Shots at Wahlhausen
The shots at Wahlhausen were a border incident in the run-up to the turning point on the inner-German border between Hesse and Thuringia near Wahlhausen . On the night of August 17-18, 1989, strangers fired shots from a small-caliber weapon at Wahlhausen from a location in Hessen without hitting anyone. A total of 91 shots were counted. The identity of the perpetrators and the background remain unclear to this day.
Historical and geographical background
In the summer of 1989, the GDR was close to its end. Various events in the previous months, from the arrests at the Liebknecht-Luxemburg demonstration in Berlin, to the ban on Sputnik, to the fraud in the local elections in 1989, led to increased protests and dissatisfaction in the GDR. July and August 1989 were mainly shaped by the wave of embassy refugees from the GDR in Hungary and Czechoslovakia . On August 19, 1989, the pan-European picnic , a demonstration on the Hungarian-Austrian border, took place.
During this time, border soldiers were withdrawn from the border near Wahlhausen and deployed to the border with Czechoslovakia to curb the flow of refugees there. The border area on the Werra , which formed a natural border between the affected towns of Bad Sooden-Allendorf (Hesse) and Wahlhausen, was considered relatively quiet, so that a reduction in the number of border troops there was seen as unproblematic.
Shots at Wahlhausen and criminal investigations
On the night of August 17 to 18 (Thursday to Friday) 1989, shortly before midnight, shots were fired at buildings near the border in Wahlhausen for over 45 minutes. Several of these buildings were damaged, and individual projectiles hit through window panes and into the interior. However, residents were not harmed. The shots were fired exactly in a time window in which the border patrols of the Federal Border Guard took place elsewhere. Although the border surveillance of the GDR was one of the strictest in the world, there was no alarm and no information from the Federal Border Guard, the telephone line provided for this purpose between the GDR border guards and the Federal Border Guard was not used by the GDR. Instead, journalists from the current camera were on site a few hours after the crime . The Federal Border Police only found out about the incident through the publication of ADN .
Police investigations began immediately in both the east and west. The incidents in the GDR were investigated by the Ministry for State Security (MfS) instead of by the criminal police , as they were relevant to the security of the state . At the crime scene on the western side, the Hessian state police seized a total of 91 cartridge cases from a small-caliber weapon; usable traces such as footprints or the like could be found in a stubble field from which the shots were fired, as well as on the embankment where cartridge cases were also found, however do not notice. In Wahlhausen, the responsible people's police and special investigators found at least 50 hits in two houses, a border post and a church.
Representation of the incidents from the official GDR side
In the GDR, the shots were portrayed as “provocations” controlled by the West. Gerhard Müller , first secretary of the district leadership of the SED in the district of Erfurt , was quoted by ADN as saying that it was "one of the worst provocations on the border with the FRG" that occurred after the end of the war. On the morning of August 18, the Permanent Mission of the GDR protested at the Chancellery against the "serious provocative attack". This note called for immediate "measures to prevent such criminal attacks" to be initiated.
Assumptions regarding the perpetrator
Since the border troops of the GDR did not raise the alarm and a telephone line to the Federal Border Guard specially set up for such incidents was not used, as well as due to the fact that several GDR journalists were already in the sleepy place a short time after the nightly crime, and Many Wahlhausen residents, including Horst Zbierski, who later became mayor of Wahlhausen after the fall of the Wall, suspected further evidence that the GDR authorities might have taken action to distract attention from the massive problems with refugees and burgeoning protests in the country. The then responsible police chief inspector of the Werra-Meißner district in Hesse, Wolfgang Ruske, also came to this conclusion after many years of extensive research, initially professional and later also private.
After the fact, the Federal Border Police in Kassel received an anonymous tip that the shooters could be found among the participants in a party. According to this, members of a Hessian landed gentry, whose former properties and properties that were lost due to the division of Germany were on the other side of the river, had the idea, under the influence of alcohol, to blow their still existing anger about the loss with shots at the property in question and their residents do. The public prosecutor's office in Kassel followed up on the information with, among other things, a request for legal assistance to the GDR authorities to determine the ownership structure at the time, which was not answered. In February 1991 the public prosecutor in Kassel stopped investigations against unknown persons for attempted willful homicide due to a lack of usable evidence. Even the files of the Stasi that were made public after the fall of the Wall could not find any useful information.
See also
- Hartmut Ferworn , allegedly kidnapped Mitropa cook after a false report by the GDR media in September 1989
Individual evidence
- ↑ “End-time mood among generals” Thüringer Allgemeine, March 21, 2009 ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Die Zeit, September 1, 1989
- ^ Solveig Grothe: Shots on the GDR ; in: Spiegel Online
- ↑ Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, August 13, 2009
- ^ Solveig Grothe: Shots on the GDR ; in: Spiegel Online
