New docs show Stasi order to fire on fleeing East Germans

expatica.com ^ | 12 August 2007

[Tailgunner Joe]

BERLIN _ The agency that manages the records of former East Germany's dreaded secret police has uncovered an order for border guards to fire on escaping citizens that is far more explicit than others on record, an official said in remarks published Saturday.

Though the official East German border regulations said use of a firearm was to be considered an ''extreme measure in the use of force,'' the Oct. 1, 1973 order to border guards from the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, is much less reserved, Magdeburg's Volksstimme newspaper reported.

''Do not hesitate with the use of a firearm, including when the border breakouts involve women and children, which the traitors have already frequently taken advantage of,'' the order reads.

Before the 1990 reunification of Germany, more than 1,000 people were killed on the eastern side of the highly fortified border as they tried to escape to the West, including more than 125 at the Berlin Wall, which was erected Aug. 13, 1961.

''The find of this order to shoot demonstrates in a horrific way how inhuman this system was,'' said Ronald Pofalla, general secretary of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats, in an interview with Berlin's B-Z newspaper.

''On the eve of the anniversary of the construction of the wall, it is a lesson to all of those who want to let the barbarity of the communist regime be consigned to the annals of history.''

The written order from the Stasi was found among the papers of an East German border guard identified only as Sgt. Manfred L., according to Joerg Stoye, head of the Magedeburg office of the Stasi Records Office, the Volksstimme newspaper said.

Other such orders contained more limitations on the use of force, making its discovery an ''exciting and highly important find for the study of the history of the Stasi,'' Stoye was quoted as saying.

He did not immediately return calls to his office seeking more details.

Germany had been divided after the end of World War II in 1945 into communist East Germany and democratic West Germany.

The Stasi, founded in the 1950s, had 91,000 full-time employees and 180,000 undercover informers. They kept the population of 18 million under blanket surveillance while the regime built the Berlin Wall and a border bristling with mines, barbed wire, dogs and self-activating machine guns.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, the border came down, the Stasi was disbanded and East and West Germany were united in 1990.

Hundreds of former East German border guards and officials have since been convicted for border shootings. Most received suspended sentences, though a few former leaders went to jail.

Meanwhile, new research shows that at least 1,245 people lost their lives under the communist East German regime, according to a disputed new figure released on Friday by a pressure group.

"The figure of 1,245 victims is, unfortunately, not definitive," said Alexandra Hildebrandt, who also runs the museum at the Berlin landmark Checkpoint Charlie.

Forty-six people have been added to the total given last year, as a result of new research.

Of the victims, 768 died after August 13, 1961, when construction began on the Berlin Wall that was to divide the city and embody the Cold War until it was toppled amid joyous scenes on November 9, 1989.

Seventy of the victims were women and 40 were under the age of 18. The figures compiled by the group, an independent body called the August 13 Association, are higher than those calculated by historians and some official bodies.

Hildebrandt said the difference could be explained by the fact that her group concentrated on a longer period than most historians, who tend to focus only on the period from 1961.

The total also includes the suicides of East German soldiers and a man who died of a heart attack after being stopped and searched by guards, both areas discounted by historians.

[donna]

Excerpt:

Some escapes were ingenious. One woman hid under the hood of a car. Two families floated over the border in a hot-air balloon as big as a four-story house.

Other escapes were just plain hard work. One group took six months in 1964 to dig a 145-yard tunnel from the cellar of a former West Berlin bakery to an outhouse on the eastern side. They freed 57 East Berliners. The escape ended when East German soldiers sprayed the tunnel with machine-gun fire.

Even soldiers escaped. On Aug. 15, 1961, the first member of the East German People’s Army leaped to freedom. After him, about 2,000 soldiers fled to the West.

In all, 246 people died at the wall. Perhaps the best known was 18-year-old bricklayer Peter Fechter. On Aug. 17, 1962, he tried to jump the barbed wire near Checkpoint Charlie, a key border crossing between the American and Soviet sectors of Berlin. East German soldiers fired. Fechter fell. The East Germans would not allow anyone to help him as he bled to death.

“Murderers!” yelled West Berliners.

Fechter, the wall’s 50th casualty, became a symbol of all those slain at the Berlin Wall. His death was memorialized with wreaths and crosses.

Heroism
More stories of people who went over, under, around, or through the Berlin Wall to the West:

A truck carrying a group of East Berliners simply crashed through the wall. The driver, though shot, kept going. He later died from his wounds.

One young woman in West Berlin made a U.S. Army uniform. She got buttons and badges from officers by saying they were for a play. She borrowed an American car, drove over to East Berlin and brought back two friends.

A team of young mechanics engineered a chain of folding ladders guided by pulleys and ropes. They scaled the electrified wall without touching it.

Two men used an archery bow to shoot a cable over the wall and onto a roof on the Western side. They attached pulleys to the cable and sailed across the wall - 65 feet - in 30 seconds.

At a blind spot between two checkpoints, people could swim across a small river and climb to freedom. British soldiers hung a rope ladder at the spot to help escapees.

More than 100 people escaped through a sewer that the East German authorities had forgotten about.

http://www.newseum.org/cybernewseum/exhibits/berlin_wall/index.htm

[familyop]

Was Putin with the Stasi and working there during that time?

[Roccus]

The Wetzels and the Strelzycks secretly purchased many small amounts of nylon cloth. They made a hot air balloon large enough to lift four adults and four children. Close to midnight on September 15, 1979 they drove to a deserted field and took off. Twenty three minutes after liftoff the gas burner died ant the balloon fell. Soon they realized that they had triumphantly landed on West German soil.

[donna]

I was in grade school when they started building the Berlin Wall. I remember all us little kids just being astounded that Communists had to have a wall to keep people IN and away from US, LOL.

[freedom4me]

Putin worked for the KGB in the former Soviet Union.

[Roccus]

When it was being built, there was no cleared “no man’s land” yet. The cement blocks were often right against the sides of apt. buildings. People would hang and push off from 2nd story windows to land in the West. Later these buildings were emptied and the windows bricked up. Eventually, the buildings came down.

[muawiyah]

The GDR/West German border was, for the most part, a German on German deal, or a German on Czech situation. However, we once had a patrol SE of Regensburg up against a Czech city where the Russians also maintained an observation tower.

These were stationed up and down the border overlooking the minefields but didn't seem to have much to do with the border operations. You rarely saw the Russians except when they rode out to the tower with a new shift and a full load of whatever Russians eat and a load of vodka bottles.

They'd get drunk and start tossing bottles. That's all we heard all night long from over there ~ breaking bottles.

Then they'd change shift and a new crew would come in to do the same thing.

At the same time you saw East German and Czech border police going up and down the area on foot or in vehicles. Sometimes you'd see a West German Bundesgruenzenschuss officer. He'd always have a great story about how stupid the folks on the other side were.

People could get hurt accidentally if they got too near the border. Out in the mountains there'd be horrendous storms and the mined area would turn into a sea of flowing mud. The little anti-personnel mines sewn all over the place would come loose and they could end up on the West German side.

Whenever that happened the Commies would come out with a steamroller and blow up the whole place ~ you wouldn't see any of them walking around over there until it was rolled clear.

Sometimes they'd set off the anti-vehicle mines and then plant new ones. Wouldn't have liked to have been the guy driving the steamroller then.

A regular feature of life on the border consisted of West Germans employed by GDR to walk thorugh US Army observation posts. These pukes would sometimes show up at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning.

Frankly, a lot more than a mere 1300 people could have been easily killed on that border if the West Germans and NATO didn't have troops on the job just watching what was going on. Wouldn't have been VOPO just shooting people up either ~ it'd been accidents with sloppy mine work. The other side really had no idea much of the time where their mines were.

[familyop]

Ah...it says here, that Putin ran the east German Stasi during the 1980s. ...interesting reading.

Who is Vladimir Putin?
Center for Security Policy ^ | September 6, 1999 | J. Michael Waller

"Russia's new government leader represents some of the worst elements of the old KGB, Kremlin observers say. His main assignment abroad was a post as KGB commissioner in Dresden, East Germany, where he oversaw the city division of the Stasi secret police in the dark years of the 1980s. So notorious was the Stasi that Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal once termed it 'worse than the Gestapo.'"

[Tailgunner Joe]

Yes indeed, Vladimir Putin worked in East Germany with the Stasi during the Cold War. This evil gang of communist murderers even gave the Chekist Putin a medal for his exeplary service.

[Verginius Rufus]

The movie “The Lives of Others” (about the Stasi) is excellent. Unfortunately the actor who plays the Stasi captain Gerd Wiesler died on July 22 of cancer at the age of 54.

[concentric circles]

At first the border was easily breached by those who could approach it without raising suspicion, allowing Conrad Schumann a quick escape in 1961, the wall soon followed.

August 1962: One of the first victims of the wall, 18 year old Peter Fechter was left bleeding to death after being shot by East German guards.

One would be escapee.

Some buildings were right at the border and while first floor windows were bricked over, upper floor windows were often open. The buildings were later demolished leaving a no man's land.