While Kennedy was trying to decide how to respond to Brandt, many Berliners were in fact electing to flee, though still from East to West. In its earliest manifestation the Berlin Wall was fairly porous. At the row of houses on Bernauer Strasse people climbed to the upper floors and jumped through windows to the street below. The lucky ones landed on bedsheets held by members of the West Berlin fire department. One who was not so lucky, a young man named Rudolf Urban, became the first fatality of the Berlin Wall when he hit the pavement and broke his neck. Good swimmers braved the treacherous currents of the Spree before the river was effectively sealed off. Still others crawled through drainpipes. Many of the initial escapees were members of the police and military squads guarding the border. A famous picture taken on August 15 shows an East German soldier named Gonrad Schumann leaping westward over a coil of wire, gun and all. Between August 13 and the end of the month some 25,605 people made it through the barrier, largely by picking places where there were still gaps.
In response to the wave of escapes, soldiers were given orders to shoot at refugees. Because the original border guards, most of whom hailed from East Berlin, were almost as likely to join the refugees as to shoot at them, replacement guards were brought in from other parts of the country. Many came from a corner of Saxony where Western television signals did not reach; these men were thought to be especially “reliable.” On August 24, 1961, twenty-four-year-old Gunter Litfin was shot and killed while trying to swim the across the Humboldthafen on the Spree. His was the first recorded death by shooting at the Wall. Before the barrier fell in 1989 at least eighty more would-be escapees were killed in this fashion, including a young man named Peter Fechter, who on August 17, 1962, was shot while trying to scale the Wall near Checkpoint Charlie. He fell back injured on the eastern side, but rather than rescue him, GDR border police let him slowly bleed to death. This grisly scenario was observed by a group of West Berliners, who pleaded with an American officer on the scene to help the dying man. The Western military forces, however, were under strict orders not to assist escape attempts, and the officer did nothing. As Willy Brandt later noted: “This incident hit the Berliners hard and exacerbated their sense of outrage. Many voiced their disillusionment at the Americans’ inability to help a young man who was bleeding to death.”
As the Berlin Wall (called by the GDR regime the “Antifascist Protective Barrier”) became increasingly difficult to pierce, the escape attempts dropped off in number while becoming more inventive in method. Over the twenty-nine years of the Wall’s existence, folks burrowed under it, ballooned over it, slipped through it in hidden compartments in cars, smashed through it in trucks, dove under it in scuba gear, bamboozled their way through it disguised as Soviet officers, and passed through it enclosed in coffins. The most ambitious escape method was tunneling: in all there were twenty-eight different tunnels bored under the Berlin Wall, eighteen of them failures. A total of ninety-seven refugees escaped in this fashion; three were killed and three wounded. In April 1964 a West German pharmacy student named Wolfgang Fuchs (known as “Tunnel-Fuchs”), along with some colleagues from the Free University, began digging a 150-meter long tunnel from Bernauer Strasse in the West to an abandoned house in Strelitzer Strasse in the East. When the work was completed in October 1964, twenty-three men, thirty-one women, and three children fled through it to the West. The oldest escapee was seventy, the youngest three. “Hell isn’t really filled with wild animals,” observed the three year old upon emerging. More refugees might have escaped through this tunnel had not East German border guards found the opening after three days and closed it off. By the time the Wall finally came down, the West Berlin police had recorded 5,043 successful escapes and about as many known failures. If, as the poet Robert Frost wrote, neither man nor nature loves a wall, no wall in history has been less loved than the one that divided Berlin.
On August 19, the day of the first fatality at the Berlin Wall, Vice President Lyndon Johnson and General Lucius Clay, hero of the Berlin Airlift, arrived in West Berlin with orders from Kennedy to do their best to restore the morale of the West Berliners. On their way to Berlin they had stopped in Bonn as a courtesy to Chancellor Adenauer. At the airport Adenauer pointed out to Johnson an old woman carrying a sign saying “Deeds, Not Words!” With her, said der Alte, he’d just as soon have neither. Johnson had not been enthusiastic about his Berlin assignment, fearing it might be dangerous, but when he arrived in the city to tumultuous applause he quickly forgot his fears and plunged into the crowds, pressing flesh, kissing babies, and passing out ballpoint pens as if he were on a campaign swing through Texas. His ecstatic welcome, of course, was a sign of the Berliners’ desperate need for reassurance in this perilous moment.
That evening Johnson delivered a speech to a huge crowd assembled in front of the Schöneberg Rathaus. Paraphrasing a line from the Declaration of Independence, he intoned: “To the survival and to the creative future of this city we Americans have pledged, in effect, what our ancestors pledged in forming the United States—‘our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.’ The President wants you to know and I want you to know that the pledge he has given to the freedom of West Berlin and to the rights of Western access to Berlin is firm. . . . This island does not stand alone.” These words were greeted with wild applause, though few West Berliners could have been very happy about the prospect of living on an “island” whose borders consisted not of sandy beaches but of an ugly wall. Their unsettling situation was best summed up by the Hungarian composer, Gyorgy Ligeti, who defined West Berlin as “a surrealist cage: those inside are free.”
In addition to delivering his speech, Johnson, along with Brandt, personally welcomed a 1,500-man combat unit that Kennedy had dispatched from West Germany as another gesture of Allied support for Berlin. The convoy had passed through East Germany without incident, which is fortunate, since the commander had not been told how to respond in the event of trouble. Johnson also paid visits to the American garrison and to the Marienfelde Reception Center. He had intended to visit the Wall but never made it. Instead, he did some last-minute shopping, which was difficult since all the stores were closed. Wanting some shoes just like the ones Brandt was wearing, he insisted that the mayor contact the store owner and have the desired items delivered to his hotel suite.
When Johnson flew back to Washington, General Clay stayed behind as Kennedy’s personal representative in the city. His presence was meant to demonstrate America’s resolve to protect West Berlin. Actually, his presence turned out to be almost too demonstrative. Clay was determined to show that the U.S. could still exercise its rights in Berlin despite the new wall. In late October 1961, when the East Germans demanded that American officials show their passports in order to enter East Berlin, Clay sent armed jeeps through Checkpoint Charlie with orders to display nothing but their firepower. On the evening of October 24, U.S. mission chief Allan Lightner was denied entry into East Berlin for not showing his passport. Clay dispatched troops to escort Lightner across the border. “If the Vopos had started shooting,” Lightner later wrote, “we would have had to kill all of them. . . . All hell would have broken loose.”