Konrad Schumann’s famous “Leap into Freedom”

Konrad Schumann’s famous “Leap into Freedom” on August 15th, 1961.

Schumann was a 19-year-old East German border guard assigned to the corner of Bernauer Straße and Ruppiner Straße in Berlin. Construction of the Berlin Wall had begun two days earlier, when East Germany sealed the border with barbed wire and temporary barriers to stop mass emigration to the West by Germans trying to flee communism. While on duty, Schumann grew uneasy watching the fortifications take shape and hearing West Berliners urge him to cross.

He stamped down a section of the wire, signaled his intention, took a short running start, leapt over the barrier, dropped his PPSh-41 submachine gun and jumped into a waiting West Berlin police van. The West German photographer Peter Leibing captured the exact moment of the jump in the iconic photo later titled Leap into Freedom. Schumann settled in Bavaria and worked as a machine operator but felt guilt that his family in the DDR was being persecuted due to his escape.

The secret police Stasi forced his family members to write him letters scolding him for his escape and trying to lure him back to East Germany to take his punishment as a man. He said that he always feared that Stasi would get to him in West Germany and that that he only really felt free after communism fell in 1989.

He then traveled to what had been East Germany to reunite his family but was heartbroken by the fact that some family members still considered him to be a traitor that had brought shame and persecution on the family.

He died in 1998 at the age of 56, hanging himself in the orchard behind his house in Bavaria.