Photo: DPA

East German victims lament lack of justice

Published: 5 Nov 09 17:00 CET
Online: http://www.thelocal.de/national/20091105-23067.html

The collapse of the Berlin Wall rectified East Germany’s biggest crime. But as David Wroe reports, many of the communist regime’s victims are still seeking justice for other misdeeds two decades later.

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The Stasi, East Germany’s dreaded secret police, tried to murder Wolfgang Welsch three times.

The first attempt was a car bomb, which exploded but somehow failed to kill him. Next, they stationed a sniper on an English hillside next to a motorway they knew Welsch would be driving down. He missed.

The third time, in 1981, a “friend” poisoned Welsch, his wife and daughter by putting the toxic heavy metal thallium in their hamburgers during a family holiday in Israel. Against the odds, they survived, though Welsch lost his hair and spent weeks in hospital.

The friend, it turned out, was a Stasi killer, working for an assassination squad codenamed “Scorpion.” As a former East German dissident who was helping smuggle people to the West, Welsch was a prime target.

Now a writer, Welsch was dismissed as a crank until Stern magazine picked up his story. In 1994, he was vindicated when the friend, whose real name was Peter Haack, was sentenced to six years in jail for attempted murder.

The 65-year-old Welsch got his justice. But like many victims of the Stasi and the East German communist regime, he remains unsatisfied. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there are dozens of lobby groups and support networks for victims. Most trumpet the message that there has never been a true reckoning of the crimes and human rights abuses that occurred in the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR).

Many victims’ advocates say failing to come to grips with this dark legacy has left a festering sore upon a reunified Germany. Others believe the country has missed an opportunity to confront the issue and lay some old ghosts to rest as the 20th anniversary of the Wall’s collapse approaches.

“Initially, the justice system didn’t want to believe me that the Stasi murdered political opponents,” Welsch said. “The fact that I had to fight for justice … left me pretty disillusioned.”

Few convictions

According to one victim’s group, the Forum for Education and Rehabilitation, in the first decade after reunification there were some 79,108 investigations, which yielded 993 prosecutions and fewer than 100 convictions. Erich Mielke, the Minister for State Security and the notorious head of the Stasi, spent less than two years in jail. He was convicted of the murders of two policemen in 1931, but not for anything he did during the GDR era.

And that is simply not enough for hundreds of thousands of victims of “persecution, false imprisonment, perversion of justice and countless other crimes,” said the forum’s chairman Reinhard Dobrinski.

The problem reunified Germany faced, according to Jens Hüttmann, a historian at the Federal Foundation for the Reconciliation of the SED Dictatorship, was that East German officials could only be tried under East German law. To apply West German law retrospectively would smack of “victors’ justice” and undermine the rule of law itself.

“Of course it was disappointing for the victims – I can understand that – but there wasn’t really a palatable alternative,” Hüttmann said. “If you’d left the principle of the rule of law behind, it could have been worse. The lack of the rule of law is one of the things that allows dictatorships to do terrible things.”

A second obstacle was the long shadow of the Nazi period. After the Nuremberg trials of the most senior National Socialists, sentences given in later trials in the 1950s were remarkably light. Germany couldn’t be seen to be treating communist perpetrators more harshly than Nazi criminals, Hüttmann said.

Yet Wolfgang Welsch believes Germany should have at least held Nuremberg-style hearings for the GDR leadership.

Grudgingly compensated

On the other side of the ledger is the seemingly grudging compensation for the victims. It wasn’t until 2007 that victims of the Stasi were granted a pension by the federal government. They are now paid €250 a month but only if they were jailed for more than six months and earn less than about €12,500 a year.

“The victims are not satisfied with this,” said Hubertus Knabe, scientific director of the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial, the former Stasi prison that has been turned into a museum. “If you were a guard, you get a good pension. That is unjust and victims feel very bitter about this.”

Knabe argues that Germany’s soft approach to punishing perpetrators and compensating victims is a major factor in creeping Ostalgie – a play on words describing the sense among eastern Germans that the communist dictatorship wasn’t all that bad.

But it’s not just about jail time and money. Vera Lengsfeld, a former dissident and Christian Democratic MP, said frank discussion could go a long way to healing the old wounds.

“There was never really a debate about what kind of regime it was. They left it to the victims to confront it all and do the talking. That was a big, big mistake,” she said.

Lengsfeld knows more about forgiveness than most. After the wall fell, she learned that her now ex-husband, poet Knud Wollenberger, spied on her for the Stasi. It took more than a decade but eventually she forgave him.

“You can only forgive somebody if they are repentant. It took my former husband 10 years but … he explained why he did it and asked for my forgiveness,” she said. “But most former GDR officials haven’t repented.”

David Wroe (news@thelocal.de)

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Your comments about this article:

09:44 November 6, 2009 by So36
It's just outrageous that they couldn't pin anything at all on Mielke for his DDR era crimes. For Pete's sake, if you can't do the bastard for murdering people or ruining countless lives, at least convict him for manipulating the East German football league.
16:05 November 6, 2009 by langohio
Mielke was elderly and sick when he was sentenced to a six-year term. He was released two years later at age 87 because of failing health, and died at the age of 92 in a nursing home. In fact, he was charged in connection with shootings at the border in 1992 but the trial was suspended because he was simultaneously on trial for the 1931 killings. The charges could have been reactivated after his conviction but were not because the court determined he was too senile to follow the proceedings. In fact, he probably was.

The way this article was written, one would get the impression that Mielke was still alive and defying justice. He was convicted, imprisoned, and died a few years later--a broken, senile, and sick old man. There were many cases of Nazis (including some whose crimes were far worse than Mielke's) who were released from prison and died under similar circumstances. One was Martin Sommer, the sadistic SS torturer at Buchenwald, who was sentenced to life imprisonment by a West German court, was released in poor health in 1975 and died 13 years later in a nursing home.
16:16 November 6, 2009 by So36
That's exactly my point: why on earth would you suspend a case about the Wall deaths in favor of something from 1931? Because you couldn't convict him or because it was less controversial? And by your count he got the five last years of his life, that's more than he gave a lot of other people.
16:38 November 6, 2009 by langohio
The case for the 1931 murders was straightforward: he could be convicted under the law that existed in Germany at the time the crime was committed. At the time the prosecutors made the decision to go this route, there was already a serious question whether the application of West German law retroactively violated the fundamental principle that laws cannot be imposed ex post facto. So, naturally, prosecutors chose the path that guaranteed a murder sentence rather than a risky prosecution that might be overturned later by the constitutional court. "Controversy" was hardly an issue: Mielke had few supporters in Germany and none of them had any political influence.

There was the option of attempting a prosecution for shootings on the GDR border after the first tiral concluded: by then, the legal issues had been sorted out and several East German border guards had already been convicted of manslaughter. But by the time he was released from prison he was senile (therefore not eligible for prosecution under German law) and terminally ill.
20:05 November 7, 2009 by langohio
If you're referring to Rudolf Müller, who shot and killed a People's Policeman while escaping East Berlin with his family: he was never charged with a crime in the old Federal Republic. In 1999 he was convicted by the Berlin regional court of manslaughter, and sentenced to one-year's probation. The Federal Court changed the crime to murder in 2000, but the sentence was unaltered.
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