Peter Hohmann sprints past the guards at Brunnenstraße

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.

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.