Rudi Arnstadt
Rudi Arnstadt (born September 3, 1926 in Erfurt ; † August 14, 1962 near Wiesenfeld ) was a captain of the border troops of the GDR who was shot by an officer of the Federal Border Police (BGS) in an incident on the inner German border in 1962 . While the state propaganda of the GDR elevated him to a folk hero and martyr , the West German side stopped their investigation into the Arnstadt death case on the grounds that he had been shot in self-defense . The name of the shooter remained a secret until 1996. There was no final clarification of the question of guilt in the reunified Germany. Arnstadt's death came back into the public eye in 1998 with the murder of the former BGS official. The murder case gave rise to speculation about motives for revenge, but could not be clarified either.
Life
Origin and youth
Rudi Arnstadt was an illegitimate child. He grew up in a foster family in Erfurt. Both foster parents joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) around 1928 . After 1946 the foster mother was a teacher at a party school of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED).
After attending elementary school , Arnstadt worked in a foundry in Erfurt until he was drafted into the Reich Labor Service in 1943 and the same year he was drafted into the Wehrmacht . During World War II he fought as an infantryman until 1945. Three months after the end of the war, Arnstadt returned to Erfurt from British captivity. Initially a worker again, he then completed an apprenticeship as a painter . He became a member of the Free German Youth (FDJ) and joined the SED in October 1947. In February 1948 Arnstadt married a seventeen year old named Christine. The marriage had three children, one of whom soon died.
Arnstadt as a border policeman
In June 1949, Arnstadt reported for service with the People's Police (VP). He was assigned as a candidate for the VP of Readiness Gotha , from where he came to the Dermbach border readiness of the German border police in March 1950 . In 1952, Arnstadt's first attempt at becoming an officer at the Sondershausen Police School failed . His marriage ended in divorce in 1953. The two children Veronika and Uwe stayed with their mother. A little later, Arnstadt married a second time. After attending the police school with success, he was promoted to lieutenant in 1954 and to lieutenant in 1955.
Initially active in Erfurt as a recruiter for the border troops, Arnstadt became company commander of the 6th border company of the Dermbach border readiness in 1957 . Arnstadt's border section was near Wiesenfeld in the Rhön . This area of the Warsaw Pact , which protrudes furthest to the west, aroused the special interest of NATO as the Fulda Gap . Not far from Wiesenfeld, the US Army's Point Alpha observation base was later located on Rasdorfer Berg .
Arnstadt moved to Wiesenfeld with his wife. There, in April 1957, the Ministry for State Security (MfS) recruited him as a secret informator (GI). While Arnstadt was advancing to lieutenant, the Stasi broke off contact with him in June 1958. In 1961 the Arnstadt couple moved into the evacuated house 25. The previous owner had been forcibly relocated to Saxony with his family as an “arch-Catholic father” and “extremely reactionary” as part of the Kornblume campaign .
In the same year Arnstadt was promoted to captain. He had received good reviews and had won several awards, including the Medal for Exemplary Border Service . The BGS assessed Arnstadt as “very strict and correct” and his company as one of the “best and most reliable”. Although the MfS disliked Arnstadt “an excessive amount of zeal” and furthermore that he did not understand how to “gain the trust [of his soldiers]”, it planned his recruitment as GI in March 1962.
Arnstadt's death
The situation on site
Just before the anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall , the GDR propaganda had heated the political mood. The "anti-fascist protective wall" erected in the previous year saved world peace. But now the “Bonn Ultras” have developed a “program for acts of violence”. The "agent headquarters in West Berlin", the place of work of "Adenauer's Gauleiter" Willy Brandt , intended terrorist attacks and would assemble "entire gangs of fascist and criminal elements". Increased operational readiness was ordered for the border troops . The anniversary passed without any significant incidents and the increased operational readiness was lifted on August 14 at 8 a.m.
In Arnstadt's border section near Wiesenfeld, from the beginning of August 1962 pioneers of the National People's Army of the GDR (NVA) were busy building a barbed wire double fence as a new border barrier under flags and banners . Arnstadt's company had to supervise this work in the front line. A platoon leader of the border troops had already used this situation in Arnstadt's area of responsibility to desert to West Germany . On August 9th, an NVA pioneer followed him by rolling over the border at the wheel of a recently introduced Soviet artillery tractor ATS-59G .
On August 14, 1962, officers of the BGS observed the action on the West German side with a force of force . They were also given the task of keeping onlookers away if they were to try to provoke the GDR border guards from the Setzelbach - Rasdorf road that ran parallel to the border . American soldiers and several officers from the customs inspection service and Hessian tax authorities in plain clothes were also present .
The fatal incident
The fatal incident is difficult to reconstruct because a public prosecutor's investigation file in the GDR was either incomplete or never existed. The investigation results of the murder investigation commission (MUK) of the VP from Suhl , the MfS and the National People's Army (NVA) are only incomplete. There are no interrogations of eyewitnesses, evidence of evidence , crime scene photos, information on the shots fired and the autopsy report .
Criminalists from Huenfeld and BGS officers and members of the MUK and the border troops began to investigate on site shortly after the incident. The latter demonstratively ignored verbal offers of the West German investigators to cooperate. In the GDR, the General Public Prosecutor's Office in Berlin took on the investigation. Because the West German investigators had inferred from the conversations of the GDR investigators operating within earshot that the shot by a BGS member had been fatal, the public prosecutor in Fulda initiated an investigation into an unnatural death .
West German investigation
According to West German investigations, on August 14, 1962, BGS captain Meißner had to walk the border between Setzelbach and Wiesenfeld. The purpose of the patrol was to prepare an inspection of the construction work by the inspector of the BGS, Alfred Samlowski . Meissner were assigned the chief hunters Hans Plüschke and Dieter Stief. At one point the border was not straight, but jumped a few meters to the west over a length of about 50 meters, while the 10-meter strip and the GDR Postenweg continued straight ahead without any kinks. A Hessian farmer illegally slammed the narrow GDR territory into his field. The boundary stone that marked the northern end of the strip could only be recognized up close in the tall grain there. The BGS chief hunters Dieter Koch and Klaus Fischer had taken up posts close to this boundary stone.
When Meißner's patrol along the border approached Koch and Fischer at around 11:05 a.m., Arnstadt, who had jumped up from the ground, called them from the side, about 20 meters away, diagonally from behind. Meißner turned around as he walked, saw Arnstadt aim at him, heard a bullet whistle past him, and threw himself to the ground. Plüschke, who was walking behind Meißner, also heard the shot and saw how Arnstadt had drawn his pistol and brought it towards Meißner. Like Stief, Fischer and Koch, he said that Meißner fell to the ground because the shot hit him. In order to prevent Arnstadt from shooting Meißner a second time, Plüschke tore his FN rifle from his shoulder and fired a German shot at Arnstadt from the hip . Hit this fell backwards. Immediately afterwards, a GDR border guard and cook started a brief exchange of fire. Those involved on both sides, who quickly took cover on the ground or in the high grain, were unharmed.
Based on the investigations of the criminal police and the BGS, the Fulda public prosecutor's office came to the conclusion that the patrol had moved into FRG territory when Arnstadt fired a “probably targeted shot” at Meißner over the demarcation line. The shot at Arnstadt was therefore considered self-defense, whereupon on October 8, 1962, the Fulda Public Prosecutor stopped the investigation against Plüschke. In December, the unsuccessful preliminary investigation against the unknown GDR border guards, who had also shot, was discontinued.
Investigations in the GDR
It was found that Arnstadt had appeared at the border on the morning of August 14 to check his soldiers. It is unclear whether he rejected BGS members at the later scene of the crime because of a border violation at the confusing area and then decided to arrest a BGS member when crossing the border again, or whether he wanted to catch a BGS officer there from the outset. In any case, Arnstadt posted his driver Karlheinz Roßner a little to the side and gave him the order to fire a warning shot if border violators should not stop when he called. Arnstadt himself sat down next to two border officers sitting on the floor and waited.
When a BGS patrol crossed the border line with the GDR, Arnstadt called them. When she did not react, his escort, Roßner, fired a submachine gun into the air, and Arnstadt fired a warning shot into the ground with his pistol. In contrast to later GDR reports, only a first report by the NVA border troops mentions this shot. Even the head of state and party, Walter Ulbricht , who was on vacation , learned of a warning shot by Arnstadt through his deputy Erich Honecker , who had received the first report from the NVA border troops. After the warning shot (s), the BGS members tore their weapons off their shoulders and fired them specifically at Arnstadt and Roßner, only to then withdraw to West German territory under mutual fire protection when a short shooting developed .
Arnstadt had been shot between the bridge of his nose and his right eye. Arnstadt died while being transported to Geisa . Koch or Meißner were named as shooters.
The district administration of Suhl of the MfS reported the incident to Minister Erich Mielke . The Ministry of the Interior presented a first internal report the following day.
At the beginning of September 1962, the Meiningen public prosecutor passed a message from the Stasi to the attorney general, who had known the shooter's name since August 16 through a secret employee . The message, in which the name of the perpetrator was missing, contained the announcement that further “material” would be received from the MfS in the next few days. Nothing has been handed down on the delivery or the content of the announced material.
The GDR investigations had no legal consequences. They were not enough to bring charges against the two BGS members known by name. The GDR authorities never determined the name of the shooter Plüschke.
The reports of the incident that were officially distributed in the GDR differed from the results of the investigation, which had been kept secret.
First reports and further consequences
After a short time, American helicopters were circling over the scene of the incident, combat alarms were triggered on both sides of the border and troops with armored vehicles took up positions. Reports went through the US Embassy in Bonn to the United States Department of State in Washington, DC
In West Germany, regional and national media reported on the incident the following day based on a short press release from the BGS. The very first report suggested a connection between Arnstadt's attempt at arrest and the transfer of the Soviet artillery tractor to West Germany. Did Arnstadt intend to exchange an arrested BGS officer for the tractor? The suspicion intensified reports from refugees that Arnstadt had been reprimanded for the two desertions in his area of responsibility and that rumors of the failed exchange were circulating among the border troops. Arnstadt was therefore a victim of his ambition.
The fact that Roßner had fired the first shot had not been noticed by any BGS member. At the end of 1964, the central registration office in Salzgitter recorded the detailed testimony of a refugee police officer who, as a member of the border troops of the GDR, had witnessed the incident in August 1962, according to which Arnstadt had neither fired first nor at all, but his escort Roßner. The Fulda public prosecutor's office, which had been informed of this, only opened investigative proceedings against Roßner in 1966, warned by the registration office, in order to close it a little later “because of the absence of the accused”. Roßner's shot was still not taken into account in the West German investigations.
A few days after the incident on August 17, 1962, the public death of Peter Fechter at the Berlin Wall forever dwarfed the border incident near Wiesenfeld in West German perception.
Arnstadt as a folk hero and martyr
In the GDR, the incident did not become public knowledge until the evening of August 15. Horst Sindermann , head of the agitation department at the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany , appeared in the weekly television program Treffpunkt Berlin , moderated by the chief commentator of GDR television, Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler . In contrast to the results of the investigation, Sindermann informed that on August 14th, BGS members, apparently “drunk”, “marched” in company strength at the border. There they would have provoked the GDR border guards after "inflammatory speeches", would have "constantly" gone to the border and finally crossed it with the three of them. After a call and a warning shot by GDR border guards, Rudi Arnstadt was then murdered by BGS members "from the territory of the GDR" with "targeted volleys".
The SED propaganda ensured that Sindermann's version became the basis of public perception in the GDR. The incident experienced imaginative embellishments and exaggerations in the press reports published from August 16. Arnstadt was said to have been “cowardly and deliberately murdered” in cold blood by BGS members in GDR territory when he tried to speak to them. “Agents” would have given out “plenty of alcohol” to the later murderers and then “ordered” the crime. It was a "targeted provocation of the Bonn Ultras", those responsible were " Adenauer , Lübke and Strauss ", who belonged to a "regime of war provocateurs , bomb throwers and murderers", and with the "planned assassination " an "armed clash." of unpredictable scope ”wanted to bring about. The reporting of the GDR brought Arnstadt's death in connection with that of Corporal Peter Göring on May 23, 1962 at the Berlin Wall . Goering had shelled West Berlin area during the “extermination of a border violator” and was fatally hit by a ricochet when West Berlin police officers returned fire. The GDR described both incidents as "murders" and withheld the fact that GDR border guards had always shot first.
Already on August 16, the SED central organ Neues Deutschland assured : “... we hurl [our hatred] in the faces of the murderers with the holy oath: The German working class will not forget! The murderers will not escape their punishment. ”From September 1962 onwards a plaque facing west proclaimed at the scene of the incident:“ At this point, Captain Rudi Arnstadt ... was murdered by mercenaries of West German militarism. His murderers, members of the BGS dept. Hünfeld, will not escape their just punishment ”.
Until the end of the GDR, written accounts as well as mourning and annual commemorations described Arnstadt as a martyr. Arnstadt's driver and escort Roßner was only partially presentable at the cult events. In a first television interview, his statements were "obviously" cut and he had to be prematurely released from the service of the border troops. In a testimony he stated in 1994 that it was not clear to him “why Arnstadt wanted to force this arrest in this way.” In order to make Arnstadt appear as a happy family man, his children were already in contact with the father lost in preschool age, included in cult events. Over the years, the warning shot disappeared from the representations and Arnstadt became a murder victim shot “from behind” when the BGS “penetrated” into the GDR and “opened fire on the posts of our border troops”.
Portraits of Arnstadt were created by visual artists Hans Hattop (1924–2001) in 1968, Werner Schwarz (1924–2010) under the title In memoriam Rudi Arnstadt in 1971, 1984 and 1986, and in 1983 Lutz R. Ketscher with the large-format painting Class Commission of the soldier in the socialist army, tradition and legacy of Rudi Arnstadt .
The Arnstadt case in reunified Germany
The end of SED rule in the GDR resulted in an abrupt end to the Arnstadt cult. In February 1990 his memorial stone disappeared from the plinth in Geisa , only to be replaced in the 1991 carnival season by the fully plastic heraldic animal of the local carnival association , a jumping goat . Everywhere in the GDR memorial plaques were removed and streets and institutions that had been named after Arnstadt were always renamed against the resistance of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). In their environment, the tradition of Arnstadt remained alive, albeit subdued by the tacit withdrawal of particularly fanciful claims, such as the previous serving of alcohol to the "murderers". Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler informed his readers in 1994 that he had “known” Arnstadt, whom the BGS chief hunter Koch had “literally riddled with a submachine gun”.
Former members of the border troops and the state security organized in the Society for Legal and Humanitarian Support eV reported in 1996 to the Berlin public prosecutor's office the "BGS-Grenzoberjäger Koch" as a shooter. The attorney and former MfS officer commissioned by them, Frank Osterloh , received a mandate from Veronika Arnstadt, and in June 1996 received access to the investigation files. This was the first time his clients found out about Plüschke's role. Osterloh asserted the "lack of important evidence" against the Berlin public prosecutor's office, whereupon they commenced investigative proceedings into the Arnstadt death case, which they referred to the Meiningen public prosecutor's office for responsibility.
Without an examination, it assumed that the fatal shot had been fired in Hessian territory, and in December 1997 passed the proceedings on to the Fulda public prosecutor's office. In an interrogation, Roßner denied both that Arnstadt had fired and that he himself had aimed at the BGS team. Nevertheless, the Fulda public prosecutor closed the proceedings at the beginning of May 1998 with reference to their investigation results and the evaluation of GDR files from 1962.
On the 35th anniversary of the incident in August 1997, Arnstadt's shooter, Plüschke, stepped out of his anonymity in the newspaper Die Welt and in the hessenschau . He left the BGS in 1970 and set up a taxi company in Hünfeld. In the TV report, he reported on his years of fear that exposing himself would not only endanger himself, but also his family.
On March 15, 1998, Plüschke was killed while working near Wiesenfeld when he was shot in the head in the right eye. The act was not a taxi murder , because Plüschke's wallet had remained untouched. Rather, the location and type of fatal injury indicated an act of revenge against Plüschke as Arnstadt's shooter. This prompted suspicions in the press, such as the Superillu spread under the heading “Is the Stasi still alive?”. Despite intensive investigations, the awarding of a high reward, and the contribution in the Germany-wide Sat.1 telecast investigation file the murder of Plüschke and thus the question of an act of revenge remained unresolved.
In 2010, the Erfurt honorary grave charter placed Arnstadt's grave under monumental protection as a “testimony to GDR history” .
literature
- Jan Schönfelder, Rainer Erices : Rudi Arnstadt is a matter of death. Between education and propaganda. Bussert & Stadeler publishing house, Jena, Quedlinburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-942115-19-3 .
- Herbert Böckel: The double death in the shadow of the border. Self-published 2012, ISBN 978-3-00-037161-5 .
- Arnstadt's biography in the SED State research association at the Free University of Berlin
Individual evidence
- ↑ Different information on the reason for the termination in Schönfelder / Erices (lit.), p. 20 and in the biography of the research association (lit.)
- ↑ Quotations from Schönfelder / Erices (Lit.), p. 19
- ↑ Schönfelder / Erices (lit.), p. 20 f.
- ↑ Quotations from Schönfelder / Erices (Lit.), pp. 12-14.
- ↑ The later paved Kolonnenweg has been preserved at the location of the incident as a junction from position 15 of the Point Alpha Weg .
- ↑ Quotation from the investigation report of the criminal police to the public prosecutor, see Schönfelder / Erices (lit.), p. 39
- ↑ Schönfelder / Erices (lit.), p. 28 f.
- ↑ See also the statements of a contemporary witness from the Arnstadt company in an interview with the Bavarian TV in 1991 with Herbert Böckel: The double death in the shadow of the border. (Lit.), p. 43 f.
- ↑ Quotation from the reasoning in the letter to the registration office, see Schönfelder / Erices (Lit.), p. 49
- ^ Sindermann quotes in Schönfelder / Erices (lit.), p. 55
- ↑ Quotations from Schönfelder / Erices (Lit.), pp. 60–62
- ^ Quotation in Schönfelder / Erices (Lit.), p. 58
- ^ Wording of the table in Schönfelder / Erices (Lit.), p. 62
- ↑ Quotation from Schönfelder / Erices (Lit.), p. 109
- ↑ Schönfelder / Erices (lit.), p. 62, also with further examples
- ↑ Schönfelder / Erices (Lit.), p. 92, with provenance information
- ↑ Schönfelder / Erices (lit.), p. 102; the place was later redesigned
- ↑ Examples in Schönfelder / Erices (Lit.), pp. 116–121, on Schnitzler, p. 120
- ↑ For the following see Schönfelder / Erices (lit.), p. 112 f.
- ^ Quotation in Schönfelder / Erices (Lit.), 125 f.
- ↑ http://www.erfurt.de/mam/ef/rathaus/stadtrecht/6/6825.pdf
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Arnstadt, Rudi |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German captain of the border troops of the GDR |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 3, 1926 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Erfurt |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 14, 1962 |
| Place of death | Meadow field |