It was in August of 1961 and the decision had been made to seal off East Berlin to stop the haemorrhaging of people into the West.
This was before the wall was built and the boundry was guarded by barbed wire and manned by soldiers.
Corporal Conrad Schumann, just nineteen years old and fresh up to Berlin from his village in Saxony, stood guard on the Eastern side.
There he was booed and jeered by the West Berliners who taunted him saying “Come on, Jump over”.

A young photographer who had trained in sport and knew how to take a photograph of a horse in mid flight over a fence, got a hunch that he just might jump and kept his lens fixed on Conrad for an hour.

The Corporal at last decided to move, threw away his cigarette and leaped into the West casting aside his gun as he jumped.
This became one of the most iconic photographas of the Berlin Wall.

The confused young corporal was treated as a hero in the West and thrived there.
He married a western German girl and moved to Bavaria where he raised a family and worked for twenty years in the Audi factory there.

Then in 1989 the wall came down and Conrad decided to return for the first time to Saxony and to the village there where he was raised.
He discovered there, to his horror, that the iconic hero in the West was the iconic traitor in the East where his photograph had been displayed with him depicted as a tool of the imperialists.

Conrad returned to Bavaria and hung himself in his back garden.
A small sad footnote to the Berlin Wall.