How many escaped, and how many we document
The West Berlin police counted at least 5,075 people who escaped through the border barriers into West Berlin between 13 August 1961 and the end of 1989 (police statistics via the Chronik der Mauer). The records on this site name or describe 925 of them: about 18 %. The rest are not lost, but most of them survive only as a line in a police report or a Stasi file, and few of those are online.
This page compares the two counts year by year, so you can see where the record is thin. It counts people, not escapes: one tunnel can hold 57 people. We count the people in successful and partly successful escapes, as the police did.
- Police count
- Documented on this site
- 1962510 of 2,305
- 196385 of 640
- 196430 of 297
- 196588 of 259
- 196618 of 102
- 196714 of 87
- 19681 of 46
- 196910 of 46
- 19703 of 62
- 19718 of 45
- 197215 of 49
- 197312 of 95
- 19744 of 55
- 19754 of 46
- 197612 of 61
- 19775 of 159
- 197812 of 146
- 19797 of 93
- 198014 of 88
- 19814 of 66
- 19823 of 44
- 19832 of 38
- 19846 of 46
- 19851 of 24
- 19865 of 10
- 198722 (no police figure)
- 19887 (no police figure)
- 198921 of 32
Police count: West Berlin police statistics, via the Chronik der Mauer. The yearly rows add up to 4,941; the total of 5,075 runs to the end of 1989. After 13 August 1989 this site documents 2 more. This site: the sum of the people who got through in each record, computed on every build.
Where the gap is
The record is thinnest at the start. In the first year of the Wall the police counted 2,305 people; this site documents 510. Of the 4,047 people in the yearly police rows whom this site does not yet document, 2,788 escaped before 13 August 1965, in the years when most people got through.
How we are closing it
Most of the missing escapes are known only from a line in a report: a date, a place, a number, how they crossed. We publish those too, as short “incident” records that say no more than the report does (16 so far). We are reading the West Berlin police reports and the Stasi files that are online, and asking the archives that hold the rest for access. Every record follows the rules on Sources and method, and all of them are in the open data.