Court Cases Bring Nazi, Stasi Crimes to Life

Germany’s violent past has made a very public appearance this week in two court cases taking place in Hamburg and Berlin examining the crimes of a former Nazi SS officer and two former East German Stasi commanders.

All three are accused of committing murder. The East German border guards allegedly shot a West German activist on the border as he tried dismantling a mine on the East-West border. Former head of the Nazi Security Service Friedrich Engel, 93, stands accused of ordering the execution of 59 Italian prisoners in 1944.

For the relatives of those killed the trials offer an opportunity to close a painful chapter. For those accused, they present a confrontation with a bitter and violent past. For Germany, they offer both.

Almost 60 years after WWII and 13 years after the fall of communist East Germany, the trials are evidence the country still has a lot to work through. To aid in the reevaluation of the past, the country has set up commissions and organizations charged with illuminating past crimes of the Nazi and communist East German era.

Investigating the vilest crimes for more than 40 years

The oldest of these, Germany’s Nazi Crime Authority first began work in 1958. Since then, they have investigated more than 100,000 Nazi war crimes cases. More than 6,500 of those have resulted in convictions and sentences.

The investigations don’t look to end anytime soon, said authority head Kurt Schrimm.

"If you would have asked me three years ago, I would have said with assurance that the time has past," Schrimm said in an interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung. Now, Schrimm says there are at least 20 cases still to be prosecuted, not including Engel.

The process is a painful for Germans, who are faced with the legacy of their horrific past on a daily basis. Painful, but necessary.

"We show the victims and their relatives that their fate matters to us," Schrimm said of the Nazi prosecutions. "And we show society that no one who committed serious or the most serious crimes can be removed of their guilt or responsibility."

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"I was only an observer"

That includes Engel (photo), who lived an unobtrusive life in Hamburg until the Italian media began publicizing the Genoa massacre in the late 1990s. In 1999, an Italian court convicted Engel in absentia for the deaths of 246 people.

Alerted by the Italian media coverage, Hamburg prosecutors began investigating Engel in 1998.

This Monday, they brought him before a Hamburg judge with 59 murder charges. Engel, who served as commander of the SS and police in Genoa, vehemently denies the charges.

"I was only an observer," he told the Hamburg court Tuesday where he is being tried.

He questioned the validity of the case’s witness, who he said was watching the execution from 90 meters away. The execution, which was in retaliation for a movie theater bombing in Genoa in which six German soldiers died, was in accordance with director orders from Hitler, who demanded the execution of 10 prisoners for every dead German soldier.

But he himself didn’t take part in the shootings, Engel said in court.

"I actually tried to hide myself," he said.

The tall man with silver hair spoke clearly and in detail, every once in a while excusing his bad hearing, according to reports. He did admit some responsibility, saying it was his job to choose those that were going to die.

"I always had a fear that something like that was going to happen to me," he said in court. "A fear of the necessary."

Necessary because the executions were orders over which he had no say, Engel said. The tactic is a tried and true one in such cases: It was an order, I had no other choice but to obey it.

"Exterminating" a West German activist

It is the defense the two Stasi commanders have employed in their case, which began in Berlin on Monday.

Helmut H. and Wolfgang S. are charged with ordering the arrest or "extermination" of Michael Gartenschläger, a former DDR dissident who was sentenced to life in prison in 1961, but later bought free by the West German government. Following his transfer to West Germany in 1971, he continued his activism against the East German government, twice sneaking across the border in 1976 to destroy two SM70 fragmentation mines.

When Helmut H and Wolfgang S., commanders in the East German security service the Stasi, caught wind he was planning a third attack, they drew up a plan, according to prosecutors.

Gartenschläger was to be either arrested or "exterminated," the two wrote in a plan, something prosecutors see as their direct involvement in his death. In other documents, the word "liquidated" was used.

Today, the pair dispute their authorship of the plan. Though both held commander positions, the pair maintain they had no authority in the matter.

The three border guards that actually shot Gartenschläger were ruled innocent by a judge more than two years ago. In that case the judge ruled that it wasn’t certain Gartenschläger and his accomplice, who were armed, didn’t shoot first. As a result, the nine bullets that killed the activist were fired by the guards in self-defense, the court ruled.

Wanting the past to go away

The ruling no doubt pleased a small but significant percentage of the German population that has had enough of dwelling in the past. That percentage sees people like Engel and the two Stasi commanders as innocent actors in a tragic production over which they had no control. The trials taking place this week, as a result, are irrelevant and too late.

At the Berlin trial, former colleagues of the two men were asked by reporters what they thought of the case.

"Mr. Gartenschläger violated the East German border from the West," one replied. Then, he shrugged. "A trial is actually not necessary."