It's a journey through time.
The Cold War Berlin of 1974 visited a court in the German capital.
A former agent of the Stasi, the political police of the former East Germany, on trial for the murder of a Pole who wanted to flee to the West, remained silent on Thursday on the first day of his trial for facts that occurred fifty years ago and which he disputes.
Extremely thin, accentuating his fragile appearance, the accused Martin Naumann, 80 years old, listened impassively to the story, hiding his face behind a black cardboard folder.
For an hour and a half, a woman now in her sixties, the first witness, recounted how she had seen one man shoot another, at the moment when, then a West German on an excursion to the east, she was about to cross the border crossing at Friedrichstrasse station, the infamous “Palace of Tears”, pictured below.
Nach 50 Jahren: Ein Ex-Stasi-Oberleutnant muss sich ab heute vor dem Berliner Landgericht verantworten.
Er soll 1974 einen Mann am Grenzübergang Friedrichstraße ermordet haben.
Prozessgrundlage sind also Documente v.
Bundesarchiv – Stasi-Unterlagen-Archiv.https://t.co/PTmlTrPCFe
— StasiUnterlagenArchiv (@StasiArchiv) March 14, 2024
While waiting for her passport to be checked, she noticed “a man in worn clothes with a small travel bag”.
A few minutes later, while the latter was in front of her, she “heard a gunshot”.
He collapses.
“Two or three meters behind him, another man, hidden, seems to have shot him.”
The victim is Czeslaw Kukuczka, a 38-year-old Pole who dreamed of a life in the “free world”.
Difficult to remember details
Fifty years later, it is difficult for the witness to remember all the details which would make it possible to identify the shooter and the accused's lawyer highlights the uncertainties surrounding the description of the facts.
Me Andrea Liebscher warned at the start of the hearing that Martin Naumann contested the facts and that he would remain silent.
Alerted by their Polish colleagues, the German secret police made Czeslaw Kukuczka believe that his exit from the GDR had been accepted, according to the indictment.
Just when the man thought he had passed the last checkpoint and was safe, agent Naumann, then 31, shot him in the back, the prosecution claims.
The children of the victim who are civil parties
Employee of a construction company, Czeslaw Kukuczka had three children who joined as civil parties but did not attend the trial.
His daughter's lawyer, Hans-Jürgen Förster, told AFP he wanted to show that the accused "was the last link in a chain of command".
He filed a request for the investigation to be extended to all people decorated by the regime for having “neutralized” the Pole and for them to be called to the stand.
“Some are still living,” he told AFP.
On the other hand, two important figures involved in the decision-making process, including the right-hand man of the former head of the Stasi, Erich Mielke, are dead.
“Even if they had still been alive, it would not have been easy to send them to court: they were not the ones who carried out the orders,” observed Daniela Münkel, head of research at the archives of the Stasi in Berlin, in an interview with AFP.
Even Erich Mielke was not convicted, after the fall of the wall, for his activities at the head of the Stasi from 1957 to 1989, due to lack of sufficient evidence.
However, he was sentenced to six years in prison on October 26, 1993 for the murder of two police officers in 1931 when he was a young communist activist.
Poland requested his extradition
The trial, which is registered due to its historical importance, takes place after years of investigation, also on the Polish side.
A European arrest warrant for murder was issued in the summer of 2021 against Martin Naumann, a retired resident of Leipzig.
Poland had requested his extradition, which prompted the Berlin justice system to look into his case again: on October 12, 2023, he was charged with “murder”, a crime which does not have a statute of limitations.
Since the fall of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, 1949-1990), several protagonists of the communist regime have been tried in Germany.
Many of them were enforcers, such as the East German border guards at the Berlin Wall.
At least 140 people died between 1961 and 1989 trying to cross it.