Chris Gueffroy (21 June 1968 – 6 February 1989) was the last person to be shot and the second-last to die in an escape attempt while trying to escape from East Berlin to West Berlin across the Berlin Wall. Biography Chris Gueffroy was born in Pasewalk, Bezirk Neubrandenburg (present-day Mecklenburg-Vorpommern) on 21 June 1968. He had an older brother, Stefan Gueffroy. He moved to Schwedt in 1970, the same year that his mother, Karin Gueffroy, and his father, Allois Gueffroy, divorced. Three years later, when he was five years old, he moved to Berlin with his mother and his brother. When he was in the third grade, he was sent to the youth sports school SC Dynamo Berlin, based on his gymnastic talent. After he finished school he refused to pursue an officer’s career track in the National People’s Army and was consequently denied the right to study at university, ending his dream of becoming an actor or a pilot. In September 1985 he began an apprenticeship in the Schönefeld airport restaurant near Berlin after which he worked in a number of different restaurants. As a waiter, his income was better than average, and he had a strong degree of freedom, but he was disgusted by the widespread corruption in the restaurant business. His friend Christian Gaudian, whom he had met at gastronomy school, shared his feelings. At twenty, he found it increasingly unbearable to think that he would remain locked up with the knowledge that it would always be this way and that he would never have the freedom to decide for himself where he wanted to live. In mid-January 1989, upon learning that he was to be conscripted into the East German army the following May, he and Gaudian decided to leave East Germany. Death Gueffroy and Gaudian based their decision to try to flee over the wall on mistaken beliefs that the Schießbefehl, the standing order to shoot anyone who attempted to cross the wall, had been lifted (it had not), and that the Swedish prime minister Ingvar Carlsson was to pay a state visit to East Berlin (he had already left when they attempted their escape). Their attempted escape from East Berlin to West Berlin, along the Britz district canal would take place on the night of 5–6 February 1989, about two kilometres (1¼ miles) from what would be Gueffroy's last residence on Südostallee 218, Johannisthal,