Elke and Dieter Weckeiser shot opposite the Reichstag

Dieter Weckeiser, born in 1943 in East Prussia, had grown up as a refugee and later lived in Warendorf in West Germany before moving to the GDR in 1962. In 1966 he married Elke Möbis, a kitchen assistant in Fürstenwalde. In 1967 he told his mother, whom he met in East Berlin, that he wanted to come 'home' to the West.

On the evening of 18 February 1968, with temperatures around freezing, the couple tried to cross in the city centre on the Spree, diagonally opposite the Reichstag, one of the most heavily guarded sections. They would have had to get through barbed wire and a dog run, climb a three-metre mesh fence, swim the icy river and scale the walled bank on the far side.

At about 11 p.m., as they crawled through the first barbed-wire fence, they were spotted from a watchtower and fired on without challenge. Seventeen shots were fired. Elke Weckeiser was hit in the chest and thigh; Dieter Weckeiser was shot through the head.

Elke Weckeiser died in the People's Police hospital that night; her husband died the following day despite emergency surgery. The Stasi told Dieter Weckeiser's former wife that the couple had died in a road accident in a stolen car, and Dieter Weckeiser's mother only learned a year later, through a pastor, that her son had died trying to flee.

In 1997 the marksman was given a suspended sentence of one year and nine months for manslaughter; most of the officers and soldiers questioned had said the use of firearms was objectively unnecessary.