Erich Honecker went into hiding for three years after his fall. When the former GDR head of state and party leader is extradited to the Federal Republic, he is taken to court. Honecker sued because he was terminally ill, was right and was released. To this day, the Honecker case raises questions.
Erich Honecker raised his fist briefly as he left the Chilean embassy in Moscow on the evening of July 29, 1992. Then a dark Volvo with the former GDR state and party leader raced to Vnukovo Airport. A good two hours later he landed in a special Russian plane in Berlin-Tegel. The 79-year-old with cancer was arrested and taken to the Moabit prison hospital.
The main accusation: manslaughter because of the deaths on the Wall. For what was once the most powerful man in the GDR, it was the end of a nearly three-year flight after his fall in 1989 – first from angry GDR citizens, then from the judiciary. After months of diplomatic wrangling, the German government succeeded in getting Honecker extradited from Russia.
“In the first statements by Bonn politicians, it was welcomed that the former SED leader could finally be brought to legal proceedings,” reported the Tagesschau. Three and a half months later, the ex-head of state came before the court. But the Honecker case still leaves many questions unanswered.
“The attempt to criminalize the injustices in the GDR has shown that an independent judiciary has reached its limits here,” says the Berlin judge Hansgeorg Brautigam, who was dealing with Honecker at the time. The historian Thomas Kunze is also of the opinion: “It doesn’t work to come to terms with half a century of world history with the penal code.”
Honecker, who had headed the SED state since 1971, resigned from all offices at the beginning of the upheaval in the GDR on October 18, 1989 under pressure from his comrades: General Secretary of the SED Central Committee, Chairman of the State Council, Chairman of the National Defense Council. At the end of January 1990, East German Attorney General Hans-Jürgen Joseph made the first attempt to bring the deposed leader to justice for “high treason” and other crimes.
Honecker, recently operated on for a kidney tumor, was picked up by the police at his bedside in the Berlin Charité and taken to the Rummelsburg prison. He was released a few hours later for health reasons, and the investigation continued. But where now?
Honecker and his wife Margot had to vacate their quarters in the Wandlitz functionaries’ settlement. They were “the most famous homeless people in the GDR,” said the then detective Ralf Romahn in the ARD documentary “The Fall.” The Honeckers themselves no longer understood the world anyway.
“How can you accuse a head of state of treason, that was so unreal,” said Margot Honecker in the same documentary. In a cloak-and-dagger operation to Moscow It was the singer-songwriter Reinhold Andert who claims to have made contact with the Protestant church and with Pastor Uwe Holmer. Holmer, who as a churchman had suffered reprisals for years, took Erich and Margot into his vicarage in Lobetal in Brandenburg in an act of generosity.
There the people moved to the former ruler on the pelt. “No mercy for Honecker,” demanded angry demonstrators in front of Holmer’s house. At the beginning of April 1990, the couple finally found refuge in the Soviet military hospital in Beelitz. “That’s when Honecker disappeared,” at least from the public’s perspective, says historian Kunze, who works for the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and has written several books about Honecker.
Even the judiciary had no access when, after German unity, an arrest warrant was issued against Honecker for the joint murder of refugees. On March 13, 1991, the Honeckers withdrew completely: the Soviets flew them to Moscow in a cloak-and-dagger operation and granted them asylum. However, that was already over with the collapse of the USSR.
At the end of 1991, the couple fled to the Chilean embassy for 232 days until Erich Honecker was finally extradited to Berlin on July 29, 1992.
The next day at 11 a.m., Honecker appeared in a light-colored suit, with a red tie and blinking uncertainly behind his horn-rimmed glasses in the courtroom in Moabit, as the 85-year-old former presiding judge described it. A “painful déjà vu” shot through the judge’s mind. The communist Honecker had already been arrested in Moabit by the National Socialists in 1935.
“I found that a bit oppressive, it wasn’t easy to issue an arrest warrant for the man,” says Brautigam. From then on, according tobridegroom, it was almost exclusively about the health of the prisoner suffering from cancer. According to his own recollection, the judge immediately commissioned medical reports.
The core of the question: “Can you try a man who you think will not live to see the verdict?” The Berlin district court tried it – on November 12, 1992, the main hearing against Honecker and five other former SED functionaries began for the manslaughter of refugees.
The indictment ran to 783 pages. However, because of the procedural issues, one never got to the core of the content, says Brautigam. Honecker defended himself against the trial and the detention with the means of the rule of law – and was right. On January 12, 1993, the Berlin Constitutional Court ruled that the terminally ill had violated his human dignity. Honecker was released.
Hours later he boarded a plane to Chile, where his wife Margot had lived since leaving Moscow. On May 29, 1994, Erich Honecker died in Santiago at the age of 81. So what remains of this saga? From the Federal Republic’s attempt to judge the leaders of the defunct socialist state in accordance with the rule of law?
Honecker himself expressed only contempt. The process was “a farce,” a “political spectacle,” intended to denigrate the GDR, to “fight against socialism,” he railed in a 70-minute statement in front of the court. He did say that he had “been bearing the brunt of the political responsibility for those who died on the Wall since May 1971” – but not in the criminal sense. “If you sit in judgment on us today, do so as the victors judge on us vanquished.”
The accusation of “victor’s justice” persisted for a long time, and the argument that events in the GDR era could not be punished under federal German law. Those involved fight back just as regularly. “I would like to vehemently reject the accusation of victor’s justice,” says judge Brautigam. “Victory justice would certainly have looked different.” Honecker was not punished, other defendants mildly.
This was bitter for the victims of arbitrariness in the GDR. After Honecker’s release, former civil rights activist Arnold Vaatz angrily stated that the constitutional state was apparently overwhelmed by the legacy of the peaceful upheaval in East Germany. Even in the days of the GDR, however, it was not possible to hold the deposed ruler accountable.
“You suddenly realize that you have no solution for such a man in such a state in such an upset society,” confessed left-wing politician Gregor Gysi in the ARD documentary “The Fall”. The head of research in the Stasi Records Archive, Daniela Münkel, says in retrospect that at least an attempt was made to establish justice. This has strong symbolic meaning. “But one can understand that some victims of the SED dictatorship find the legal processing unsatisfactory.”
