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In a Berlin court Monday, a former member of the East German Stasi secret police was found guilty of murder for killing a man who was attempting to escape the communist East for freedom in the West, The New York Times reported.
A judge sentenced Manfred Naumann, 80, to ten years in prison for a crime committed on March 29, 1974, when it looked like the Berlin Wall would stay intact forever instead of just another 25 years.
During several days of testimony in March and April this year, the witnesses to the event who were still alive came to the court to describe Naumann’s actions. Those in the court docket were just schoolgirls in 1974 and now retired from the workforce. Naumann listened quietly to their testimony. His work as a member of the dreaded Stasi had been long forgotten or not known where he lived in Leipzig.
The trial reminded many Germans of what life had been like in what was then called East Germany, of how you had to get across that Berlin Wall or through “Checkpoint Charlie” to move from East Berlin and the liberty of West Berlin; of how the Stasi watched you constantly because they had paid informers working everywhere: with a force of 91,000 officers and men, the Stasi employed an additional 180,000 part-time spies, The Times noted.
The trial also reminded Germans of the debate over how individuals can attempt to evade guilt by blaming the apparatus of the state or saying they were simply “following orders.”
But even though it is attracting attention today, the Stasi murder of Czeslaw Kukuczka was largely ignored for decades, until it was unearthed by an investigator, political science professor Stefan Appelius, who was going through police records. The charge was initially manslaughter so the prosecutor dropped the case because of the length of time. But interest in Poland, where the murdered man was originally from, was intense and that began to move the legal process in Germany.
Appelius was satisfied with the result, telling The Times, “I think this a really good signal for the many victims and their families.”
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