Berlin: Ex-Stasi employee in court after fatal shot

Berlin
Ex-Stasi employee in court after fatal shot

Children of the killed Pole – a son and a daughter – appear as co-plaintiffs in the proceedings. photo

© Annette Riedl/dpa

A man is shot in the back at the GDR border crossing at Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse in East Berlin. It will take decades before charges can be brought. Now an ex-Stasi employee is on trial.

He is said to have fired the fatal shot from concealment – 50 years later the ex-Stasi employees in the Moabit criminal court in the spotlight. The Berlin public prosecutor’s office accuses the now 80-year-old Leipzig man of treacherous murder. The then first lieutenant is said to have shot 38-year-old Pole Czesław Kukuczka in the back from two meters away at the GDR border crossing at Friedrichstrasse station on March 29, 1974, according to the prosecution.

Almost exactly 50 years to the day after the crime, the trial against the suspected shooter began in the Berlin district court, almost three kilometers from the crime scene, amid great public interest.

The defendant denies the allegations

The slim man, dressed in a burgundy turtleneck under a gray-blue jacket with jeans, looked interestedly into the audience. When prosecutor Henrike Hillmann read out the charges, he took some notes. The 80-year-old is said to have belonged to an operational group of the GDR Ministry for State Security at the time of the crime and was tasked with “rendering the Pole harmless”. The German will not comment on the allegations in court, as his defense attorney Andrea Liebscher explained. “I can announce that my client denies the accusation,” she explained at the start of the trial.

The three children – a daughter and two sons – and a sister of the killed Pole appear as co-plaintiffs in the proceedings. For the daughter’s lawyer, Hans-Jürgen Förster, the case shows one thing above all: “It is not abstract that murder does not expire.” Because of its historical significance, the process is recorded.

Investigations only made progress after decades

The investigation did not make any progress for many years. The fatal shot was fired at the busiest border crossing between East and West, known as the “Palace of Tears” because of the often painful farewells. The case was recorded in 1974 by the central registration office of the state justice administration in Salzgitter, which documented injustices in the GDR and collected evidence. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he continued to be followed – but there were no crucial clues to the possible shooter. According to the public prosecutor’s office, these only came from the Stasi records archive in 2016.

However, the authorities initially assumed it was a case of homicide. In this case the crime would have been statute-barred. In the meantime, however, the public prosecutor sees the murder characteristic of insidiousness fulfilled. According to the co-plaintiffs, the decisive factor for this new assessment was a European arrest warrant against the defendant after persistent research on the Polish side. The arrest warrant led to the case being reviewed, explained lawyer Thomas Walther, who represents one of the sons.

Court must evaluate documents

The presiding judge Bernd Miczajka made it clear where the difficulty of the trial lies 50 years after the crime: “A lot will be based on the evaluation of documents.” The court must get an idea of ​​how reliable these are.

A Berlin criminal inspector, who was given the old files for the new investigation, was the first witness to testify on Thursday. He explained how the reclassification as murder came about. Initially, it was assumed that it was a case of homicide because the victim was said to have tried to force his departure to West Berlin with the help of a dummy bomb in the Polish embassy on the day of the crime. However, witnesses said that on March 29, 1974, the 38-year-old had already passed two of the three checkpoints at the “Palace of Tears” unhindered when the shot was fired. The Pole was sure that he had achieved his goal. It was precisely at this moment of innocence that the shot was fired.

Shot before the last checkpoint

According to the prosecution, the ex-Stasi officer – hidden behind a screen – fired it “in order to kill the injured party immediately after passing through the last checkpoint.” A group of students from the West observed this after the investigation. The teacher traveled back to the West with the tenth graders and informed the police there, the inspector told the court. At that time there was an unsuccessful request to the judiciary in the East. It was only with the fall of the Wall that further approaches to investigations were possible through old court files on unexplained deaths in the GDR.

Later, documents on awards given to possible participants in the crime provided further clues: an order signed by then-minister Erich Mielke named Stasi employees who were to be honored in connection with the killing. “It was a chain of command that went from top to bottom with different names,” said the commissioner. The defendant’s name was “pretty far down.” The now 80-year-old received a bronze medal.

Spectators travel from Poland to the trial

The start of the proceedings was also attended by two public prosecutors from Poland and a historian who was involved in the investigation of the case. “Because I have been researching the case since 2016, I also feel emotionally connected to it,” said historian Filip Ganczak, who traveled from Warsaw for the start of the trial.

The regional court initially planned a total of seven days of hearings. A verdict could therefore be pronounced on May 23rd. The trial is scheduled to continue on April 4th with the questioning of an eyewitness.

dpa

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