A former officer in the East German secret police has been sentenced to 10 years in jail for the murder of a Polish firefighter at a Berlin border crossing 50 years ago.
Martin Naumann, now 80, shot Czesław Kukuczka in the back at close range on 29 March 1974 as Kukuczka walked towards the last in a series of control posts at a transit area in the divided city, having been told he had a free pass to escape to West Berlin.
The truth surrounding Kukuczka’s death was never revealed to his family. Instead, his cremated remains were sent in an urn to his wife, Emilia, weeks later, after which he was buried in a private ceremony by his family in southern Poland.
It took the dogged research skills of a historian immersed in the history of the Ministry for State Security (MfS), or the Stasi – which was the intelligence service and secret police of the communist GDR – to unearth the details of the case years later.
Stefan Appelius found documents about the shooting and the subsequent attempts to cover it up in the archives of the former Stasi, and tracked down Kukuczka’s family in Poland. They alerted the Polish judiciary to the case, who issued a European arrest warrant for Naumann in 2021, which put pressure on German investigative authorities to reopen the case after decades of inaction. Naumann was charged with murder in October last year.
Details specifically linking Naumann to the killing had only emerged in 2016, after documents shredded by Stasi officers in the dying days of the regime in order to cover up its activities were pieced together by a digital puzzler machine manufactured specially for the purpose.
Naumann, from Leipzig, who had repeatedly denied the charges against him, was one of the first former East German officials to be charged with murder instead of manslaughter. Prosecutors had demanded a 12-year prison sentence for him, highlighting the “particularly treacherous” characteristic of the killing, namely that Kukuczka was shot having believed he had made it to freedom.
The court heard how Kukuczka, a 38-year-old father of three from the mountain village of Kamienica near Krakow in southern Poland, had entered the Polish embassy in East Berlin, demanding permission to allow him to go to West Germany. He had threatened to detonate a fake explosive, which he claimed would have blown up the embassy and other buildings, if he was turned down.
Research by the historians Filip Gańczak and Hans-Hermann Hertle found that embassy staff had contacted the Stasi, telling them of Kukuczka’s threat. In apparent collusion with the embassy, Stasi officials came to meet the Pole, handed him an exit visa and five West Deutschmarks and drove him to the nearby Friedrichstraße border point. While Kukuczka was under the impression he was soon to be a free man, Stasi officers had been ordered that he should be “rendered harmless”, using a euphemism commonly used for the killing of political opponents.
Naumann, hiding behind a strategically placed screen at the station, shot Kukuczka in the back from a distance of around 2 metres after he had crossed two of three control points.
According to the Stasi’s report into the incident, “operative forces” succeeded at around 3pm “to render [Kukuczka] harmless without attracting any special attention from other outgoing travellers”.
Naumann was described by a lawyer for Kukuczka’s daughter, who was 18 at the time of her father’s death, as “the last link in a chain of command” that led to the killing, but ultimately it was he who carried out the order, the court heard.
Naumann’s lawyer, Andrea Liebscher, had insisted her client was innocent and that there was no proof that he carried out the shooting or that the killing could be deemed murder rather than manslaughter, on which the statute of limitations would have already expired. She said having made a bomb threat, Kukuczka was not an innocent party and “would have to have expected authorities to intervene with weapons”.
Naumann typically appeared in court wearing a black corduroy cap and trainers, and clutching an office file to cover his face. He was described as having lived a life of quiet retirement for decades in suburban Leipzig, until his past caught up with him in 2016. He spoke only once to confirm his identity. He was decorated after the murder, for special services to border protection (as was the doctor who treated Kukuczka in hospital before he was pronounced dead).
Among those to give evidence were three pensioners who were at the time teenagers on a school trip to the communist East Berlin from West Germany. Petra L, 65, a retired teacher from Hessen, recalled having spent a “typical day” in East Berlin before returning with her classmates through the border controls in the heavily guarded underground tunnel at Friedrichstraße station. A man in sunglasses caught her attention, she said. “It was odd, because we were underground.” She told the court how the man had pulled a pistol, and shot at a man who had passed him with a briefcase, and recalled how those around her “held their hands to their mouths in shock”.
“Suddenly doors opened where none had been before then, and people in uniform emerged and sealed the passage,” she said.
On the sidelines of the trial, Gańczak said that while authorities in communist Poland and their counterparts in East Germany (GDR) had attempted to cover up the murder, they disagreed on how to present it. “Whilst the Polish side wanted it to look like Kukuczka had taken his own life, the GDR was not in agreement … According to a shortened version of events they prepared, there had been an incident at the border crossing, which had resulted in Kukuczka being killed. The family was not allowed to ask further questions.”
In one version, Kukuczka was said to have been armed, but there is no evidence to back this up. The explosive he alleged he was carrying was nonexistent.
Kukuczka was taken to the Stasi prison hospital in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, where he was pronounced dead after having bled to death, according to an autopsy.
In a reflection of its historical importance, the trial was recorded, similarly to some Holocaust-related trials of recent years.
Kukuckza’s family, including his sister, and his daughter, now 68, do not know to this day what their father had planned. According to anecdotes he had hankered after a life in Florida.
An estimated 140 people or more were killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall, which divided the city between 1961 and 1989. The handful of East German officials and border guards who have so far faced prosecution for the deaths have mostly been charged with manslaughter.
Higher-ranked officials have often escaped justice. Attempts to try Erich Mielke, head of the Stasi from 1957 to 1989, repeatedly failed until, in 1993, he was sentenced to six years in prison for the 1931 murder of two police officers as a young communist combatant.
