The Road to the Wall

The man described in the film around the 3:50 mark as "Berndt Ludens" who was shot after swimming across the Spree river on August 13 is not as described. The man pictured was Gunther Litfin, an East German who worked in West Berlin and who was planning to move permanently into the western sectors of the city when the Wall came up. His escape attempt occurred on August 26, 1961, and he did not complete the swim. He was halted in the center of the river by transportation officers on a bridge. When he raised his hands in surrender, they fired on him and killed him. He was the second person to die in an escape attempt and the first to die by gunfire (the first death was a woman who fell from a window while trying to climb down a building on the east-west border on August 22).

There was a man named Bernd Lunser who died on October 4 of that year in an escape attempt, but the circumstances of that death do not match up with what is presented (Lunser died falling from a roof at the border while he was struggling with a Vopo trying to drag him back to East Germany).