Berlin Wall Escapes1961–1989

14 August 1961 · Over the wall · Bernauer Straße

Peter Hohmann sprints past the guards at Brunnenstraße

A waiter who had gone back East on the night the border closed tried the Sophien cemetery the next day, then slipped past the first soldiers in Brunnenstraße and ran when the guard holding his identity card chased another refugee.

Sunny street corner with a grass strip and path in front, low apartment buildings behind, and on the right a white gable wall labelled 'Bernauer Straße' with a large black-and-white mural and a row of photo panels.
The corner of Bernauer Straße and Brunnenstraße in April 2022, now part of the Berlin Wall Memorial Photo: Francesco Adami. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Peter Hohmann grew up in Hohenschönhausen with his sister Ingeborg Hiekel. He crossed the border daily to work as a waiter at the Hotel am Zoo on the Kurfürstendamm. On the night of 12–13 August 1961, after hearing in a Kantstraße bar that the border was being closed, he buried his tips, 60 West marks, in the Tiergarten, showed his GDR identity card at the Brandenburg Gate and went back to the East, a decision he soon regretted.

The next day he and his sister tried to escape over the wall of the Sophien cemetery on Bernauer Straße, carrying a flowerpot as if to visit a grave, but the cemetery was full of soldiers and armed factory militia. They turned away towards the corner of Brunnenstraße and Bernauer Straße, where the border ran.

Close-up of a pavement: a double row of cobblestones set between grey paving slabs, with a metal plate in the row reading 'Berliner Mauer 1961 - 1989'.
A double row of cobbles with a plate reading 'Berliner Mauer 1961–1989' marks the line of the Wall across Brunnenstraße (2018) Photo: Andrzej Otrębski. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

In Brunnenstraße Hohmann slipped past the first soldiers. One of them was checking his identity card and about to send him back when another refugee started running from the middle of the street. All the soldiers ran after that person, including the one holding Hohmann's card, and Hohmann sprinted the 80 to 100 metres to the West.

His sister, left behind, feared he had been caught, until a friend from West Berlin brought her his greetings a few hours later. She escaped a few days later with a false identity card.

Sources

  1. Das verbuddelte Trinkgeld – rbb eyewitness video (2011)rbb – Geschichte der Berliner Mauer (berlin-mauer.de)
  2. Das verbuddelte Trinkgeld – subtitles of the rbb eyewitness videorbb – Geschichte der Berliner Mauer (berlin-mauer.de)

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