Hildegard Trabant

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Hildegard Trabant in the memorial window of the Berlin Wall Memorial

Hildegard Johanna Maria Trabant , née Pohl, (born June 12, 1927 in Berlin ; † August 18, 1964 there ) was a victim of the Berlin Wall . During an attempt to escape, she was discovered by two members of the GDR border troops in the area of ​​a then disused S-Bahn line between the Schönhauser Allee ( East Berlin ) and Gesundbrunnen ( West Berlin ) stations and fatally injured by a gunshot.

Residential building in Richard-Sorge-Strasse 64 (formerly Tilsiter Strasse 64) in Berlin-Friedrichshain
Entrance door to the residence at Richard-Sorge-Strasse 64, where Hildegard Trabant last lived

Life

Trabant grew up in Berlin. In the GDR she was loyal to the regime; she joined the Socialist Unity Party of Germany as an active member in the year the GDR was founded . Together with her husband, Günter Horst Trabant, a people's police officer whom she married in 1954, she lived in Berlin-Friedrichshain at Tilsiter Strasse 64 (today Richard-Sorge-Strasse 64) and worked for a municipal housing administration , where she held a managerial role as a property manager. The marriage was childless because of an abdominal surgery that made her sterile. The reasons that led the 37-year-old to flee in August 1964 were probably in the private sphere. There have been violent arguments in the past between Hildegard Trabant and her husband, including abuse and bodily harm . In February 1964, the VP member was therefore confronted by his superiors. At the time of her death, her mother was already dead, her father was in a nursing home in West Berlin, and with the exception of a Günter Pohl in Marl-Drewer , Recklinghausen district , she had no other relatives.

Attempted escape

On August 18, 1964, Günter Trabant reported in his office that he had not seen his wife since 7:00 a.m. the previous day, August 17, 1964, and that some of her clothes were missing. Also on August 18, 1964 at 6:50 p.m. she tried to escape to West Berlin via a disused S-Bahn site . After she had overcome the hinterland wall unnoticed, she was spotted by two guards while she was hiding behind bushes. After the speech she jumped up and ran back towards East Berlin . After a warning shot , one of the guards fired an aimed shot at her that hit her in the back. When hit, she collapsed and was taken to the People's Police Hospital . There she died an hour later.

In the presence of his superior, employees of the Ministry for State Security (MfS) informed the husband of the deceased the next day. He was asked in the presence of his superiors why his wife had attempted to escape. Apparently he could not or did not want to provide any information on this in the course of the conversation. They obliged him to keep silent about the circumstances of death.

funeral

Hildegard Trabant's grave in the Nordend cemetery in Berlin-Rosenthal, marked as UH Him - B102
Map of the cemetery. The location of her grave is marked in yellow.

The MfS also organized the cremation and the subsequent burial on September 23, 1964 at the Peace Ascension Cemetery (today Evangelical Cemetery in Nordend), north of Pankow in Rosenthal . The authority's intention was to keep as little information as possible about the death and its circumstances in the public eye, in order to prevent the death from becoming known in the West. She was buried in a linear grave. Their dormant period ended in 1984 and this particular part of the cemetery was rearranged. Your urn is still there, like all the urns that are buried there, but it is now under a different grave number and under a different name on the tombstone. Her grave number used to be UH Him - 234a. The "new" grave number is UH Him - B102. Of all the Berlin Wall victims who were classified as refugees, she was probably the only one who was loyal to the GDR regime.

Aftermath

Unlike many other deaths at the Berlin Wall, the death of Hildegard Trabant in West Berlin went completely unnoticed. It was not until October 1990 that the Berlin public prosecutor's office began investigations into Trabant's death. In 1997, indictments were brought against the young shooter at the time of the crime before the juvenile criminal chamber of the Berlin Regional Court . Most of the other wall rifle trials took place between 1994 and 1995. On June 10, 1998, the court sentenced the confessed shooter to a suspended sentence of 21 months. Also in contrast to almost all other deaths at the Berlin Wall, it was obvious that by the time she was actually shot, she had already given up trying to escape East Berlin and was running back to the hinterland wall to avoid imprisonment.

literature

  • Christine Brecht: Hildegard Trabant . In: The victims of the Berlin Wall 1961–1989 . Links, Berlin 2009, pp. 165–167.

Web links

Commons : Hildegard Trabant  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records, Ministry for State Security, File AS 754/70, Vol. II, No. 7, Bl. 29
  2. ↑ Annett Gröschner: From Anderer Sicht / The Other View . Hatje Cantz, 2011, ISBN 978-3-7757-3207-9 , p. 625
  3. ↑ a b c page 48 of the registration of the Nordend cemetery, Berlin-Rosenthal
  4. ↑ a b Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records, Ministry for State Security, File AS 754/70, Vol. II, No. 7, Bl. 6
  5. ↑ Federal Commissioner for Stasi Records, Ministry for State Security, File AS 754/70, Vol. II, No. 40, Bl. 5
  6. ↑ a b Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records, Ministry for State Security, File AS 754/70, Vol. II, No. 7, Bl. 5
  7. ↑ a b c d Brief portrait of Hildegard Trabant on chronik-der-mauer.de
  8. ^ Report of the GDR border troops on the attempted escape and the shooting >
personal data
SURNAME Trabant, Hildegard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Trabant, Hildegard Johanna Maria (full name); Pohl, Hildegard (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German casualty from the Berlin Wall
DATE OF BIRTH June 12, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH August 18, 1964
Place of death Berlin