Gate; the small contingent of Russian guards at the site might have been killed had not British troops intervened and dispersed the attackers.
Willy Brandt did not approve of attacks against Soviets in West Berlin, but he too was livid over the tepid Western response. Originally he had harbored a high regard for Kennedy, with whom he shared a ribald sense of humor and a predatory attitude toward beautiful women, but he now wondered if his admiration was not misplaced. His deep disappointment with Germany’s Western Allies in this time of testing shaped the rest of his political career, starting him on a search for accommodation with the East that would culminate in his
While Kennedy was trying to decide how to respond to Brandt, many Berliners were in fact electing to flee, though still from East to West. In its earliest manifestation the Berlin Wall was fairly porous. At the row of houses on Bernauer Strasse people climbed to the upper floors and jumped through windows to the street below. The lucky ones landed on bedsheets held by members of the West Berlin fire department. One who was not so lucky, a young man named Rudolf Urban, became the first fatality of the Berlin Wall when he hit the pavement and broke his neck. Good swimmers braved the treacherous currents of the Spree before the river was effectively sealed off. Still others crawled through drainpipes. Many of the initial escapees were members of the police and military squads guarding the border. A famous picture taken on August 15 shows an East German soldier named Gonrad Schumann leaping westward over a coil of wire, gun and all. Between August 13 and the end of the month some 25,605 people made it through the barrier, largely by picking places where there were still gaps.
In response to the wave of escapes, soldiers were given orders to shoot at refugees. Because the original border guards, most of whom hailed from East Berlin, were almost as likely to join the refugees as to shoot at them, replacement guards were brought in from other parts of the country. Many came from a corner of Saxony where Western television signals did not reach; these men were thought to be especially “reliable.” On August 24, 1961, twenty-four-year-old Gunter Litfin was shot and killed while trying to swim the across the Humboldthafen on the Spree. His was the first recorded death by shooting at the Wall. Before the barrier fell in 1989 at least eighty more would-be escapees were killed in this fashion, including a young man named Peter Fechter, who on August 17, 1962, was shot while trying to scale the Wall near Checkpoint Charlie. He fell back injured on the eastern side, but rather than rescue him, GDR border police let him slowly bleed to death. This grisly scenario was observed by a group of West Berliners, who pleaded with an American officer on the scene to help the dying man. The Western military forces, however, were under strict orders not to assist escape attempts, and the officer did nothing. As Willy Brandt later noted: “This incident hit the Berliners hard and exacerbated their sense of outrage. Many voiced their disillusionment at the Americans’ inability to help a young man who was bleeding to death.”
