http://beltwayblips.dailyradar.com/story/gallup_majority_thinks_torture_justified_but_wants/
1989: East Germany, the Wall and torture.
A quick search on the internet, one discovers: “The last person to be shot dead at the Wall was Chris Güffroy, a young East Berliner who decided to try his luck at escaping on 5 February 1989, months before the Wall finally fell. He had wrongly assumed the East German regime had suspended its order to shoot would-be escapers on sight. Yet Chris Güffroy was not the Wall's final victim. Four weeks later, 33-year-old Winfried Freudenberg died fleeing East Berlin in a gas-filled balloon.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/revealed-tragic-victims-of-the-berlin-wall-411504.html
“The ‘August 13 Working Group’, named for the day the Communist state closed the border in 1961 to halt a mass exodus to the West” has claimed that over 1100 people died trying to cross over from East to West Germany illegally.
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,1673538,00.html
On the other hand, other German researchers in Berlin claim that no more than 125 to 130 were killed there.
However, due to the secretiveness of the East German and other communist regimes of the Cold War era, the real numbers of those who hated or feared the totalitarian state enough to flee for their lives (or to give their lives) in fleeing their homeland may never be known.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/3323564/Torture-memoirs-revive-horrors-of-communism.html
Most of those captured trying to flee had to spend several years in jail, and on many occasion people were certainly known to have been tortured.
http://www.aidan.co.uk/article_gdr_border_tour.htm
I recall one cold winter night approaching the very Wall between the Reichstag and the Spree River in Berlin in the late 1988, one year before the last escapee, Chris Güffroy, was shot meters from there.
I walked up to the Wall and touched it.
A few seconds later an Eastern German border guard yelled at me to get back.
Apparently, near the Brandenburg Gate, two-meters on the West side of the border there was considered East German property—as was the Wall itself.
http://eeuropeanhistory.suite101.com/article.cfm/torture_in_east_european_history
Torture has far too often been a historical reality in East European history.
However, even modern German leaders in 2005 considered keeping information gathered through torture: http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,391493,00.html
On the other hand, torture is illegal in Germany nowadays.
How about in the USA?
2009: USA-Mexican Wall and USA on Torture
Over the last decade-and-a-half in the USA, torture and wall-building have suddenly caught on among the political elite.
1989: East Germany, the Wall and torture.
A quick search on the internet, one discovers: “The last person to be shot dead at the Wall was Chris Güffroy, a young East Berliner who decided to try his luck at escaping on 5 February 1989, months before the Wall finally fell. He had wrongly assumed the East German regime had suspended its order to shoot would-be escapers on sight. Yet Chris Güffroy was not the Wall's final victim. Four weeks later, 33-year-old Winfried Freudenberg died fleeing East Berlin in a gas-filled balloon.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/revealed-tragic-victims-of-the-berlin-wall-411504.html
“The ‘August 13 Working Group’, named for the day the Communist state closed the border in 1961 to halt a mass exodus to the West” has claimed that over 1100 people died trying to cross over from East to West Germany illegally.
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,1673538,00.html
However, due to the secretiveness of the East German and other communist regimes of the Cold War era, the real numbers of those who hated or feared the totalitarian state enough to flee for their lives (or to give their lives) in fleeing their homeland may never be known.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/3323564/Torture-memoirs-revive-horrors-of-communism.html
Most of those captured trying to flee had to spend several years in jail, and on many occasion people were certainly known to have been tortured.
http://www.aidan.co.uk/article_gdr_border_tour.htm
I recall one cold winter night approaching the very Wall between the Reichstag and the Spree River in Berlin in the late 1988, one year before the last escapee, Chris Güffroy, was shot meters from there.
I walked up to the Wall and touched it.
A few seconds later an Eastern German border guard yelled at me to get back.
Apparently, near the Brandenburg Gate, two-meters on the West side of the border there was considered East German property—as was the Wall itself.
http://eeuropeanhistory.suite101.com/article.cfm/torture_in_east_european_history
Torture has far too often been a historical reality in East European history.
However, even modern German leaders in 2005 considered keeping information gathered through torture: http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,391493,00.html
On the other hand, torture is illegal in Germany nowadays.
How about in the USA?
2009: USA-Mexican Wall and USA on Torture
Over the last decade-and-a-half in the USA, torture and wall-building have suddenly caught on among the political elite.
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