40 Years On, Boy Shot at Berlin Wall Faces Attackers

Forty years after fleeing East Berlin, the victim of one of the most savage and poignant border clashes of the cold war yesterday told the men accused of shooting him how his bid for freedom had left him disabled for life.

Wilfried Tews, who was just 14 years old at the time of his escape, was hit eight times as he swam through a canal under the Berlin Wall in 1962.

"The injuries have never healed", he said. "No more waltzes for me."

Prosecutors at the trial of three former border guards, in Berlin, say they fired 121 times at the boy. "It was non-stop, like in a western," Mr Tews told the court. "I dived. Then I was shot in the lung and could dive no more."

Though hit in the lung, legs, collarbone and arm, he managed to drag himself on to a step on the western bank of the canal. "I lay there and was hit yet again", he recalled.

Sitting in front of the defendants and avoiding eye contact, Mr Tews choked back tears as he gave his evidence.

West Berlin border guards provided covering fire for a passerby who pulled the boy to safety. In a statement from East German records that was read to the court, a border guard who has since died said he heard shouts from the West of "Stop shooting! You are Germans too, aren't you?"

An East German border guard, the 21-year-old Peter Göring, died in the firefight and the communist authorities turned him into a secular martyr. Schools, streets and barracks were named after him.

Hundreds of former East German border guards and officials have been convicted since 1990 for shootings at the former border. Most have received suspended sentences.

Mr Tews testified that he had left his parents' home in the city of Erfurt several weeks earlier and headed to Berlin, after falling foul of the authorities for refusing to distribute leaflets for a communist youth organisation.

He scouted out possible escape routes and fled via a cemetery in north Berlin.

Prosecutors opened the Tews case in 1994, using a law passed after German reunification that waives the statute of limitations for shootings by border guards. Two of the defendants have remained silent in court, but the third, 65-year-old Werner Görlich, said earlier in the trial that he had fired only warning shots.

Mr Tews, who now lives in Schleswig-Holstein where he works as a homeopathic doctor, yesterday brushed aside this version.

"I never heard any warning shots," he said.

If convicted, the defendants face up to 10 years in prison. A verdict is expected in June.