This was an almost otherworldly brutal act, from another time, when the Cold War was raging and Germany was divided. An officer in East Germany’s feared secret police shot dead a man as he tried to cross into the West.
Half a century later, a German court on Monday convicted 80-year-old former officer Manfred Naumann of murder and sentenced him to 10 years in prison, one of the harshest penalties ever imposed for a clandestine reign of terror. The verdict was handed down in 2018. Police known as the Stasi.
Over several days in March and April of this year, the only known living witness to the shootings confronted the defendants in a tight Berlin courtroom and testified about what he saw on March 29, 1974.
The witnesses, who were schoolgirls at the time and are now retired women, all said witnessing the murders at a young age affected them for the rest of their lives. Naumann, well-dressed and well-dressed, lived a comfortable and anonymous life for years in her home in Leipzig, Germany, silently watching.
The trial, nearly 35 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is a reminder of the horrific Stasi’s prevalence and impunity, and the darker side of the oppressive communist regime that many in the East now view with nostalgia. It became.
When the Wall fell in November 1989, the Stasi had an estimated 91,000 employees and 180,000 part-time spies, and had used coercion and violence to maintain a communist regime for 40 years. It forced ordinary people to spy on their colleagues, neighbors, friends, and even family members and produce documents about millions of people.
The case also brought to light once again Germany’s long-standing problem of individual culpability in state-run terrorist organizations.
“This is a very brave and important judgment,” said political scientist Stefan Apelius, who spent decades studying state crimes committed in East Germany and whose study of the case ultimately led to Monday’s conviction. said.
But despite its repercussions, Czesław Kukczka's murder received little attention for many years until Dr. Apelius discovered clues in the Stasi’s own meticulous records in 2016.
After publishing his research both in academic journals and in the magazine “Super Ill” with a primarily East German audience, he soon realized that very few people had heard of the incident.
Initially it was not clear who carried out the killing. The public defender then dropped the case on the basis that the charge was manslaughter, not murder, and that the statute of limitations had passed.
But while the story subsequently gained attention in the victim’s native Poland, the victim’s widow and children were kept in the dark about what had happened. (His widow later died, and his children became plaintiffs in the criminal case.) Polish prosecutors issued an international arrest warrant for Mr. Naumann, which helped prompt German authorities to prepare murder charges. It became.
Calling Monday’s ruling a landmark, Dr. Apelius said, “I think this is a really good sign for a lot of the victims and their families.”
On the last morning of 1974, Mr. Kukczka entered the Polish embassy in East Berlin with a bag containing some wires and a crude light switch, according to photographs shown in court 50 years later. . Kukucka told embassy officials that he had a bomb in his bag and was prepared to detonate it if he was not allowed to leave the country.
Kukczka worked as a firefighter and laborer in the village of Kamienica in southern Poland. Filip Ganczak, a Polish historian who investigated the victim’s life, said he served some time in prison for embezzlement in the 1950s.
According to historical records, Maximilian Karnowski, a Polish man at the embassy, promised Kukczka a trip to the West before leaving the room and calling the Stasi. The embassy gave Mr. Kukczka temporary documents and even West German money, after which Stasi officials drove him to the Friedrichstraße train station.
The station was located at what in 1974 was the most important crossing point on the fortified and militarized border between East and West Berlin. There, train passengers were able to pass through the Iron Curtain after passing through a border crossing known as Treinenpalast (Palace of Tears).
There, Kukutka was allowed to pass all checks and enter a tunnel leading to a train bound for West Berlin, where he was shot dead. Nauman and the other officers involved were later awarded medals for their roles in the operation. The surviving records say that thanks to their work, “a serious provocation at the border was thwarted and the terrorists were neutralized.”
What the Stasi didn’t expect were three girls from Bad Hasfeld, West Germany, who were visiting East Berlin and were at the same station. They returned home and met with both Bild, Germany’s most important tabloid, and the West German federal prosecutor, who collects testimony about crimes committed in the east. Although their testimony did not lead to direct action, it confirmed that some West Germans knew about the shooting and that records were kept.
However, this case remained unsolved and disappeared from people’s memories. Naumann rose through the ranks and enjoyed the benefits of a nearly 30-year Stasi career, rising to the rank of major.
Three witnesses said in testimony this year that they saw a man wearing tattered clothes and greasy hair go through passport control and into the tunnel. Police said he passed another man wearing sunglasses and a civilian sport coat who drew a gun from about 6 feet away and shot the victim in the back.
Witnesses remembered the victim holding his back where he was hit before he fell to the floor. East German border authorities quickly closed the tunnel doors to block the view of people waiting in line at immigration. The girls did not know until long after the fall of the Berlin Wall that the man died hours later in the Stasi prison hospital.
Tatiana Firsova contributed reporting.
