A former agent of Stasithe secret police of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), was sentenced this Monday by a Berlin court to ten years in prison for the 1974 murder of a Polish citizen who intended to flee to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). It is about the first time that a former Stasi officer is convicted of murder.
The accused, the now octogenarian Manfred N., did not speak out during the legal proceedings which convicted him, although He always defended his innocence through his lawyer.
However, the Berlin Territorial Court found him guilty of murder – a crime that is never statute-barred in Germany – in a case with thriller overtones that had remained unsolved for five decades. The sentence can still be appealed.
Czeslaw Kukuczka was the victim shot by the former Stasi officer. It was about a 38-year-old Polish citizen, who had gone to the Polish embassy in East Berlin to demand documents allowing him to travel to the west, under cover of false threat that he had explosives in his briefcase.
The Stasi, alerted by the embassy, decided that it would be better first to play the game with Kukuczka, who received the documents and was then escorted to the famous border crossing at Friedrichstrasse station.
There he was allowed through all exit controls and, as the Pole took the final steps before boarding a train west, He was shot several times in the back.
During the trial before the Berlin Territorial Court, two teenage teenagers from West Berlin, who were on a school trip that day and were leaving the West at the time of the events, testified as witnesses.
Both remembered how a man dressed in a dark coat and tinted glasses suddenly appeared with a gun in his hand at that moment and shot Kukuczka as he passed the final security check behind him.
Czeslaw Kukuczka, a Polish citizen who attempted to flee the GDR to the west and was murdered in 1974.
Wikimedia
Over the next 50 years, there have been several unsuccessful attempts to try the casebut in 2016 new Stasi documents appeared, probably as part of the work to reconstruct the archives destroyed during reunification.
Among these is a report on the operation and the role of Manfred N. “Comrade Lieutenant N. solved the task with prudence, courage and determination and “He managed to neutralize the terrorist using his firearm.”indicates the document, cited by German media.
Initially, the prosecutor’s office assumed that It was a homicide already prescribedbut based on the new evidence and investigations provided by the Polish side, in 2023 he presented a charge of intentional murder.
During the almost 30 years of the Berlin Wall, between 1961 and 1989, at least 140 people were killed. The few East German officials and border guards who have so far been prosecuted in connection with these deaths have mostly been charged with manslaughter.
