The East German government gave a shoot to kill order in writing to troops manning the 103 mile long Wall barricading East and West Berlin, historians have said.
London, Aug 13 : The East German government gave a "shoot to kill" order in writing to troops manning the 103 mile long 'Wall' barricading East and West Berlin, historians have said.
The Cold War document unearthed in a regional archive of Stasi (East German Secret Service) documents in Madgeburg, is the clearest evidence yet that East German troops had licence to fire on people fleeing to the West.
The written order, issued to Stasi secret service agents, states: "Don't hesitate to use your weapon even when border breaches happen with women and children, which traitors have often exploited in the past".
Though the existence of a shoot-to-kill policy has long been assumed, given that more than 1,100 people were killed trying to flee East Germany, (most were shot between 1961 when the frontier was sealed with the construction of the Wall, and November 1989, when it fell), senior Stasi agents and Politburo officials have steadfastly maintained that no such 'kill' order existed.
The denial and the absence of any written document was one of the reasons many East German officials escaped prosecution or were given lenient sentences in trails after German reunification.
Now, politicians and historians are suggesting that the document, dated October 1, 1973, could provide the basis for future prosecutions.
"This discovery is important because to this day officials kept denying that there was a firing order at the Berlin Wall, and we haven't come across an instruction as explicit, clear and unlimited as this one," said Marianne Birthler, head of the German Government's Birthler Authority, which manages the Stasi files.
Written orders instructing border guards to open fire as a last resort have been found before in East German files, but those orders always added that guards had to shout warnings or fire warning shots first.
But there is no reference to such warnings in the seven-page order now uncovered.
"This shows that the history of East Germany has yet to be fully researched," said Andreas Schulze, spokesman for the Birthler Authority.
According to a Times report, the shoot-to-kill order was issued to a specially trained unit of Stasi agents ordered to infiltrate border guards and halt defections by regular soldiers.
At least 37 border guards are known to have been shot dead while trying to flee across the frontier.
Hubertus Knabe, director of the Stasi prison museum in the Berlin district of Hohenschönhausen described the document as a form of "licence to kill".
"We haven't seen anything like that before. It was only directed at Stasi agents but I think we have to establish whether this order was carried out, who gave it, what it led to. If we can establish that people were killed as a result of this order then of course state prosecutors will have to launch a criminal investigation," Knabe said.
Incidentally, the find coincides with the 46th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall. The East Germany government decided to seal the border to halt an exodus of people to the West.
On the night of August 12, East German soldiers and workers tore up streets, put up barriers and barbed wire around the three Western sectors and began construction of the 103-mile wall that isolated West Berlin from the Eastern part of the city.
Farther west, the 860-mile border between East and West Germany was fortified with fences, minefields and watchtowers.
ANI