Conrad Schumann leapt over the nascent Berlin Wall on August 15, 1961 because he didn't want to "live enclosed" in East Germany — a powerful moment famously captured by a nearby photographer.

By August 1961, tensions were high in Berlin. The city had been cut in two by the creation of West Germany and East Germany and, that summer, East Germany began to build a wall to stop its people from pouring into the West. But just days into the construction of the Berlin Wall, a young East German soldier named Hans Conrad Schumann leapt over it.

Schumann hadn’t thought deeply about his decision, and he didn’t expect that it would be recorded. As it so happened, a photographer named Peter Leibing captured the exact moment that Schumann jumped over a piece of barbed wire into West Germany, and the r

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