This Day in History: 1961-08-15

Konrad Schumann — An East German border guard — vaults over the Berlin Wall and into iconic Cold War history on this day in 1961. The stunning moment was caught on film by  Peter Leibing, a photographer with Contiepress. As a new border guard, Schumann had been  appalled at the way the Soviet controlled East Germans were setting up barriers that made Berlin look like a concentration camp.  He whispered to a West German that he was going to jump, and photographers and police were on hand were there when he did. This angered some East Germans and even Schumann’s family, who thought he had given the Americans and their allies a propaganda coup. People in the West saw it as an act that revealed the human need for freedom and fight against repression in the Soviet Union. Still,  the weight of history was too much for Schumann, who took his own life in 1998. In May 2011, the photograph of Schumann’s “Leap Into Freedom” was inducted into the UNESCO Memory of the World programme as part of a collection of documents on the fall of the Berlin Wall.