page_title: Ida Siekmann
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Ida Siekmann / Biography
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Berliner Mauer: Bernauer Straße 48 mit dem Mahnmal für Ida Siekmann. English: Berlin Wall: Bernauer Straße 48 with the Ida Siekmann memorial.
context_page_description: Ida Siekmann was a German nurse who became the first known person to die at the Berlin Wall, only nine days after the beginning of its construction.
context_section_description: Ida Siekmann was born on 23 August, 1902, in Gorken near Marienwerder, West Prussia in the German Empire (now Górki, Kwidzyn County, Poland). She had moved to Berlin where she worked as a nurse, and by August 1961 was already a widow, although it is not known when she was widowed. Siekmann lived at Bernauer Straße 48 in the district of Mitte, and had a sister, Martha L., who lived only a few blocks away on Lortzingstraße. 
  After World War II, Berlin was divided into four Allied sectors, and while the street and the sidewalk of the Bernauer Straße lay in the French sector of West Berlin, the frontage of the buildings on the southern side lay in the Soviet sector of East Berlin. Siekmann regularly crossed the border between the French and Soviet sectors just by leaving her house. Siekmann's sister at Lortzingstraße was located in the French sector of West Berlin.
caption: Bernauer Straße 48 (and 47c to the far right) in June 1965. Annotations (on the Wikimedia Commons version of this page) show Ida Siekmann's front door and the window that she jumped from, three floors above the ground floor.
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