Heinz Kessler
East German minister behind Berlin Wall shoot-to-kill policy
HEINZ KESSLER, who has died aged 97, was the last defence minister of communist East Germany, the GDR, from 1985 until 1989 and was charged along with three others with complicity in the “shoot to kill” orders issued by Honecker in 1974 to prevent the escape of East Germans to the West; after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he was one of a handful of former East German politicians to be punished for acts they committed while in power.
During the domestic unrest which erupted in 1989 on September 27 Kessler signed an order increasing the state of combat readiness along East Germany’s borders. During protest demonstrations in early October, by order of Erich Honecker, general secretary of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), soldiers of the GDR’S National People’s Army were issued with live ammunition.
Violence was averted only when Egon Krenz, the politburo member in charge of security, unilaterally cancelled Honecker’s order, thereby allowing protesters to march unmolested. Krenz then replaced Honecker as SED secretary, but was forced to resign in December when the Berlin Wall fell.
In January 1990 Kessler was among hardliners kicked out of his party following its reinvention as the Party of Democratic Socialism. In May 1991 he was arrested in Berlin after officials in a reunited Germany received a tip-off that he would try to leave the country. The ailing Erich Honecker had already been spirited away to Moscow and the authorities were under pressure to ensure that at least some GDR politicians were brought to justice.
In 1993 Kessler was sentenced to seven-and-ahalf years in prison for incitement to manslaughter for his role in the deaths of hundreds of people who tried to flee the GDR. His former deputy, Fritz Streletz, was given a five-and-a-half-year sentence. The judge in the case ruled that Kessler and Streletz had “directed border troops in their work and thereby assumed responsibility for the death of refugees”.
Kessler later filed an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that his actions had
been in accordance with GDR law. But his appeal was rejected on the grounds that the GDR’S policies violated human rights.
As suggested by the title
of his later memoir, Without the Wall, There Would Have Been War, Kessler remained
a true believer. “Sure, I hear about the new freedom that people are enjoying in Eastern Europe,’’ he told an interviewer in 1996. “But how do you define freedom? Millions of people in Eastern Europe are now free from employment, free from safe streets, free from health care, free from social security.” People who had lost their lives trying to cross the border only had themselves to blame, he felt.
Heinz Kessler was born on January 26 1920 into a communist family in Lauban, Lower Silesia. By the time he was 10 he was a member of the Young Spartacus League, a communist youth group.
Called up into the Wehrmacht in the late 1930s, he deserted during its advance into the Soviet Union in July 1941 to join the Red Army. In 2004 he tried to claim under a government scheme to compensate former Wehrmacht soldiers if they could prove they had been convicted of desertion by a Nazi court. His application was refused.
In Moscow Kessler joined the resistance group National Committee for a Free Germany. In 1945 he returned to the Soviet occupation zone in Germany and began a steady progression through the communist ranks. He was appointed chief of the air forces and air defence of the East German armed forces in 1956 and was defence minister from 1985 until November 1989. He became a member of the politburo in 1986.
His wife, Ruth, died in 2013.