A Charité orderly under 102 shots at the Gartenstraße
A woman who worked as an orderly at the Charité climbed the rear fence by the Nordbahnhof; guards fired 102 shots and arrested her about three metres from the wall. The Stasi recorded her statement that she had wanted to be shot.
At about 5 a.m. on 5 June 1973 a woman born in 1934, an orderly in the intensive-care ward of the Charité's first surgical clinic, entered the border area from the forecourt of the Nordbahnhof near the Humboldt University refectory. She climbed the rear fence, crawled under the signal fence and set it off.
Guards on the Gartenstraße tower, 65 metres away, called on her to stop. When she ran on towards the wall, about 25 metres away, they opened fire: 11 shots from the Gartenstraße tower and 91 from the Liesenstraße tower. When the firing stopped she moved up and down about three metres from the wall, apparently looking for a way over, until guards seized her and carried her to a vehicle; the report says she had a kitchen knife and fell over a heap of gravel.
Residents on the West Berlin side watched, and West Berlin police, customs and French soldiers came to the spot. The Stasi report rejects West Berlin and West German press reports that she was mistreated. It says she told investigators she had entered the border area intending to be shot, after the death of her husband in 1972 and her daughter's imprisonment in May 1973.
Sources
Whose account is this? Told from a GDR record only: documents of the GDR’s police, Stasi or border troops. No other account of the event is cited.
GDR records
- Information Nr. 516/73 über die Verhinderung eines ungesetzlichen Grenzübertritts an der Staatsgrenze DDR – Berlin (West) am 5. Juni 1973DDR im Blick (Stasi-Unterlagen-Archiv)
Facts checked against the sources: November 2026
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Cite this page
Berlin Experiences, “A Charité orderly under 102 shots at the Gartenstraße”, Berlin Wall Escapes, 2026, https://berlinwallescapes.com/escapes/charite-orderly-102-shots-gartenstrasse-1973/ (accessed [date]).
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