When the Berlin Wall was still just a coil of barbed wire, 18-year-old Conrad Schumann risked everything to take a leap of faith.

Conrad Schumann heard them. The 19-year-old was on the front line, a border guard building a border that was getting higher with every passing hour. So on the spur of the moment, ...

Hans Conrad Schumann, a former East German soldier immortalized in a photograph as he leaped across a barbed-wire fence to freedom in West Berlin, hanged himself Saturday. He was 56.

When 18-year-old border guard Conrad Schumann jumped the barbed wire fence he was guarding he became the first defector from East Germany and a symbol of the Cold War.

Conrad Schumann defects (Wikimedia) A few weeks ago, I was standing one evening somewhere near Checkpoint Charlie. On the other side of the Wall, three soldiers were sitting on a block of concrete.