2. “Help Me! Why Won’t You Help Me?”

If socialism is paradise, why do they build walls to keep people IN?

I want to tell you about a wall.

Not a metaphorical wall. A real one. Made of concrete and barbed wire and guard towers with machine guns.

I want to tell you about an eighteen-year-old boy named Peter Fechter, and what happened to him on August 17, 1962.

And I want you to ask yourself a question that the socialists will never answer:

If their system is so good, why do they have to build walls to keep people from leaving?

Peter Fechter was born on January 14, 1944, in Berlin.

Think about that date for a moment. January 1944. The war was still raging. Bombs were falling on German cities. The world was on fire.

Peter grew up in the ashes. He grew up in the Weissensee district of East Berlin — which meant that when the dust settled, when the war ended, when the maps were redrawn, he found himself on the wrong side of history.

The Soviet side.

His father was a mechanical engineer. His mother was a saleswoman. He was the third of four children. He left school at fourteen and became a bricklayer — a trade in high de­mand during the reconstruction years.

He was, by all accounts, an ordinary young man in extraor­dinary circumstances.

His oldest sister had married and moved to West Berlin before the Wall went up. Before 1961, the family visited her regularly. They walked across the border like it was nothing. Because it was nothing. Because Berlin was one city, and families shouldn’t be divided by ideology.

Then came August 13, 1961.

Then came the Wall.

The Berlin Wall went up overnight.

One day, Berliners could cross from East to West. The next day, they couldn’t. Soldiers and workers laid barbed wire, stacked concrete blocks, sealed windows, blocked streets.

Families were torn apart. Husbands separated from wives. Children separated from parents. Friends who had known each other their entire lives suddenly found themselves in different countries.

And the wall wasn’t built to keep enemies out.

It was built to keep citizens in.

Let that sink in.

The socialist government of East Germany — the German Democratic Republic, they called it, and notice how tyrants always use words like “democratic” and “people’s” — had to build a wall to prevent its own people from leaving.

That tells you everything you need to know about the sys­tem.

Peter Fechter missed his sister. He missed the freedom that existed just a few hundred meters away. He missed the world he could see but couldn’t reach.

Sometime in early 1962, he started talking with a coworker named Helmut Kulbeik. They were both apprentices at the same company, working on the reconstruction of a palace on Unter den Linden boulevard.

They started planning.

They found a carpenter’s workshop near the Wall on Zim- merstrasse. From there, they could observe the border guards. They could study the death strip — that empty zone between the inner and outer walls, raked smooth so foot­prints would show, watched by guards with orders to shoot.

The plan was simple. Desperate, but simple.

Hide in the workshop. Wait for the right moment. Sprint across the death strip. Climb the two-meter wall topped with barbed wire. And freedom.

Helmut’s friend had made it a few weeks earlier. It could be done. It had been done.

On August 17, 1962, Peter and Helmut decided it was time.

It was early afternoon. A Friday. The sun was bright.

They left their worksite at lunch, telling their colleagues they were going for cigarettes. They made their way to the workshop. They found a back room with one small window – most of the others had been bricked up. The window was crisscrossed with barbed wire, but it let in light.

They could see a guard post a few hundred feet to the right. But the guards couldn’t see the area directly outside the window. A blind spot. A chance.

They planned to hide in a pile of wood shavings until evening, when dusk would provide cover. But just before 2:00 PM, they heard voices. Workers. Someone was coming.

They made a decision. The kind of decision you make when you’re eighteen and desperate and freedom is so close you can almost taste it.

They tore away the barbed wire. They ran.

Helmut went first.

He sprinted across the open ground — the death strip, where nothing grows and everything is visible. He reached the wall. He grabbed the top. He pulled himself up, scrambling over the barbed wire, tearing his clothes, not caring about anything except getting over.

He made it.

He dropped down on the Western side. Free.

Peter was right behind him.

But Peter wasn’t as fast. Or maybe he hesitated for half a sec­ond. Or maybe the guards were already aiming by the time he started running. We’ll never know exactly what happened, what fraction of a second separated freedom from death.

What we know is this:

The guards opened fire.

East German border guards Rolf Friedrich and Erich Schreiber were recent draftees. They’d been given little training. They raised their Kalashnikovs — Soviet-made as­sault rifles — and they fired.

They fired twenty-four rounds.

One of them hit Peter Fechter in the pelvis.

He was half a meter from the wall when he fell.

Half a meter. Eighteen inches. Close enough to touch free­dom with his outstretched hand.

The bullet had passed through his body. We was bleeding heavily. We collapsed in the death strip, on the Eastern side, in plain view of hundreds of witnesses on both sides of the wall.

And he began to scream.

“Helft mir doch!”

That’s German. It means: Help me!

“Helft mir doch!”

Why won’t you help me?

On the Western side, Helmut had made it over. He was safe. He was free. And he could hear his friend screaming.

A crowd began to gather. West Berliners, drawn by the gun­shots, by the screaming. Within minutes, there were dozens of people. Then hundreds. They pressed against the wall on their side, helpless, horrified.

They could hear Peter screaming.

They couldn’t reach him.

A West German reporter threw bandages over the wall. Peter was too weak to use them. He could only roll onto his side, into a fetal position, and scream.

The crowd began to shout at the guards.

“Murderers!”

“You criminals!”

“Mörder! Mörder!”

On the Eastern side, the guards did nothing.

They stood in their tower, rifles in hand, and they watched an eighteen-year-old boy bleed.

Why didn’t they help him?

Because they weren’t allowed to enter the death strip without permission. Because the system had rules. Because bureau­cracy trumped humanity. Because the wall was more impor­tant than the boy.

On the Western side, the Americans did nothing.

Checkpoint Charlie — the famous crossing point between East and West — was just a hundred meters away. American soldiers stood there. They could see what was happening. They could hear the screaming.

At 2:17 PM, a U.S. Army lieutenant phoned Major General Albert Watson, the commandant of Berlin’s American garri­son.

“Sir, a boy has been shot at the wall. He’s bleeding out. What should we do?”

Watson’s response: “Stand fast. Send a patrol but stay on our side.”

Stay on our side.

An eighteen-year-old was dying in the dirt, screaming for help, and the order was: stay on our side.

General Watson, unable to reach his own superiors through normal channels, did something extraordinary. He called the White House directly.

President John F. Kennedy was in Colorado. His top military aide, General Chester Clifton, took the call and summarized the situation:

“Mr. President, an escapee is bleeding to death at the Berlin Wall.”

Kennedy listened.

Kennedy did nothing.

Fifty minutes.

For fifty minutes, Peter Fechter lay in the death strip, bleed­ing.

Fifty minutes of screaming. Then moaning. Then silence.

Fifty minutes while the crowd on the Western side watched helplessly.

Fifty minutes while the guards on the Eastern side waited for orders.

Fifty minutes while the Americans stood at Checkpoint Charlie, a hundred meters away, paralyzed by politics and protocols.

At 2:40 PM — half an hour after he was shot — Peter stopped screaming.

He was still alive. But he was too weak to cry out anymore.

Finally, East German guards climbed down from their tower and carried him away. They loaded him into a vehicle. They took him to a hospital.

He was pronounced dead shortly after arrival.

That evening, thousands of West Berliners took to the streets.

They marched on Checkpoint Charlie. They threw rocks at the American soldiers. They screamed at the guards in the towers.

“Mörder! Mörder! Mörder!”

Murderers! Murderers! Murderers!

The next day, Das Bild — West Germany’s largest newspaper — ran a photograph of East German guards carrying Peter Fechter’s body. The headline read:

“VOPOS LET 18-YEAR-OLD BLEED TO DEATH — AS AMERICANS WATCH”

Another paper ran the same photo beneath a banner that quoted Peter’s final cries:

“Helft mir doch, helft mir doch!”

Help me. Why won’t you help me?

After Peter died, the Stasi came to his family’s apartment.

The Stasi — the East German secret police, one of the most feared organizations in the communist world. They demanded to know where Peter was. They searched the apartment for weapons, for “incriminating literature,” for any evidence of disloyalty.

They found nothing.

Finally, they hinted — obliquely, coldly — that Peter might have been shot at the Wall that afternoon.

The family was told to keep silent. They were watched for years afterward. They were ostracized, treated with suspi­cion. Their son had tried to escape, and that made them enemies of the state.

Peter’s sister Ruth later testified at a trial — decades later, af­ter the Wall fell — that participating in the legal proceedings was her first opportunity to address what had happened.

“World history,” she said, “fatally intersected with the fate of a single individual.”

Peter Fechter was not the first person to die at the Berlin Wall.

He was the twenty-seventh.

But he was the first to die so publicly. The first whose agony was witnessed by hundreds, photographed, broadcast, seared into the memory of a generation.

His death became a symbol. The American news magazine Time ran his story, and in that article, they coined a phrase that would become synonymous with the Wall itself:

“The Wall of Shame.”

Mauer der Schande.

By the time the Wall fell on November 9, 1989, at least 140 people had been killed trying to cross it.

One hundred forty human beings who wanted nothing more than to leave.

Not criminals. Not terrorists. Not invaders.

Just people who wanted to be free.

And the socialist state killed them for it.

Now I need you to think about something.

Really think.

The direction of the traffic.

At the Berlin Wall, which way were people trying to go? From East to West.

Always.

No one was trying to break INTO East Germany. No one was risking their lives to reach the socialist paradise. No one was getting shot trying to enter the German Democratic Republic.

The traffic was one-way. Out.

And that tells you everything you need to know.

The Berlin Wall was not unique.

Every socialist state has had to build walls, fences, barriers to prevent its own citizens from leaving.

Cuba: Since 1959, tens of thousands of Cubans are estimated to have died attempting to reach Florida — drowned, lost at sea, or perished from exposure. The U.S. Coast Guard alone has interdicted over 100,000 since 1982; the total death toll across six decades of flight remains uncounted. They build rafts out of inner tubes and scraps of wood. They paddle through shark-infested waters. They die of thirst, of expo­sure, of drowning. Because anything is better than staying.

North Korea: The most heavily fortified border in the world. Defectors describe land mines, electric fences, guards with orders to shoot on sight. The exact number of people killed trying to escape is unknown — the regime doesn’t keep records it might have to show someday. But defectors speak of bodies in rivers, of families executed as punishment for a member’s attempted escape.

Venezuela: 7.7 million people have fled since socialism took hold. They walk across borders with nothing. They carry children through jungles. They beg for food from strangers in Colombia and Peru and Ecuador.

The direction of the traffic is always the same.

Out.

Here’s the question the socialists can never answer:

If your system is so good, why do you have to build walls to keep people from leaving?

If socialism delivers equality and justice and prosperity, why are people risking their lives — dying — to escape it?

If capitalism is so oppressive and cruel, why do capitalist countries have to build walls to keep people from coming in?

The traffic tells the truth.

The traffic never lies.

Peter Fechter was eighteen years old.

He was a bricklayer. He missed his sister. He wanted to be free.

He died fifty minutes from freedom, screaming for help that never came.

His crime was wanting to leave.

That’s it. That’s the whole crime. Not theft. Not violence. Not treason in any meaningful sense.

He just wanted to leave.

And socialism killed him for it.

In 1997 — thirty-five years after Peter’s death, seven years after the Wall came down — two former East German guards faced trial for manslaughter.

Rolf Friedrich. Erich Schreiber. The men who pulled the triggers.

They were convicted.

But what about the men who gave the orders? What about the system that required walls and guns and guards? What about the ideology that said it was better to kill a boy than let him walk away?

That trial has never been held.

But history has rendered its verdict.

There’s a memorial now, on Zimmerstrasse, at the precise spot where Peter Fechter fell.

It’s a simple stone marker. People leave flowers sometimes.

But the real memorial is the question that hangs in the air, unanswered by every socialist who has ever lived:

If your system is so good, why do you have to shoot people to make them stay?