Urban street grey sky portrait memorial Berlin Wall casualty Ida Siekmann, side grassy verge at location of Bernauer Strasse 48
Memorial, at the location of Bernauer Strasse 48, to 58 year old Ida Siekmann, the first casualty of the Berlin Wall. The information panel, in French, German, English and Russian, reads: 'On 22 August 1961, 58 year-old Ida Siekmann tried to flee to West Berlin from her home at 48 Bernauer Strasse. As the door to her house had been barricaded the day before, she jumped from the window of her 3rd-floor flat onto the pavement, which belonged to West Berlin. She suffered fatal injuries in the process. The windows to her house- like all the windows along the east Berlin side of Bernauer Strasse - were later bricked up. After the inhabitants had been forced to leave their homes, the houses were demolished. The ground floor, which was left standing, served for many years as the Sperrmauer (front wall). Nowadays, the Berlin Wall Memorial and the Mauerpark (Wall Park), on the former border strip, serve as reminders of the time the city was divided.' The photographs (top to bottom) show the flats (4/10/1961); bricked up windows (8/10/1961); the original 1967 pavement memorial to Ida Siekmann; the Sperrmauer (15/2/1967). The top of the memorial lists the Wall statistics: length km East Berlin/West Berlin; km GDR/West Berlin; height m; 136 dead along the Berlin Wall 1961-1989.
Size: 3648px × 5471px
Location: Ida Siekmann Memorial, Berlin Wall, Bernauer Strasse at Meuerpark, Berlin, Germany
Photo credit: © robert harrison / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: 1960s, berlin, bernauer, cars, casualty, cold, english, french, german, germany, grey, history, ida, information, language, memorial, monochrome, morning, multi-lingual, panel, photographs, portrait, roadside, russian, siekmann, sky, strasse, street, urban, vehicles, wall, war
