This man ESCAPED East Germany by leaping over the barbed wire.
On 15 August 1961, the 19-year-old Conrad Schumann was assigned to guard the Berlin Wall's construction at Ruppiner Strasse and Bernauer Strasse. Schumann became disillusioned by his role after witnessing heartbreaking scenes of families being separated.
During a protest, he took advantage of the chaos and jumped over the wire, a moment famously captured in the photo "Leap into Freedom."
After escaping to West Germany, he settled, got married, and worked at a winery and later at an Audi car factory for almost thirty years.
However, this story has a dark ending and on 20 June 1998, suffering from depression, Schumann would hang himself.
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.
