by Deborah Cole
BERLIN, Aug 12 (AFP) - Dozens more people than originally thought died trying to escape communist East Germany, according to new research by a prominent victims group presented Thursday.
The "August 13 Working Group," named for the day the Stalinist state closed the border to West Berlin in 1961 to halt a mass exodus, unveiled fresh findings about those shot by border guards or otherwise killed trying to flee.
"(The communists) always said 'Never again should a mother cry, never again should a worker die as a soldier'," said Juergen Litfin, whose brother Guenter was shot and killed in 1961 trying to swim across Berlin's Spree river to freedom.
"They were armed to the teeth."
Nearly 15 years after the Berlin Wall collapsed, historians say the true number of border victims may never be known.
But information unearthed in the last year by the Working Group revealed a new total of 1,065, up from the 2003 estimate of 1,008 people killed.
The figure covers deaths between the end of World War II in 1945 when the communists claimed control of what was to become East Germany and the fall of the Wall on November 9, 1989.
Alexandra Hildebrandt of the Working Group said she had decided to include on the list East German border guards who were shot by dissidents trying to escape, killed by fellow soldiers, or who had committed suicide in response to orders to shoot their compatriots.
"The list has for the first time not just victims in the traditional sense but also East German border guards who fell at the Wall," she told reporters.
From the 1950s until the Wall's construction, some 2.5 million people had quit communist East Germany out of a population of some 19 million in 1947, prompting the country to take the extraordinary measure of sealing the border.
The organization's press conference falls each year on the eve of the anniversary of the construction of the Wall, when East Germans woke up to find themselves prisoners of their own country.
Of the total, the organization now believes that 687 people were killed after the despised 43-kilometer-long (27-mile-long) barrier went up that summer day.
It estimates that 227 died in Berlin, 190 after the construction of the Wall. The others were East Germans who perished at the Iron Curtain separating the communist bloc from Western Europe or who were captured after fleeing.
The German government has put the official number of East German border deaths at 421 while state prosecutors list 270 proven killings.
The Working Group, however, uses a much broader definition of deaths that can be linked to the communist border regime.
East German dissidents killed at other sites in the Soviet bloc including Hungary's border with Austria or the Bulgarian frontier with Greece also count as victims of the "German Democratic Republic," as East Germany was known under the communists, Hildebrandt said.
Its list of the dead includes not only those fired on by border guards, many of whom have been tried and received light sentences in reunified Germany, but also heart attacks at checkpoints, gun accidents and drownings in the Baltic Sea of people trying to escape.
The Working Group, based next to the former US-controlled Checkpoint Charlie border crossing at a Berlin Wall museum, adds new names of victims it uncovers in its research each year but also removes names of people who it discovers died under normal circumstances.
The organization said it expected the count to continue to rise in the coming years as official archives and autopsy records provide new evidence.