Kessler jailed for Berlin Wall ‘shoot to kill’ policy
Heinz Kessler, German politician, b Poland, January 26, 1920; m Ruth; d Germany, May 2, 2017, aged 97.
As a young army commander, Heinz Kessler strode out in the early morning mist in Berlin along the line of an imposing concrete structure that was rapidly rising. He stopped along the way to give speeches to construction workers, urging them to greater efforts, ‘‘for socialism, food and security’’. It was August 1961 and by the end of the year the Berlin Wall was completed.
Kessler would be prosecuted as one of the perpetrators of the Schiessbefehl – the shoot-to-kill policy that led to the deaths of many of those who tried to escape over, under or through the wall. ‘‘It was our protection. It was a fantastic experience to be part of it,’’ said Kessler, who remained a fanatical communist to the end of his life.
A striking figure with a baleful gaze and a much-beribboned uniform, Kessler looked every inch the henchman of a totalitarian regime as his square jaw jutted out defiantly during his 1993 trial for inciting manslaughter. As defence minister and a member of the politburo, he was high up on the authorities’ wanted list after the reunification of Germany, especially after East Germany’s leader, Erich Honecker – a friend of Kessler from their days in the communist youth wing in the 1930s – was released from custody earlier in 1993 and soon after escaped to live out his days in Chile. Some historians have questioned the centrality of Kessler’s role in enforcing the shoot-to-kill policy, but with Honecker gone, justice was demanded by the families of those killed trying to escape East Germany. Kessler and several other high-profile figures were put on trial for the ‘‘collective manslaughter’’ of 68 people.
As the government of the reunited Germany prepared to arrest him in May 1991, the authorities received a tip-off that Kessler was preparing to flee for Moscow disguised as a Soviet Red Army officer. A phalanx of police cars was dispatched to block the entrance to his most likely escape route, the Soviet air base in Sperenburg. However, his capture ended up being a relatively meek affair. When the judge found Kessler guilty and sentenced him to seven and a half years, Roger Boyes of The Times reported that there were ‘‘catcalls’’ from his supporters in the public gallery.
Heinz Kessler was born in 1920 in Lauban, Lower Silesia, which would later become part of Poland. He imbibed the communist creed as a child from his working-class parents, who yearned for a revolution in their homeland. As a boy Heinz joined the Red Young Pioneers, the youth organisation of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). His childhood was blighted by the emergence of Adolf Hitler. As a teenager he trained to become a motor mechanic and risked his life by agitating against the Nazis. It was to no avail. In 1940 he was drafted to fight for the regime he hated. During Germany’s invasion of Russia in 1941, Kessler was taken as a prisoner of war. With other German communists he pledged his allegiance to the Red Army. In Germany a Nazi tribunal sentenced him to death in his absence.
Kessler returned to Germany in 1945 expecting to hear that his parents had been killed by the Nazis. In the Soviet Occupation Zone he was overjoyed to find his mother, emaciated but alive after spending most of the war in a Nazi concentration camp. It was a rare moment of catharsis for a man who spent most of his life holding his emotions in, partly because of the terrible things he had seen in the war. He joined the KPD in the Soviet zone and resolved ‘‘to build a fairer state on the ruins of Nazism’’. He rose quickly in the People’s Army because he was marked out as an ardent communist who could meet the exacting demands of the East German politburo and Moscow. Within the military he was feared rather than admired. He was still a young man when he was appointed chief of the air forces and air defence of the army in 1956. His wartime service in the Red Army had given him mastery of the Russian language and impeccable credentials with the effective overlords of East Germany.
In 1985 Honecker appointed Kessler as armeegeneral of the Volksarmee and minister of defence of East Germany. A year later Kessler joined the politburo.
Kessler had championed the idea of a wall to prevent the estimated 2000 people a week who were ungrateful enough to try to escape his beloved republic, and went to Moscow to discuss the project with Nikita Khrushchev. In the early years of the wall several successful escapes were made. A group of 12 pensioners tunnelled their way to West Berlin in May 1962 and then, in early 1963, an acrobat moved hand over hand along a cable and then tight ropewalked to freedom. Security was ramped up.
Over the next 28 years an estimated 800 people were killed trying to escape over East Germany’s heavily fortified border. The estimate of those killed trying to pass the Berlin Wall range from 80 to 239. Various hazards were placed on the approach to the wall, which became known as the ‘‘death strip’’, including landmines and trip wires that would set off automatic machinegun fire. Savage dogs patrolled the perimeter. If the escaper was lucky enough to get as far as scaling the 3m wall, searchlights would seek them out and marksmen in the watchtowers would shoot.
Kessler’s seven-and-a-half-year sentence would have been far more severe if he had used force to quell growing demonstrations in East Germany in the autumn of 1989. The defence minister had signed an order from Honecker to mobilise troops, increasing the likelihood of slaughter on the streets of Leipzig, where most of the demonstrations were held. However, by this point the chain of command was murky. Egon Krenz, who succeeded Honecker in October 1989, is said to have cancelled the order, and there was silence from Moscow. Kessler held off. When pictures of the demonstrations in Leipzig appeared in the West, people in Berlin were emboldened to come out into the streets. He later lamented the ‘‘complacency’’ that led to the end of East Germany.
Kessler raged against the death of the regime and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he ordered troops to maintain the border. They ignored him.
He spent two years in prison and was under house arrest for a further three years. His internment was singularly unsuccessful in provoking any remorse. He appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, which upheld his conviction in 2001. He maintained that there had ‘‘never, never been an order to shoot’’ escapers.
Little is known about his family life apart from the fact that he was married to Ruth, who died in 2013, and that he is survived by a son.
In 2011 he wrote a justification of his life, Without the Wall, There Would Have Been War.
‘‘Millions of people in eastern Europe are now free from employment, free from safe streets, free from healthcare, free from social security. While the wall was standing, there was peace. Today, there’s hardly a place that isn’t in flames. Were you ever in East Germany? It was a wonderful country.’’
A striking figure with a baleful gaze and a muchberibboned uniform, Kessler looked every inch the henchman of a totalitarian regime.