One of the early legal battles involved Erich Honecker, the former GDR dictator who had been instrumental in building the Berlin Wall and devising the measures to prevent escapes over the inner-German border. At first it did not look like Honecker would have to stand trial at all. On March 13, 1991, he had managed to fly to Moscow with Soviet assistance to avoid facing the charges that German prosecutors were drawing up against him. Bonn officially protested Russia’s role in spiriting its old minion out of Germany, but Chancellor Kohl had undoubtedly known of Honecker’s impending flight and was probably not sorry to see him go: after all, it could be highly embarrassing to try a leader whom the chancellor had personally welcomed in Bonn. By the spring of 1992, however, Kohl’s government decided that a Honecker trial could be a useful way to show eastern Germans that there were no grounds for their growing Ostalgie. Reminded of Honecker’s villainy, they might also be less inclined to condemn Kohl for failing to transform eastern Germany into a “blooming landscape.” The new Russian government of Boris Yeltsin, anxious to shake off reminders of its own communist past, and hoping for additional loans from Bonn, proved willing to return Honecker to the Federal Republic. Thus in late 1992 he was flown back to Berlin and clamped in Moabit Prison, the same jail in which the Nazis had held him in the 1930s. While many Ossis were glad to see him behind bars awaiting trial, there was considerable questioning, in both east and west, about the legitimacy of his arrest. To some, the treatment of Honecker looked more like vengeance than justice. Certainly he could no longer do any harm to anyone, save perhaps to those who had to listen to him endlessly protest his right to a tranquil old age. Moreover, medical tests revealed that he was suffering from cancer of the liver and stomach. Nonetheless, he was made to stand trial in November 1992 on charges of having ordered acts against life and liberty on the inner-German border. But after two months the trial was suddenly suspended on grounds of the defendant’s ill health, and Honecker was once again given his freedom.
The former dictator’s release prompted angry demonstrations in Berlin, mostly on the part of Ossis. The protesters were at a loss to understand how a man like Honecker, who had trampled on human rights, could successfully appeal his case on humanitarian grounds. Shortly after his release the old man flew to Chile to join his wife and daughter. Upon arrival in Santiago he was cheered by local leftists, who recalled with gratitude that the GDR had provided a refuge for some 5,000 Chileans fleeing the rightist dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.
Honecker’s partner in crime, Erich Mielke, also found himself in Moabit Prison awaiting trial in the early 1990s. His lawyers claimed that he was mentally unfit to defend himself, and he certainly seemed senile, barking orders to imaginary inferiors on a toy telephone kindly supplied by his guards, and hiding under his bed when the prison psychologist arrived to interview him. After a while he recovered sufficiently to blame Honecker for whatever wrongs the GDR might have committed. In the end, the authorities determined that Mielke was competent to stand trial, but the charges proffered against him had nothing to do with his role as GDR minister of state security (the prosecution’s case here seemed too weak); rather, he was tried for having murdered two policemen on Berlin’s Bülowplatz way back in 1931. If Honecker’s trial seemed questionable to some, the Mielke proceeding appeared doubly bogus, a misuse of the judicial process almost as egregious as Mielke’s own perversion of the law as Stasi chief. The trial ended in October 1993 in a six-year jail sentence for Mielke, who was almost eighty-five when he began his term.
