Manfred Smolka

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Manfred Smolka (born November 26, 1930 in Ratibor , Silesia ; died July 12, 1960 in Leipzig ) was a German first lieutenant in the GDR border police . In 1958 he fled to Bavaria. In an attempt to bring his family to the West, the Stasi lured him into an ambush on the inner-German border in 1959 , shot him on West German territory in front of his wife and daughter and kidnapped him to the East. In a show trial initiated by the GDR State Security , he was sentenced to death in 1960 with the consent of Central Committee Secretary Honecker and Head of the Domestic Intelligence Service Mielke for "educational reasons" and executed with the guillotine .

Life

Manfred Viktor Smolka was born in Ratibor in 1930. His father, a merchant, died in 1943 in World War II . With his mother and siblings, he fled the advancing Red Army from Upper Silesia to Hohenleuben . There he worked from 1945 to 1947 as a casual and agricultural worker.

education

In 1948 Smolka joined the SED . He completed basic training with the People's Police in Greiz and was transferred to the border police , where he completed a Unterführer course in 1950 and a course for political officers in 1951. In 1955 he became the deputy political officer of his company in Titschendorf, Thuringia, on the Bavarian border. From 1956 he attended the officers' school. He then became a lieutenant in the headquarters company of the Zschachenmühle border police station .

The Smolka couple had a daughter and lived in Titschendorf.

Escape to the West and kidnapping by the Stasi

On June 17, 1958, the fifth anniversary of the popular uprising against the SED dictatorship , Smolka resisted the order to use his unit to strengthen border security so as not to harass his compatriots and the farmers in their fields in the border area without cause. Thereupon he was demoted to sergeant-major, returned to candidate status by the SED because of “party-damaging behavior” and the district council withdrew his hunting license .

On the night of November 15, 1958, Smolka fled across the green inner-German border to Bavaria and found a job as a driver in Peisel near Gummersbach in the Bergisches Land . On August 22, 1959, with the support of a border police friend, he wanted to bring his wife and daughter to the West. When he crossed the border, informers from the GDR State Security lay in wait for him in the bushes, who opened fire on him without calling. He collapsed in western territory with his thigh shot through. A Stasi riot troop abducted him to the GDR in violation of international law .

Show trial and death penalty

In order to be able to bring him to trial, the Stasi extorted a confession from Smolka, who was incarcerated in the Magdalenenstrasse detention center in Berlin , which he surprisingly revoked at the beginning of the trial. Lieutenant Colonel Neumann from Main Department IX / 6 (responsible for investigative proceedings with political significance) suggested making an example of Smolka and executing him in order to deter other employees of the border police from fleeing to the West. Central Committee Secretary Erich Honecker , Minister Erich Mielke and GDR Justice Minister Hilde Benjamin agreed to the recommendation “The procedure is suitable for imposing the death penalty on Smolka for educational reasons” . Contrary to the rule of law and contrary to the GDR's code of criminal procedure , Smolka received a politically intentional death sentence, which was prejudiced by the Stasi months before the actual main hearing, decided by the SED Politburo and then officially announced by the Erfurt District Court, instructed accordingly by messenger . In addition, it was assumed that he had spied for Western intelligence services. Smolka had previously denied all allegations against him in his defense speech. But even his public defender worked with the Stasi. Smolka's mother was refused entry to the courtroom. Instead, 65  political officers from the NVA and the police, as well as 17 Stasi officers, were forced to take part in the process that was supposed to be an “educational measure” for them.

Smolka's wife Waltraud was sentenced to four years in prison by the Erfurt District Court.

execution

Entrance to the central execution site of the GDR in Leipzig, Arndtstrasse 48

Smolka's appeal on May 6, 1960 failed. President Wilhelm Pieck rejected his mother's petition for clemency.

Smolka was on July 12, 1960 in the central place of execution Leipzig by the guillotine executed . Smolka was 29 years old at the time. His widow was not informed of the execution of her husband during her four-year imprisonment for “attempted escape from the republic” in the Hoheneck women's penal institution .

With order 357/60 of July 18, 1960, Stasi Minister Mielke had the political death sentence and its execution circulated in all MfS service units “in order to educate all employees of the ministry in such a way that they hate treason and, as Chekists, really want to overcome it work seriously on political and moral deficiencies and weaknesses ”.

Ten marks for the last wish

As the GDR's death row inmate, Smolka had one last wish that was not allowed to exceed a value of ten East German marks . Instead of a hangman's meal , he decided to write a suicide note in which he asked his family for a burial . But the Stasi withheld the letter, had Smolka anonymously burned in the crematorium as an “anatomical oak” and his ashes were taken to an unknown location. In the death certificate, Stasi helpers falsely noted a heart attack as the cause of death . The Smolka family only saw the suicide note and the trial files after the end of the GDR.

Criminal charges against Honecker for joint incitement to manslaughter

On January 29, 1990, the Smolka family went public with the case and filed an application for rehabilitation and criminal charges against Erich Honecker for joint incitement to manslaughter and perversion of justice . However, Honecker was allowed to leave for Chile on January 14, 1993, a few hours before the rehabilitation of the Smolka couple, whose judgments against them were overturned as injustice.

Judicial processing after the fall of the Wall

In 1994, the Erfurt Regional Court sentenced the now 82-year-old public prosecutor from the Smolka show trial, Paul Wieseler, to ten months' imprisonment on probation for aiding and abetting the perversion of justice and aiding and abetting intentional homicide. During the trial, Wieseler also met Ursula Franz, Manfred Smolka's daughter, but did not regret his behavior. In the grounds of the judgment it was emphasized that Wilhelm Pieck was also guilty of intentional homicide. In the course of the trial it emerged that the then border police officer Fritz Renn, who had lured Smolka into an ambush on behalf of the State Security, had received 1,000 marks from the Stasi for his information. Renn also received a suspended sentence. The other participants in the Smolka trial had already died during the GDR era.

Since the Stasi and SED files allowed the complete reconstruction of the Manfred Smolka execution case and the SED successor party, the PDS, admitted to their moral responsibility for the injustice in the GDR in an open letter to Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker , the widow sued the PDS in 1998 before the Berlin regional court for damages of 200,000 DM. PDS lawyer Eisenberg replied that Honecker could have decided the death sentence with Ms. Benjamin as a private person and not as a party official. Smolka's brother, Roland Smolka, stated in 2015 about the tape cassettes that he keeps next to the files of the sham trial: "Judges and public prosecutors strike a tone that is familiar from the People's Court ."

The political murder of Manfred Smolka is one of 166 death sentences, some of them political, that were carried out in the GDR. It joins a series of 200,000 to 250,000 political convictions to be named, e.g. B. against escaped GDR citizens or officials who were arrested or kidnapped and in some cases subsequently executed or murdered. These included Bernd Moldenhauer , Wolfgang Welsch and the Stasi officers Sylvester Murau and Werner Stiller .

Media processing

In the film Top Secret: The Central Execution Site of the GDR, broadcast by MDR and moderated by Axel Bulthaupt , the story of Smolka runs through the film as a red thread.

The MDR broadcast Damals nach der DDR (2010) dealt with the 1994 trial against the public prosecutor Wieseler from the Smolka trial, who had demanded the death sentence for Manfred Smolka.

See also

literature

  • Klaus Schmude: guillotine education: the Stasi / SED murder of Manfred Smolka . Tykve, Böblingen, ISBN 978-3-925434-69-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Exactly 55 years ago in the GDR: ex-officer Manfred Smolka is beheaded "for educational reasons". Thuringian General, July 14, 2015.
  2. ^ "Death penalty for educational reasons": How the drama about an East Thuringian ends with a judicial murder Thüringer Allgemeine, June 16, 2018
  3. ↑ a b c Manfred Smolka. Research association SED state. Free University of Berlin .; For Manfred Smolka: A stone against forgetting in Titschendorf. Ostthüringer Zeitung, May 13, 2017 (link to be paid for).
  4. ↑ "We are separated for all time" Die Zeit, March 13, 2016,
  5. ↑ a b c Education with the guillotine. How the Stasi made an example of Manfred Smolka. Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic
  6. ↑ a b Markus-Liborius Hermann: Death penalty for "educational reasons" - The Manfred Smolka case. Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Political Education Forum Thuringia. Erfurt, December 2, 2015.
  7. ↑ Karl Wilhelm Fricke: Stasi history revisionism and historical truth. "Offensive disinformation". P. 13 .; SED VICTIMS: Red traps. Focus August 24, 1998.
  8. ↑ The GDR executioner beheaded the victims in the children's room. Die Welt, October 23, 2013.
  9. ↑ Anne Hähnig: SED regime: "We are separated for all time" TIME online, March 13, 2016th
  10. ^ Eberhard Vogt: SED VICTIM: Red traps. Focus August 24, 1998.
  11. ↑ Smolka case from Titschendorf: "Death penalty for educational reasons." Thuringian General, January 22, 2015.
personal data
SURNAME Smolka, Manfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German first lieutenant of the GDR border police
DATE OF BIRTH November 26, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Racibórz , Silesia
DATE OF DEATH July 12, 1960
Place of death Leipzig