Marienetta Jirkowsky

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Marienetta Jirkowsky in the memorial window of the Berlin Wall Memorial

Marienetta Jirkowsky (born August 25, 1962 in Bad Saarow-Pieskow , † November 22, 1980 in Hennigsdorf ) was a victim of the Berlin Wall . She was shot by border guards of the GDR while trying to escape on the Berlin Wall between Hohen Neuendorf and Berlin-Frohnau and succumbed to her injuries shortly afterwards.

View of the family grave of the Jirkowsky family, Spreenhagen cemetery
Marienetta Jirkowsky's last residence before her death in 1980 at Birkenweg 13, Spreenhagen
White Crosses Memorial - the second cross from the right is dedicated to Marienetta Jirkowsky
Memorial stele for Marienetta Jirkowsky in Hohen Neuendorf, in the background former wall strips with the crime scene (as of April 2014)
The window of remembrance . In one of the windows in the right third of the memorial there is a photo commemorating Marienetta Jirkowsky
Marienetta-Jirkowsky-Platz in Hohen Neuendorf
Memorial plaque on Marienetta-Jirkowsky-Platz in Hohen Neuendorf

Life

She was the only child of the trained bricklayer Klaus Jirkowsky and his wife Astrid and spent her childhood in Spreenhagen ; her last place of residence was Birkenweg 13 in Spreenhagen. During school she had little contact with classmates, helped in her free time in an old people's home in the neighboring village and was very popular with the elderly. In 1979 she began training as a textile worker in the Fürstenwalde tire combine , where her mother also worked. At the age of 18, she got engaged to the 24-year-old Peter W. He was divorced, drank a lot, changed jobs and had come into conflict with the law several times in the past. The relationship between the two was ambivalent; Several times, Peter W. became violent towards his fiancée, who nevertheless felt drawn to him. A marriage was refused by her parents, who also called the authorities for help and obtained a police ban against Peter W.

Attempted escape

Peter W. and Marienetta Jirkowsky and their mutual friend Falko Vogt planned their escape over the Berlin Wall for the night of November 22nd to 23rd, 1980. To find a convenient place to escape, they drove on the evening of November 21st. November to Hohen Neuendorf . Little did they suspect that they were being searched for at that time, as Peter W. had reported the plans to a friend in a pub in Fürstenwalde / Spree that afternoon . This was an unofficial employee (IM) of the Ministry for State Security (MfS) , who immediately informed his department, which initiated an immediate search.

While exploring the border area north of the West Berlin district of Frohnau , they were able to seize two ladders on land, so that they spontaneously decided to flee that evening. As the breakthrough point, they chose a location on the western edge of the embankment of the Berlin-Frohnau - Hohen Neuendorf S-Bahn line, which was closed at the time , exactly in the middle between observation towers 20 and 21 in security section III of the border installations there. At around 3:40 a.m. they climbed the hinterland wall with the help of the ladder section of a stepladder that had previously been dismantled. They climbed the following border signal fence, which was covered with barbed wire, with the help of the second ladder, a stepladder . Due to a malfunction of the signal fence, the three border refugees initially overcame the fence unnoticed. Only after Jirkowsky was the last to climb over the signal fence and the ladder fell over, the alarm was triggered. Now they only had the support part of the first, dismantled stepladder with which they ran towards the last border wall. Jirkowsky tripped and fell while overcoming a guardrail behind the Kolonnenweg that acted as a vehicle barrier .

When they reached the last border wall, which was around 3.5 meters high, they found that the ladder part they had carried did not reach the edge of the wall. Falko Vogt overcame the wall without any problems and immediately jumped to the west. Peter W. also climbed the wall without any problems, but stayed flat on the rounded edge of the wall to pull Jirkowsky up. Due to her smaller stature, she had not been able to reach the edge of the wall. During this attempt, Jirkowsky, who was still standing on the last rung of the ladder, was shot and fell back into the death strip.

After the alarm was triggered, the then 20-year-old guard post of the border troops first fired a warning shot from observation tower 21, which is about 160 meters away, before he aimed his Kalashnikov , which was set on continuous fire, at the refugees. The second border post also fired from the tower a little later, but according to his own statements he aimed the weapon in the treetops of the trees on the West Berlin side. The two border guards at the other observation tower 20 about 200 meters away were used that night as a commuting patrol with a dog . After the alarm was triggered, both ran with the dog in the direction of the signal. After the dog refused to order the border refugees, the guard leader of tower 20 also shot the refugees.

27 shots were fired at Jirkowsky, which hit her abdominal organs. After the rescue by border guards, emergency care was carried out on site by the regimental doctor of the border troops. He delivered the injured person in a border troop ambulance to the Friedrich Wolf district hospital in Hennigsdorf, nine kilometers away . In doing so, the regimental doctor disregarded a regulation of the Central Border Command and the MfS, which provided for injured border refugees to be transferred either to the Drewitz Army Hospital or the Berlin People's Police Hospital . The reasons for this procedure were possibly the severity of the injuries or the young age of Marienetta Jirkowsky. In addition, the Drewitz Army Hospital , which also had no intensive care unit, was about 45 kilometers away, and the Berlin People's Police Hospital about 25 kilometers from the crime scene. The decision of the regimental doctor to transport Jirkowsky to the nearby Hennigsdorf hospital was accordingly criticized in a later evaluation by the Stasi, as a larger group of people learned of the attempted border breach through his admission to a civilian hospital.

Despite emergency surgery and intensive therapy, Marienetta Jirkowsky died around 11:30 a.m. as a result of the gunshot wounds.

Aftermath

On November 22, 1980, Jirkowsky's father was summoned to the Fürstenwalde People's Police , where he was informed that his daughter had been arrested in the border area with West Berlin. He was only informed of his daughter's death two days later. The family was not allowed to post an obituary notice. In order to encourage the grieving parents to remember their daughter as negative as possible, the MfS put a total of five IMs on them. Astrid Jirkowsky's family doctor at the time was particularly successful among these IMs. The burial took place on December 14, 1980 in the Spreenhagen cemetery, which was almost completely cordoned off by employees of the State Security.

After their escape, Peter W. and Falko Vogt gave detailed interviews in West Berlin media and erected a memorial cross for Marienetta Jirkowsky at the breakthrough in Frohnau. The MfS therefore immediately attacked the men with four IMs operating in West Berlin, including Gero Hilliger (code name “ IMB Brunnen”). These were supposed to gain the trust of the two of them and encourage them to get into debt so that they could later expose and criminalize them. During their spying, the IM got the information that the men were trying to get hold of a photo of Marienetta Jirkowsky through a correspondent for Stern magazine who was accredited in the GDR in order to publish it. Warned by the IM, the MfS then confiscated all photos, ID cards and other documents of Marienetta Jirkowsky from her family, friends and acquaintances. It was not until 2010 that the images and documents confiscated at the time were found in a hidden collection of the BStU archives .

In March 1981, Hilliger dismantled and stolen the memorial cross that had been erected in Frohnau, secretly brought it to the GDR and handed it over to his commanding officer.

After German reunification , the then post leader of the observation tower 21 was sentenced to a prison term of 15 months on probation for manslaughter in a less serious case in a wall rifle trial conducted in 1995 by the juvenile criminal chamber of the Neuruppin district court . Another alleged gunman, the then post leader of observation tower 20, was not charged because he could not be found and the court assumed that he had already died.

Different spellings of names

Marienetta Jirkowsky's name was spelled differently in literature, at memorial sites, but also in personal writings and official documents. This is probably due to the fact that she wrote out her name in handwritten documents, often changed in the variant “Marinetta”. Her surname, which is mentioned several times in the literature and also in personal documents such as the photo ID of the apprentice dormitory as "Jirkowski", corresponds to a variant of the name that is more common in Germany. Her correct name, which was given on her identity card and which is also on the tombstone of the family grave in Spreenhagen, is Marienetta Jirkowsky.

Commemoration

The fate of Marienetta Jirkowsky, who was only 18 years old, is remembered in various places today. Her name can be found on one of the 14 crosses of the White Crosses Memorial on the Reichstagufer in Berlin (spelling “Marinetta Jirkowski”).

The renaming of a square in Hohen Neuendorf in memory of her was planned by the city council in 2009, but was vehemently rejected by Jirkowsky's aunt Bärbel Kultus. This aunt acted as the spokesperson for the family, since both of Jirkowsky's parents had passed away. The aunt said it was no merit to have died on the wall. In 2010 it became known that this aunt, in addition to her previous work as a GDR local politician, had also been an employee of the GDR Ministry for State Security from 1970 (code name " GMS Bärbel"). After the aunt's objection, a controversial debate broke out within the various political camps of the Hohen Neuendorf city council. The central point of contention was the question of whether the public interest in the memory of the Wall Dead outweighed the privacy of the people concerned or their families. After months of struggle, the decision was finally confirmed by the city council. On August 13, 2010, the square, a roundabout on federal highway 96 , was renamed.

Very close to this square ( location ), and only a few meters from the crime scene at the time, a memorial stele with her name was erected on Florastraße (spelling “Marinetta Jirkowsky”).

Since May 2010, a picture of Marienetta Jirkowsky is in one of the windows of the Memorial of Remembrance window of the Berlin Wall Memorial at Bernauer Strasse in Berlin.

On August 13, 2011, the 50th anniversary of the construction of the Wall , a small memorial plaque was inaugurated on Marienetta-Jirkowsky-Platz in Hohen Neuendorf.

Web links

Commons : Marienetta Jirkowsky  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Cinematic reception

  • Alexander Lahl, Izabela Plucińska (Die Kulturingenieure): Micki , D 2014, 5:30 min, short animation film, film on Vimeo , film on YouTube .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Spiegel Online: Victims of the Wall: Marienetta's Lost Pictures , August 13, 2010.
  2. ↑ a b c d Stefan Appelius: The two deaths of Marienetta Jirkowsky. In: Einestages - Zeitgeschichten on Spiegel Online . March 24, 2010, accessed October 17, 2011 .
  3. ↑ a b Jeanette Bederke: The two deaths of Marienetta Jirkowsky . Commemoration. In: Berliner Morgenpost . February 28, 2011.
  4. ↑ a b MfS evaluation of the escape attempt on www.chronik-der-mauer.de
  5. ↑ a b c Jürgen Liebezeit: Too much ammunition used pointlessly . The dramatic hours on the night of November 21st to November 22nd, 1980 / attempted reconstruction. In: Oranienburger Generalanzeiger . December 8, 1995.
  6. ^ A b Hannelore Strehlow: The dangerous way to freedom: Escape attempts from the former district of Potsdam . Ed .: Brandenburg State Center for Political Education; The Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR, Potsdam branch. Potsdam 2004, ISBN 3-932502-42-6 .
  7. ^ Photo of the observation tower 21. In: Einestages - Zeitgeschichten on Spiegel Online. Retrieved October 18, 2011 .
  8. ↑ portrait Marienetta Jirkowskys on www.chronik-der-mauer.de
  9. ↑ a b c Stefan Appelius: Marienetta's lost pictures. In: Einestages - Zeitgeschichten on Spiegel Online. August 13, 2010, accessed October 18, 2011 .
  10. ^ Sven Felix Kellerhoff : How the Stasi was active in West Germany. In: The world . August 7, 2010, accessed December 11, 2010 .
  11. ↑ See progress report on enemy actions in connection with the border breakthrough to West Berlin by [names blackened], April 3, 1981, in: BStU, MfS, Secretary Neiber No. 263, Bl. 11-13.
  12. ↑ See judgment of the Neuruppin Regional Court in the criminal case against Detlev S. and Werner St., Az. 12 Ks 61 Js 109/94 (61/94), of December 19, 1995, in: StA Neuruppin, Az. 61 Js 109 / 94, Vol. 4, pp. 77-80.
  13. ↑ The correct spelling of the name can be found on the inscription on the tombstone in Spreenhagen ( Memento from 7 July 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  14. ↑ Marienetta's lost pictures. Retrieved on October 19, 2011 (see note on different spellings of names).
  15. ↑ Marlene Goetz: Remembrance of victims of the Berlin Wall: Nothing is forgotten in Hohen Neuendorf. In: taz.de. November 8, 2010, accessed December 5, 2013 .
  16. ^ Claus-Dieter Steyer: Victims of the Wall honored - despite the family's objection. In: Der Tagesspiegel . March 30, 2010, accessed October 18, 2011 .
  17. ^ Ceremonial inauguration of the memorial plaque to Marienetta Jirkowsky - the city commemorated the victims of the Wall on the 50th anniversary of the construction of the Wall. (PDF) In: Nordbahn-Nachrichten. September 24, 2011, p. 1 , archived from the original ; Retrieved October 18, 2011 .
personal data
SURNAME Jirkowsky, Marienetta
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German casualty from the Berlin Wall
DATE OF BIRTH August 25, 1962
PLACE OF BIRTH Bad Saarow
DATE OF DEATH November 22, 1980
Place of death Hennigsdorf