Michael Kollender – a soldier's flight from guard duty

Michael Kollender, born on 19 February 1945, grew up in a Catholic family in Oberlungwitz in Saxony and worked as a tractor driver. Called up in November 1965, he was trained as a gunner in an anti-aircraft missile regiment. He had told his younger brother he would cross into West Berlin if he got the chance.

On the night of 24–25 April 1966 he was guarding his unit's equipment at the former Henschel works in Johannisthal. He left his post in uniform with his loaded submachine gun, ran across the former Johannisthal airfield and got over the rear fence.

At about 3.45 a.m. a flare from the Wredebrücke tower revealed him to four guards 100–200 metres away. They pursued him, firing burst after burst. He was crawling across the control strip with only the triple barbed-wire fence left before the canal bank, which belonged to West Berlin.

The guards fired 109 rounds. Kollender was shot twice through the head and suffered many other wounds; he had not fired a single shot. He lay untreated in the strip for half an hour before being loaded, out of view of the West, into an ambulance, and died in the People's Police hospital.

In the 1990s one guard was acquitted by the Berlin regional court and the other, first convicted, by the Federal Court of Justice, which held that shooting a deserter was excused under GDR military law, a ruling the Chronik der Mauer strongly criticises.