A former Stasi officer has denied the murder 50 years ago of a Polish man trying to flee to West Berlin, at the opening of a trial that could affect how communist-era killings are prosecuted in Germany.
Martin Naumann, 80, spoke only to confirm his identity as a court in Berlin began hearing the case on Thursday. His lawyer said Naumann, an ex-member of the East German secret police, denied the charges against him.
Naumann is accused of murdering Czesław Kukuczka at a border crossing between East and West Berlin in 1974.
The delay in the legal proceedings illustrates the challenges Germany has faced in bringing East German officials to justice for crimes allegedly committed by the communist government in its attempts to stop citizens escaping to West Germany.
At least 140 people were killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989. Border guards and other East German officials who have faced trial so far have usually been charged with manslaughter, a lesser charge on which the statute of limitations would have run out in Naumann’s case.
He is accused of fatally shooting Kukuczka on 29 March 1974, as the Polish man passed through the border control post at Friedrichstraße train station, one of the best-known crossing points in divided Berlin.
Earlier that day, Kukuczka had gone to the Polish embassy in East Berlin to demand passage to West Germany, according to prosecutors. Kukuczka threatened to detonate a dummy explosive if his demands were not met.
Details of the incident are laid out in research work by two historians, Hans-Hermann Hertle and Filip Gańczak. According to the research, staff at the Polish embassy alerted the East German secret police to Kukuczka’s threat.
Stasi officials are said to have led Kukuczka to believe he would be allowed passage to West Germany, handing him an exit visa and conveying him to the Friedrichstraße crossing. But instead of facilitating his passage, the officers were under orders to render Kukuczka “harmless”, employing a common euphemism in Stasi documents for the elimination of political opponents, according to the historians.
Prosecutors say Kukuczka had passed through two of the three control points at the border and “thought he had reached his goal” when he was shot. They allege that Naumann, concealed behind a screen, hit Kukuczka in the back from a distance of 2 metres.
The victim’s children and sister are joint plaintiffs in the case but will not attend the trial.
Naumann was “the last link in a chain of command” that ordered the killing, Hans-Juergen Foerster, the lawyer for Kukuczka’s daughter, said before the trial.
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Foerster and the family want the investigation into Kukuczka’s death to be extended to include all those who may have had a hand in it and to have them called as witnesses.
“Some are still alive,” Foerster told Agence France-Presse, though two of the officers allegedly involved have died.
Daniela Muenkel, the head of research at the Stasi archives in Berlin, told AFP that if the two officers were still alive, it would “not have been easy” to have them stand trial for the killing. “It was not them who carried out the orders,” Muenkel said.
Even Erich Mielke, the head of the Stasi from 1957 to 1989, avoided punishment for his role in the secret police after the fall of the wall for lack of evidence. However, he was sentenced to six years in prison in 1993 for the murder of two police officers in 1931 as a young communist militant.
Naumann’s trial, which will be recorded for its historical importance, comes at the end of years of investigation. A European arrest warrant for Naumann was issued by Poland in 2021, which spurred German authorities to pick up the stalled case. He was finally charged with murder in October 2023.