Authors: Frederick Taylor
As in the case of Bittner, there was an imediate cover-up. Schmidt’s wife was told that he had been shot, but at the same time was forced by the
Stasi
to corroborate the official story-that he had died in an unfortunate traffic accident. They never released his clothing to her or allowed anyone to view the body. The
Stasi
took over the organisation of Schmidt’s funeral, at which his body was cremated. When neighbours continued to question the official story, his widow was forcibly resettled to another part of the city, where her tragic story would be unknown.
14
After this, there were no more deaths on the Wall for almost two years. For the most part, East Germans had given up on this risky method of leaving the Workers’ and Peasants’ State. Instead, they were applying for exit permits.
Following the issuing of 30,000 such permits in 1984, applications rose to 27,000 in 1985 and 58,000 in 1986. In 1987, the year of Lutz Schmidt’s death at the Wall and of Honecker’s visit to West Germany, the number of applications reached 112,000.
15
For a complex of reasons, ordinary people were not as afraid of the East German state as they had once been. They wanted out, and they were prepared to say so.
In 1984, the
Stasi
registered less than forty ‘extrusions’ (
Ausschleusungen
), as it delicately referred to organised escapes from East Germany. Where in the 1960s these had been numbered in their thousands, and even in the 1970s in their hundreds, by the 1980s the escape business had become a tiny cottage industry, scarcely politically or statistically significant. Pressure was building up, but it was pressure of a different, less spectacular kind which would prove even more fateful for the GDR.
In West Germany there were few politicians of Left or Right who still made grand and angry speeches about the Wall, or who openly supported dissidents in the GDR. One of the few exceptions to the passivity of the Western politicians was the courageous Green Bundestag deputy Petra Kelly, who spoke her mind on official trips to East Germany far more frankly than her more right-wing colleagues. The notion of ‘convergence’ had originally, in the 1960s, been intended as a kind of slow and subtle route to self-determination for all Germans, but by the 1980s the means had become all, and the end had been largely forgotten.
The only major political figure to challenge this increasingly relaxed attitude towards the Wall was the same man who, in 1978, had attracted
the attention of the
Stasi
observers at Checkpoint Charlie: Ronald Reagan. Now more than half-way through his second term as president of the United States, the 76-year-old had lost none of his fierce and occasionally undiplomatic anti-Communist drive. In June 1987 he arrived in West Berlin to join the city’s 750th-anniversary celebrations.
‘General Secretary Gorbachev,’ Reagan thundered in front of the Brandenburg Gate, ‘if you seek peace-if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe-if you seek liberalisation, come here to this gate, Mr Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’
All the same, three months later, Erich Honecker was received with honours in West Germany. No one was impolite enough to raise the matter of the Wall, or the deaths, or the continuing persecution of dissidents by the
Stasi
, or the fact that his people still had to put their hands in the fire before they wrote exit-visa applications. The attitude of most West German politicians was summed up by a prominent Social Democrat in 1987: ‘Reunification is a big lie!’ (
Die Wiedervereinigung ist eine Lebenslüge!
) he declared. His name was Gerhard Schröder, later to become Helmut Kohl’s successor as chancellor of Germany.
East Germany seemed to be becoming a permanent and acceptable feature of the international landscape. In 1982 the SPD established a so-called ‘Joint Commission for Fundamental Values’, a kind of talking shop in which East German
apparatchiks
and SPD politicians could discuss issues of mutual interest amid lavish hospitality, for all the world as if the SED were a fellow democratic party competing in the same political market-place.
All this gave East Germany a new respectability. No wonder, then, that the East German leadership entered 1989 in a state of blissful selfconfidence. No one seemed prepared to offer a serious challenge to their authority or legitimacy.
While Honecker and his supporters continued to promote a hard ideological line, there were indications that in certain areas East Germany was being allowed to liberalise. Honecker had become adept at uttering soothing bromides that would keep his benefactors in the West happy. In July 1987, the GDR officially abolished the death penalty. Just as Honecker had told Kohl in September 1987 that no one wanted to see
deaths on the so-called German-German border, so he continued to deny that there was any ‘shoot-to-kill’ order.
Then, in February 1989, almost two years to the day after the Wall had claimed its previous victim, a young East Berliner decided to test the regime’s new humanitarian claims.
Barman Chris Gueffroy was twenty years old and due to be conscripted into the East German army in May. He hated being made to defend a state that he loathed. Chris wanted to travel, especially to America. Then he and his friend Christian Gaudian heard from an acquaintance serving with the border police in Thuringia that the ‘shoot-to-kill’ order had secretly been abandoned. This was exciting news.
At around eleven on the evening of 5 February 1989, the two young men approached the border with West Berlin, which ran along the Britz district canal. It was a cold night, minus-three centigrade (27°F). They crept through a deserted ‘weekend colony’, a group of little allotments, each with their own hut, where Berliners came at the weekends and in the summer to relax. The friends had dismanted a clawed garden hoe and tied the spiked head to a length of strong rope. The plan was to toss this improvised grappling hook over the first barrier, a high barred fence, and haul themselves over. This part was a success. They got over the high fence undetected. Five metres further on stood a lower fence. They also managed to climb this without trouble. Perhaps it was true, and the whole Wall was now a harmless fake? But this last barrier turned out to be wired. Before they knew it, an alarm had been touched off and searchlights automatically flooded the area.
Reality bit, with a vengeance. Guards in a nearby watch-tower had been alerted to the intruders’ presence. They fired warning shots. Trying to avoid their line of sight, the two young men ran in zigzag fashion parallel to the border, Chris to the fore, frantically seeking a way across the next lattice fence, the last before the canal.
Within moments they had tragic confirmation that the ‘shoot-to-kill’ order was no dead letter. They ran straight into two guards approaching from the opposite direction and were greeted with a hail of fire. Gueffroy caught ten bullets in the chest and died immediately. His companion, wounded in the foot, tumbled to the ground.
Christian Gaudian was arrested, recovered, and was put on trial. There
was the by now habitual attempt to cover up the cause of Chris Gueffroy’s death, but this time it failed. Western observers were alerted by a death notice in the East Berlin
Berliner Zeitung
which referred to the ‘tragic accident’ that had ended his young life.
Chris Gueffroy’s mother was not allowed to see his body. Against his family’s wishes, he was cremated, according to the
Stasi’
s standard practice. The world learned the truth about the killing from a reporter for the West German
Frankfurter Rundschau
who slipped through the
Stasi
security cordon to attend the funeral.
For the first time in years, a death at the Wall caused an international outcry. In April, Honecker lifted the ‘shoot-to-kill’ order. Too late for Chris Gueffroy.
Since the East Germans had never admitted that the order existed in the first place, Honecker’s decision remained a state secret. It was indicative of the regime’s growing guilt and unease that even in the official report of the killing, there is no mention made of shooting, or of the fatal wounds that Chris Gueffroy suffered. The document simply states in mealy-mouthed regime-speak that the border guards ‘carried through border-tactical activities and placed both border violators under arrest’. By 1989, shooting people on the border was unacceptable, and even the cosseted old men at Wandlitz knew it.
16
None the less, the Wall still stood proud and ugly, with its sturdy blocks, its spikes and fences and alarms and watch-towers, seemingly permanent and impregnable. Its fate would not be determined in Berlin. Mostly it would be decided hundreds of miles away, by people who had decided that a Communism which needed to be enforced by guns and barbed wire was not a Communism worth having.
The Maginot Line was another of the great walls of history. Running along the German frontier from Longwy in north-eastern France south to the Swiss border near Basel, the line was the brainchild of a French élite determined to prevent a repeat of the horrendous conflict that had devastated their country between 1914 and 1918. It would make another invasion impossible. Or so they believed.
The idea came from the supreme French commander, Marshal Joffre. It was supported by the legendary Marshal Pétain, whose defence of
Verdun, the greatest fortress on the Western Front, during World War One seemed to suggest that France could be successfully protected by a chain of similar strongpoints. The project was brought to fruition by André Maginot, French Minister of Defence during the late 1920s, and was built between 1930 and 1936 at a cost of three billion French francs (approx. $120 million in 1933 or around $2 billion at current values).
The Maginot Line had concrete walls thicker than in any fortress ever built. Its massive guns were placed on turntables in steel-plated cupolas. There were recreation areas, living quarters-many air-conditioned-and well-stocked subterranean storehouses. Underground railways connected various portions of the line so that troops could be moved swiftly to threatened points in the defences. The tunnels extended over 150 kilometres, with 39 military units, 70 bunkers, 500 artillery and infantry groups, and 500 casemates for guns, shelters, and observation towers.
There was one problem. As a pushy tank colonel named Charles de Gaulle had pointed out in the early 1930s, future wars were unlikely to be static. Mobile armour and air power would become increasingly decisive. Moreover, in 1936, Belgium, which had hitherto been France’s ally and formed an integral part of a common defensive system, made a declaration of neutrality. This left the French northern flank embarrassingly exposed. The French built fairly desultory defences along the Belgian border and continued to proclaim the Maginot fortifications’ impregnability to one and all. Many were impressed, above all the French public.
In May/June 1940, the German forces went into action. They were divided into three groups positioned in the shape of a huge ‘sickle’. Their first army group sat tight on the Rhine border, where the Maginot Line was overwhelmingly strong, thus tying up large French forces. The second army group, however, swept in from the north to violate the neutrality of the Netherlands and Belgium. The third was the ‘wild card’. Composed largely of mobile armour and mechanised troops, it sneaked through the Ardennes forest into Eastern Belgium and Luxembourg.
The Ardennes area was lightly defended because the dense woodland was thought impenetrable by large bodies of men. To prove them wrong, the German armoured spearheads pushed through into north-eastern France within a matter of days, cutting off the Maginot Line from the
rear. France fell within the month, with scarcely a shot fired from the fortifications upon which France had bestowed so much treasure and so much trust.
So, the Germans in 1940 solved the problem of the Maginot Line by going round it. This was also a method often favoured by the ‘barbarians’ whom the Great Wall of China was supposed to keep out. The captive population of East Germany in 1989 was no different.
On 18 January, looking forward to the year that would see his seventy-seventh birthday and the fortieth birthday of the GDR, Erich Honecker allowed himself the confident boast that the Wall ‘will still be standing in fifty or a hundred years, if the reasons for its existence have not been removed’. This despite the fact that three days earlier the GDR had signed yet another treaty in the Helsinki Process, clearly stating that any individual possessed ‘the unrestricted right to leave…and return to his own country’. Afterwards, Honecker breezily explained to the Soviet ambassador that ‘we gave instructions to sign it, but we won’t carry it out’.
17
There were also plans in hand to create this hundred-year Wall. It would, of course, be a ‘high-tech’ Wall, more advanced and more completely impregnable than any previous incarnations. Electronic sensors and cameras would enable the border authorities to detect and foil any would-be escapers well before they reached the actual fortifications, in this way reducing the unfortunate deaths that did so much to harm the regime’s image.
As the commander of the border force expressed it, in a masterpiece of GDR jargon: ‘Precedence will be given to the utilisation of physical mechanisms of action and technical methods such that, while maintaining high security, the enemy’s ability to find excuses for defamation against the GDR will be reduced.’
18
But, high-tech or low-tech, there were hints that the Wall was becoming superfluous. In the first week of January 1989, twenty East Germans who had unsuccessfully applied for exit visas sought refuge at the Permanent Representation of West Germany in East Berlin. They were allowed to leave on 11 January, without punishment and with the promise that within six months there would be a ‘good end’ to their endeavours. By the end of January, some had already arrived at the refugee camp in Giessen, West Germany.