Johann Burianek

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Johann Burianek on May 23, 1952 in the dock in Berlin

Johann Hans Burianek (born November 16, 1913 in Düsseldorf , † August 2, 1952 in Dresden ) was a German militant resistance fighter against the SED dictatorship and a member of the combat group against inhumanity . He was sentenced to death by the GDR judiciary in a show trial for inciting boycotts after he confessed to planning an attack on a railway bridge and a passenger train. In 2005 he was rehabilitated.

Life

During the Second World War , Johann Burianek served in the Wehrmacht . In the last days of the war he arrested a supposed deserter in Berlin . For this reason he was sentenced in November 1949 to one year in prison by a court in the GDR for crimes against humanity. He served almost six months from the sentence, since the remaining sentence was suspended in April 1950.

He then found work as a driver at VEB Secura-Mechanik Berlin. Between July 1950 and March 1951 he smuggled several thousand copies of the SPD-related magazines Kleiner Telegraf and Tarantel into East Berlin . In March 1951 he was recruited by the Combat Group against Inhumanity (KgU), on whose behalf he distributed leaflets, collected information and transported letters and carried out unsuccessful arson attacks.

The Ministry for State Security (MfS) imprisoned Burianek after his arrest on March 5, 1952 in the "U-Boot" , its central remand prison in Berlin. In consultation with the Central Committee of the SED , a large show trial was prepared before the Supreme Court of the GDR (OG). Burianek's biggest project, according to his own statement, was the demolition of a railway bridge near Erkner , scheduled for February 21, 1952 , in order to derail the Blue Express , the express train Berlin-Warsaw-Moscow. He had accepted the death of people. The combat group against inhumanity handed him the explosives for this attack . It stayed with planning because no suitable vehicle could be procured. Emissaries from the KgU had picked up the explosive case deposited in Burianek's apartment, allegedly to blow up a railway bridge near Berlin-Spindlersfeld .

On May 15, 1952, chaired by Hilde Benjamin , the OG accused Burianek of being "agents of the combat group against inhumanity" and on May 25, passed his first death sentence against him . Burianek was a good two months later in the central place of execution of the GDR in Dresden with that guillotine executed that even during the Nazi dictatorship had been used.

Work-up

On the urn grove Tolkewitz , where Burianek's ashes were put, a memorial plaque in the “Memorial for the executed victims of the Stalinist tyranny on Münchner Platz” has been commemorating him since the 1990s.

The Berlin district court rehabilitated Burianek in 2005 on the initiative of the working group on August 13th due to the criminal rehabilitation law for "serious disregard of elementary material regulations" and declared the death sentence to be unlawful.

When Wolfgang Schmidt , a former lieutenant colonel of the MfS, referred to Burianek on his website as a “bandit” and “member of a terrorist organization”, the then director of the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial, Hubertus Knabe , filed a criminal complaint against him for denigrating the memory of deceased people . As a result, the Tiergarten District Court sentenced Schmidt in 2012 to a fine. The next highest instances , the Berlin Regional Court and the Court of Appeal , 2013 confirmed the verdict. In response to Schmidt's constitutional complaint , the Federal Constitutional Court overturned both decisions in January 2018 because it recognized a violation of fundamental rights through insufficient consideration of the political context of an expression of opinion , and referred the matter back to the regional court for a new decision.

According to Knabe, the death sentences against Burianek and Wolfgang Kaiser are "one of the darkest chapters of the SED justice system, because it was not about the prosecution of acts, but about plans that were then punished in this drastic manner for political reasons" .

literature

Web links

Commons : Johann Burianek  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hubertus Knabe : The perpetrators are among us: on the glossing over of the SED dictatorship , p. 277.
  2. ↑ Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk:  Burianek, Johann . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
  3. ^ A b c Karl Wilhelm Fricke , Roger Engelmann : Concentrated blows , p. 86
  4. ^ Judgment of the Supreme Court of the GDR of May 25, 1952 against Burianek (1 Zst (I) 6/52) published in decisions of the Supreme Court of the German Democratic Republic , Volume 1 (1952), Deutscher Zentralverlag, pages 230-280
  5. ↑ Information ( Memento of the original from December 19, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. of the Federal Archives on the journal Tarantel  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.bundesarchiv.de
  6. ↑ Enrico Heitzer: Koestler, Orwell and "The Truth": The Combat Group Against Inhumanity (KgU) and secret reading in the Soviet Zone / GDR 1948 to 1959 . In: Siegfried Lokatis ; Inge Sonntag (Ed.): Secret Readers in the GDR: Control and Distribution of Unauthorized Literature , Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-86153-494-5 , pp. 140–155; here p. 147. on Google Books
  7. ↑ Falco Werkentin: Political criminal justice in the Ulbricht era: From confessing terror to covered repression , Ch. Links Verlag, 1997, ISBN 978-3-86153-150-0 . on Google Books , there also to the following
  8. ↑ a b c Stasi colonel convicted of falsifying history , Die Welt , March 26, 2013
  9. ^ Resolution of the 3rd Chamber of the First Senate of January 24, 2018 Az. 1 BvR 2465/13, NJW 2018, 770
  10. ^ Justice as a sword in the class struggle Interview of the MDR with Hubertus Knabe from August 4, 2013
personal data
SURNAME Burianek, Johann
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Burianek, Johann Hans (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German militant resistance fighter against the SED dictatorship and member of the combat group against inhumanity, show trial victim of the GDR justice system
DATE OF BIRTH November 16, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Dusseldorf
DATE OF DEATH 2nd August 1952
Place of death Dresden