Two days after the erection of the barriers, 18-year-old East German police officer Conrad Schumann was assigned to guard a section at the corner of Bernauer Strasse and Ruppiner Strasse.

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.