Brigitte Frauendorf

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Brigitte Frauendorf (born December 18, 1937 , † July 26, 1949 near Kirchgandern ) was a schoolgirl who was shot dead by members of the border police in the Soviet occupation zone. Both in 1949 the office of the then Thuringian interior minister Willy Gebhardt ( SED ) and after the German reunification the public prosecutor's office in Erfurt saw the fatal shot by the border police officer Paul W. as a criminal offense. Even so, the perpetrator was never convicted.

Life

Brigitte Frauendorfer lived with her mother and stepfather in Leipzig at the time of her death . Her stepfather worked as an electrical mechanic . In July 1949 the family wanted to visit Brigitte's grandparents in Neu-Isenburg . Although the stepfather had a vacation permit for himself and a residence permit in Neu-Isenburg for the whole family, he decided to illegally cross the zone border between the Soviet and American occupation zones , which was hardly secure at the time . He feared that he would not receive an interzone pass . The family had arrived in Arenshausen near the border on July 25 , where they met other cross-border commuters in an inn.

Circumstances of the fatal shots

On the evening of July 25, 1949, around 11 p.m., about ten people, including several women and a total of two children, set out with a local guide to cross the border to the west.

From midnight, two members of the German border police monitored the border area in the area of ​​Kirchgandern, about one kilometer from Arensburg. The border police had previously been warned of "serious criminals" who had escaped from prison and who might want to cross the border.

When they heard the noises from the group of border crossers from around 100 meters away at around 2:10 a.m., they waited until they were only about 10 meters away and then asked them to stop. These did not obey, but fled back to the grain field from which they had come. After they did not react to a warning shot, one of the border police officers reportedly shot several times in the direction of the fugitives. One of the shots fired in the direction of the fleeing people hit Brigitte Frauendorf in the stomach.

The border police then looked after the refugees in the grain field. They found the injured girl and her parents. When her parents spoke to Brigitte, she said that she could not come to them because she had been hit. They took the family to the Kirchgandern border police station. When they got there, the child had died from the high blood loss. The killed was in the fire station of the town laid out and released the same day by the District Court Heiligenstadt for burial. Her parents were arrested. The other members of the group had escaped undetected.

Investigations

The shooter was also arrested, but released the next day at around 11.50 a.m.

The people's police department at the border police in Weimar and the district criminal police departments in Mühlhausen and Heiligenstadt came to the conclusion in their investigation reports of September 26 and 28, 1949 that the shooter had acted correctly and that he was not responsible for any wrongdoing. However, a People's Police commander wrote on September 30th that the shooter had not acted correctly, as the child who had been killed had only moved in the direction of his mother at the time of the shot, who had already stopped herself. He described Paul W. as someone who "makes the worst possible impression and (...) not the slightest regret about this incident". About a month later, the office of the then Thuringian Minister of the Interior wrote that "some members of the People's Police - especially the one who fired the shot in question - not only acted recklessly, but also criminally". Although he mentioned this statement in his statement of reasons, a senior employee of the Weimar People's Police finally decided on December 12, 1949 that the shooter had acted correctly and that the parents were to blame for the child's death, as they exposed them to the dangerous situation during the border crossing would have.

After the reunification, the case was reopened. The shooter Paul W. stated this time during the interrogations that the shot had only come off by chance. The public prosecutor saw this only as a protective claim , especially because Paul W. expressed this for the first time, in contrast to his earlier statements. The district court of Mühlhausen acquitted the shooter because, in its opinion, his statements could not be refuted.

memory

In a photo book published by the Grenzmuseum Schifflersgrund , one page is dedicated to Brigitte Frauendorf. There the full name of the shooter is also mentioned and it is mentioned that her parents were also sentenced by the GDR justice system for the loss of their daughter .

Nils Klinger, a graduate of the Kunsthochschule Kassel , won the Merck Prize of the Darmstadt Days of Photography, endowed with 5000 € , with a photo documentation Demarkation , which depicts various escape attempts . It also deals with the fate of Brigitte Frauendorfer. He writes in the explanation of the picture of aimed shots at the child.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Brigitte Frauendorf on the website of the SED State Research Association at the Free University of Berlin
  2. ↑ a b "We do everything thoroughly" ; Der Spiegel from June 24, 1991
  3. ↑ On the other hand - a photo story about the Schifflersgrund border area on issuu.com, accessed on May 26, 2016
  4. ↑ Visual Communication , page from Nils Klinger on alumni.kunsthochschulekassel.de; accessed on May 26, 2016
  5. ↑ Nils Klinger wins the Merck Prize of the Darmstadt Photography Days ( memento from May 26, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) on bildwerk3.de; accessed on May 26, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Frauendorf, Brigitte
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German victim of the dictatorship in the GDR
DATE OF BIRTH December 18, 1937
DATE OF DEATH July 26, 1949
Place of death at Kirchgandern