Berlin полностью

Markus Wolf, the Stasi’s most brilliant foreign intelligence operative, was charged in 1992 with twelve counts of treason stemming from his work as head of East German Intelligence in the 1970s and 1980s. But the legitimacy of bringing Wolf to trial was debatable. Had he really done anything different than his West German counterparts? Was not spying an accepted practice of a sovereign state? Was not his real offense simply that of making Bonn’s counterspooks look bad? Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel, who as a former head of West German Intelligence was particularly anxious to punish Wolf, lamely argued that the GDR spies had acted offensively, while FRG spies had acted only defensively. Wolf was brought to trial in September 1993. During the proceedings Kinkel made a brief appearance in court, and the encounter between these two former intelligence chiefs, one of them now a senior statesman, the other fighting to stay out of jail, struck Wolf as “in many ways symbolic of the trauma that East Germans were facing after unification. Their lives were on the slab, and the West held the scalpel for dissection.” On December 6, 1993, the court found Wolf guilty and sentenced him to six years in prison. His lawyer, however, appealed the decision to the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, which in May 1995 overturned the conviction on grounds that spying for the GDR did not amount to treason, since espionage was a normal activity for a sovereign state. The verdict put Wolf and other former GDR spies in the clear for the time being, but it remained possible that they could still be tried for espionage activities committed in third countries.

While Wolf could plausibly argue that he had not done anything his western counterparts had not also done, this defense was unavailable to those who had ordered and carried out killings at the Berlin Wall and inner-German border. As we have seen, Ho-necker was brought up on charges related to the Schießbefehl (shooting-order), as was General Heinz Keßler, head of the National Defense Council. (Later, so was Egon Krenz.) In Keßler’s trial, it was shown that the GDR government had specifically authorized shooting as a last-resort measure to deter the “crime” of fleeing the country. East German officials, however, maintained that it was the Soviet Union, not the GDR, that had been responsible for the security procedures at the border.

As if unclear precisely where the order to shoot had originated, united Germany’s legal authorities focused much of their attention on the low-level guards who had actually carried out the killings. This of course raised the objection that mere cogs in the machine were being made to bear most of the responsibility for the operation. Not surprisingly, the defendants argued that they were only following orders and that their acts had not been illegal under East German law. Nevertheless, in 1992 a Berlin court found two young border guards guilty of the shooting death of Chris Gueffroy, the last fatality at the Berlin Wall (February 6, 1989). The guard who had fired the fatal shots received a sentence of three-and-one-half years’ imprisonment. In passing sentence, the court argued that an “intolerable disproportionality” existed between the “offense” of flight and the guards’ lethal response.

The complaint that it was mainly the smaller fry who were being held accountable for the border shootings was addressed in 1996 by a trial in Berlin of six former generals of the East German army. Among the defendants was Klaus-Dieter Baumgarten, a former deputy defense minister. Charged with nineteen counts of manslaughter and attempted manslaughter, all six generals were found guilty and sentenced to prison terms of varying lengths. Baumgarten, who was accused of complicity in eleven killings and of signing orders to shoot fugitives, received the longest sentence: six and a half years. “This is a political verdict,” said the general. He insisted that the border-security regime was a legal measure designed to thwart a Western invasion of East Germany.