Illegal border crossing under GDR law
The illegal border crossing was in the GDR with the entry into force of the Criminal Code of the German Democratic Republic on 1 July 1968 in accordance with § 213 of the Criminal Code of the GDR a criminal offense, for which "minor cases" penalties of a fine of up to two years in prison and in "serious cases" Punishments of one to eight years imprisonment were provided. In official and propaganda language , after the law was passed, the “illegal border crossing” took the place of the “ republic flight ” as a term for an escape from the GDR , but was comparatively uncommon.
Until then, according to § 8 of the passport law of the GDR of September 15, 1954, anyone who had left the territory of the German Democratic Republic abroad without a permit, or had prepared or attempted to do so, had made himself a criminal offense.
description
The criminal offense that violated human rights , in particular Articles 12 to 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations , primarily served to punish attempts to flee from the GDR, as well as preparation or failure to report it.
According to Section 213 (1) of the German Criminal Code of January 12, 1968, the basic offense of illegally crossing the border was punishable by imprisonment for up to two years or with a suspended sentence, imprisonment or a fine. In legal practice there have also been serious cases under paragraph 2; the minimum sentence was then one year and the maximum five years imprisonment. By law of June 28, 1979, § 213 was revised; the serious case now regulated in paragraph 3 provided for a maximum sentence of 8 years imprisonment from this point on. The sentence was important because, according to Section 27 of the Border Act, the use of firearms was only permitted to prevent a crime, not an offense. According to Section 1 III of the GDR Criminal Code, however, a crime was only an act that was punished with a minimum sentence of two years or for which a sentence of at least two years would be imposed in individual cases. In practice, the case law of the GDR after June 28, 1979 saw the unlawful border crossing with direct GDR border contact mostly as a serious case and imposed prison sentences of more than two years, since crossing the border without aids, deception or Hide was hardly ever possible.
Non-return to the GDR (especially after an approved trip to the West) without official approval was on the same level as fleeing.
The criminal offense is to be seen in connection with the fact that the GDR cordoned off the inner-German border between the GDR and the Federal Republic of Germany in 1952 and also cordoned off West Berlin in 1961 with the construction of the Berlin Wall . The government's aim was to hinder the labor migration of qualified specialists to West Germany. The GDR declared the goal of leaving the state for the west without permission to be illegal. In those cases in which the GDR pursued economic, scientific, cultural, political or secret service purposes or where a non-return could be accepted, the border crossing was approved.
Extensive border security by the border troops of the GDR has since prevented the citizens of the GDR from traveling or moving to the western part of Germany. Like other states under the supervision of the USSR, the GDR did not grant general freedom of movement . The GDR took particularly repressive measures against its own citizens, as it threatened to bleed even further economically as a result of massive migration to the West.
Officially, however, border security was presented as a protective measure against the West; The Berlin Wall, for example, was called an “ anti-fascist protective wall ”, although the barriers were clearly intended to prevent people from leaving the GDR. The criminal offense in § 213 was formulated in such a way that it made “crossing the state border” (1979 version) a criminal offense regardless of the direction of passage.
The border guards trained by the SED propaganda to “unconditionally hate the enemy” were responsible for opening single or continuous fires on refugees at their own discretion . The shooters were entitled to a shooting bonus, called the “ head bonus ” by soldiers , as well as rewards and awards (for the penultimate time in 1989 for Chris Gueffroy ), but no legal proceedings. Shooting at children was forbidden; however, supervisors indicated that e.g. B. in the dark these are indistinguishable from adults. For example, there were fatal shots at Jörg Hartmann and Lothar Schleusener , which the Ministry for State Security (MfS) and other killings at the border had to cover up as much as possible.
Within the command structure of the GDR Ministry of Defense, the subordinate agencies for border security had to implement the annual ministerial orders of the so-called 101 series. In 1962, the formula “ Destruction of the enemy ” appeared for the first time in the 101 order regarding the shooting training of the border troops . This formulation was later taken over into the “gattering formula” of the border troops of the NVA, which was issued daily during the watch lift. While the "Vergatterungstext" of 1964 said that "border breaches are not to be allowed and border violators are to be temporarily arrested or rendered harmless", the "Vergatterungsformel" was tightened in 1967 by the requirement to "not allow border breaches, to temporarily arrest or destroy border violators." This text was only deleted in 1984/85 after several GDR border officers who had fled to the West reported this extermination formula in a media-effective manner. Because the Berlin Wall border was not mined, the guards of the Central Command were urged from the start to kill or destroy border violators "with the first shot".
Among the total of 235,000 people who managed to escape between August 1961 and the end of 1988, there were 40,000 "barrier breakers" who managed a life-threatening escape to the Federal Republic of Germany; among them were 5,000 people who overcame the Berlin Wall, which became more and more difficult from 1964 onwards, due to increased barriers and control systems. Between 1980 and 1988 a total of only 2700 “barrier breakers” were counted. The number of criminal and investigative proceedings initiated between 1958 and 1960 was 21,300 and rose to 45,400 between 1961 and 1965. Between 1979 and 1988, the courts of the GDR sentenced around 18,000 people to imprisonment on the basis of Section 213.
The prison conditions for convicts were mostly inhumane . The year after the Berlin Wall was erected, the federal government began discreetly buying free political prisoners from the GDR . Through this release of prisoners , the GDR got foreign currency and mostly saved itself the re-education of politically opposing citizens, since the vast majority were incarcerated because of the illegal border crossing and wanted to go to the West after their release from prison.
By the time the Wall came down, the federal government had freed around 35,000 political prisoners. 3.5 billion marks are said to have flowed into the GDR in the ransom purchases. For example, in 1978 the federal government paid 100,000 marks for the release of a couple with a child after their parents had been imprisoned for over 19 months.
On the GDR side, the secretariat of the minister “for carrying out special tasks” in the MfS under Colonel Heinz Volpert was responsible for the release of the prisoners by ransom . In the Federal Republic it was the Federal Ministry for Internal German Relations . Both ministries negotiated indirectly through lawyers. The payments to the GDR were handled by the EKD's Diakonisches Werk .
See also
literature
- Federal Ministry for All-German Issues (ed.): The escape from the Soviet zone and the blocking measures of the communist regime of August 13, 1961 in Berlin. Bonn / Berlin 1961.
Web links
- Wording of the StGB-DDR (version of § 213 from 1968 and amended version from 1979) (accessed on June 6, 2020)
- Stasi media library with documents on flight from the republic , information provided by the BStU
Individual evidence
- ^ Passport law of the German Democratic Republic of September 15, 1954
- ↑ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, German
- ↑ see: Federal Court of Justice: BGH 5 StR 370/92 - judgment of November 3, 1992 (LG Berlin) , Rn. 23
- ↑ Klaus Marxen , Gerhard Werle , with the assistance of Toralf Rummler, Petra Schäfter: Violent acts on the German-German border. de Gruyter Berlin 2002 (Reprint 2012), p. 139.
- ^ Quotes from Edgar Wolfrum : The Wall. History of a division. Beck, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-58517-3 , p. 69; on the general meaning of the order to shoot for refugees see Hans-Hermann Hertle : “Border violators are to be arrested or destroyed” , Federal Center for Political Education
- ↑ Peter Joachim Lapp , Jürgen Ritter: The limit. A German building. With a foreword by Rainer Eppelmann and a contribution by Ulrich Schacht. 9th edition. Links, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-86153-560-7 , p. 66 f.
- ↑ Edgar Wolfrum: The Wall. History of a division. Beck, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-58517-3 , p. 68
- ↑ The Night of Shattered Dreams. Online article from the Rheinische Post dated August 17, 2011, accessed on November 3, 2012
- ↑ Article about Heinz Volpert on the online offer of the Federal Foundation for the Processing of the SED Dictatorship , accessed on December 18, 2016.
