Walter Praedel

Walter Praedel (also Walter Prädel or Walter Predel , born February 10, 1911 in Schloppe ; died January 25, 1962 in Leipzig ) was a German stove and farm worker. He was sentenced to death on December 21, 1961 at the Frankfurt / Oder district court for setting fire to two barns full of harvested crops and was executed with the guillotine a month later in Leipzig. In terms of time and content, the case was linked to the construction of the wall and was intended to have a deterrent effect on the public. He employed the heads of government and the state party.Walter Ulbricht , Hilde Benjamin , Erich Mielke and others pleaded for the sentence proposed by the public prosecutor. The judge was Walter Ziegler , who had been transferred from Berlin to Frankfurt .

Life

Walter Praedel's father Willi was a carpenter. He died in 1957. The mother Martha, b. Stellter, died in 1958. Walter attended elementary school in Schloppe from 1917 to 1925. He failed the 7th school year and went to his grandfather Ernst Praedel, a roofer, as an apprentice and graduated in 1929 with the journeyman's examination. In 1935 he married Elisabeth Hanke. The marriage remained childless. At the beginning of the war in 1939 he was part of the 9th Engineer Battalion in the Polish campaign . In 1940 he became a non-commissioned officer and came to the Eastern Front until shortly before Moscow. While retreating in the winter of 1941/42, he stated that he had seen "many crimes against Soviet property and civilians", including arson and rape. He himself "shot 4 to 5 civilians with his own hands" near Kiev. In March 1942 he was injured by a knee bullet and from 1943 he was used to repair war damage in the Ruhr area. In 1944 he set up anti-tank barriers in the Sudetenland. On May 6, 1945, he was taken prisoner by the Soviets near Prague and on December 25, 1948, a Soviet military court sentenced him to 25 years of forced labor, 7 of which he completed. In 1955 he came to Dannenberg and started to work in the VEB Schamottewerk Bad Freienwalde .

Motive and sequence of events

Sketch of the crime scene (the two barns in the picture above)

Walter Praedel lived in Dannenberg / Mark in the far east of the GDR and saw how the barns of the Agricultural Production Cooperative (LPG) , which his sister-in-law Anna Zielke managed, fell into disrepair. Despite several petitions within three years, the LPG did not respond. The roofs were leaking, the cattle sick, the grain spoiled. Walter Praedel had friends in West Germany whom he could no longer visit after the wall was built in August 1961. He regularly listened to the West Berlin radio stations RIAS and SFB , where the then governing mayor Willy Brandt called on GDR citizens to resist. On October 9, 1961, Praedel stated: “Every evening at 7.45 p.m. I listened to the news from the 'Free Berlin' station in my apartment. The GDR was criticized almost exclusively. By constantly listening to this station, I was influenced in the western sense. It was even the case for me - I would like to say this quite frankly - that I believed the station 'Free Berlin' more than the GDR stations. ”During the same interrogation, Praedel repeated his statement that he was solely responsible for the arson. Walter Praedel wanted to vent his frustration and was waiting for a public holiday, namely the 12th anniversary of the founding of the GDR. On October 7, 1961, he was alone on his sister-in-law's property, harvesting potatoes and then setting fire to one of the two barns with matches shortly after 12 noon. Because Praedel had included the wind direction in his considerations, the second, smaller barn also burned down. The barn with the cows remained intact.

He was arrested the same day and brought before the judge in Torgelow on October 8th . Countless interrogations followed in pre-trial detention. Dozens of very similar interrogation protocols can be found in the files of the Stasi records archive . The public prosecutor's office ordered reports on the amount of damage (around DM 100,000). The forensics stepped in and examined Walter Praedels in standing outdoor wooden toilet encountered feces ; On October 7th, the forensic team only secured “poop from the perpetrator. The excrement was removed with a spatula and put in a glass bottle. ”To check the truthfulness of statements made by his wife Elisabeth. This had claimed that her husband had eaten fried potatoes with sour herring the evening before the crime. The fish could not be detected in the feces, but the medical experts did not want to rule it out. The investigation was carried out by the Forensic Institute of Biology in the Ministry of the Interior. The investigation report of November 13, 1961 is signed by the head of the institute, Major of the People's Police, Rychlik.

State security was involved just a few days later. In the language of the Ministry for State Security it read as follows: "After consultation with the district administration and Department IX, the perpetrator was taken over on October 9, 1961 for further processing." The HA IX was the criminal investigation agency in the MfS. On October 12, 1961, the Stasi district administration in Frankfurt / Oder received the search log of Praedel's apartment. This included the brochure “Important information for visitors from the zone”.

The process

Walter Ulbricht rejects Praedel's petition for clemency.

The criminal trial took place in Frankfurt in December 1961. There were representatives of the police, the Stasi , the LPG and the press in the audience of the district courtroom. The GDR radio broadcast sound recordings. The judge Walter Ziegler trivialized the actual act and invented a major political conspiracy against the GDR. As was very common in trials in the 1950s, he began to denounce the defendant's Nazi past. From Walter Praedel’s appearance as a Wehrmacht soldier in the Second World War and the conviction by a Soviet court, Ziegler attributed a deep hatred of the Soviet Union to him, which was further nourished by contacts with the West and ultimately turned him into an “anti-subversive fascist” by building the Wall.

Walter Praedel was not up to the judge's ideologically driven questions and remained cautious and almost mute throughout the process. On December 21, 1961, the criminal case ended with the death penalty.

The response from the GDR population remained subdued. The GDR press only reported once about the verdict. The New Germany headlined on December 28, 1961:

"Death penalty for incorrigible fascists - war criminal pardoned by the Soviet Union again exposed as dangerous arsonist"

swell

• BStU -Akte Frankfurt AU 236/62
• Falco Werkentin: Political criminal justice in the Ulbricht era , p. 101 ff
• Karsten Jedlitschka, Jens Niederhut, Philipp Springer: Locking things

Individual evidence

1. ^ Walter Praedel signed the interrogation protocols initially mostly with Predel, later almost exclusively with Praedel. In a protocol dated October 13, 1961, the officer asked him why he wrote his name in the work book with a d after the s, while his identity card was dl? Praedel replied that the latter was a mistake in issuing the ID. His name ends with el.
2. ^ Werkentin, Falco .: Political criminal justice in the Ulbricht era: from avowed terror to covert repression . 2., revised. Ed. Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-86153-150-X .
3. ↑ Niederhut, Jens, 1975-, Springer, Philipp, 1970-, Appl, Christian .: Locking things: documents, photos and objects from the archive of the State Security . 1st edition. Berlin, ISBN 978-3-946572-40-4 .