The shooting took place around noon on Sunday, September 5, 1971, at the Kreuzberg district border in the German Democratic Republic (formerly East Germany). Border guards pulled back a fugitive who had been shot to death after a failed escape attempt.

　　The shooting took place around noon on Sunday, September 5, 1971, at the Kreuzberg district border in the German Democratic Republic (formerly East Germany). Border guards pulled back a fugitive who had been shot to death after a failed escape attempt. The insistence of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) state on unrestricted control of the East German population was most clearly and brutally demonstrated in the border system. Those who fled the country without the rare permission of the GDR authorities risked their health and lives.

　 When the Berlin Wall was erected on August 13, 1961, the East German authorities separated the free West Berlin from the controlled areas by a wall. According to official figures, some 1,245 East German citizens had been shot dead while attempting to cross the border by 1989. Of those, about 136 had been killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall by 1989; by the time Erich Honecker said in 1989 that the Berlin Wall would still exist 50 or even 100 years later, at least 130 people had already been killed by border patrol gunfire. The first victim was a woman, Ida Siegmann, who, in the early morning hours of August 22, 1961, attempted to escape, jumped from the window of her fourth-floor apartment, fell to the sidewalk, and died on her way to Lazarus Hospital from serious injuries. More recently, 20-year-old Chris Geffroy was shot and killed in February 1989, nine months before the wall fell. He was the last victim of the German border wall, which fell on the night of November 9, 1989, opening the border between East and West Germany.

　Many people fled to the West through the East German barrier. The East German authorities took steps to strengthen the border. Watchtowers were erected every 10 meters along the wall. East German border patrol soldiers were given cameras and ordered to record, meter by meter, the areas where the border wall was to be built. The approximately 1,200 negatives that were taken were stored in the military archives in Potsdam and were accidentally discovered in a cardboard box. Soldiers on border patrol were severely punished for committing minor crimes. In October 1973, the East German government issued a shoot-to-kill order to the border guards handling defectors to West Germany. In the event of a successful escape and crossing the border into West Germany, border guards who failed to prevent border violations and desertion from the GDR were subject to disciplinary action.