LETTER FROM BERLIN:Hours after claiming its final victim, the first crack had appeared in the Berlin Wall, writes Derek Scally
KARIN GUEFFROY had no idea why the Stasi officers asked her to come in for questioning, but she knew better than to ask.
It was only when they finished that she remembered hearing shooting two nights previously.
Her son Chris, a handsome 20-year-old with curly black hair, had been killed trying to cross the border between East and West Berlin.
Six months later, that border would cease to exist, but on February 6th, 1989, it was still patrolled by border guards under orders to shoot anyone trying to flee.
Chris had wanted to leave East Germany for years, ever since authorities refused permission to let him take his final school exams, ending his dreams of becoming a pilot.
He begins working as a waiter in September 1985 in the East Berlin airport restaurant, but when he receives a letter calling him up for military service the following May, he plots his escape in earnest with his friend Christian, a year older.
The two young men rule out applying for permission to leave East Germany, like 29,000 others in 1988, afraid of the consequences for the families they will leave behind. Instead they decide on the route chosen by 9,700 others in 1988: to flee.
In early February, they hear a rumour that the order obliging border guards to fire at everyone trying to flee has been lifted; they decide to try their luck during the visit of the Swedish prime minister to East Berlin, guessing the authorities will not want any embarrassing headlines about fleeing citizens during his stay.
The two leave their homes at about 9pm and head down to small garden colony on the banks of the canal that separates the eastern neighbourhood of Treptow from Neukölln in West Berlin.
After an hour watching the guards from a tool-shed, they run for the first “Hinterland” wall just before midnight.
On the other side, in the no-man’s-land between east and west, they trigger alarm signals as they start to run. At the final barrier, a three-metre high metal fence, the first shots ring out.
About 40 metres from the two, a border guard goes down on one knee, takes aim and fires: first at Gueffroy’s feet, then his back.
Chris is giving Christian a leg-up when the second bullet hits his heart. He collapses and is dead in minutes.
Christian is injured, arrested by the guards and, in May 1989, sentenced to three years imprisonment for “an attempted illegal border crossing”.
In the police station two days after hearing the night-time shots, Chris’s mother only realises he is dead when Stasi officers say that he was “involved in an attack on an military installation”.
“I yelled, I cried, I screamed,” she says later. “For weeks I was almost dead, I didn’t know how I would survive it.”
The Stasi tries to keep the shooting quiet – Chris’s death certificate reads “heart failure” – but news leaks to the West Berlin media and over 100 people attend Chris’s funeral.
It starts a chain reaction, and in April, East German leader Erich Honecker quietly lifts the border guard order to shoot, an order the authorities denied existed.
After German unification, Karin Gueffroy pushes for a fresh investigation and, in 1991, the border guards go on trial.
Three are given suspended sentences, while the guard who fired the fatal shot is given three years and six months; the court calls the killing “particularly cold-blooded and objectionable”.
But an appeals court later suspends the sentence, describing the border guard as “at the bottom of the chain of command and, in a way, a victim of the regime, too”. That controversial verdict sets a precedent for all future cases of Berlin Wall shootings.
“I’m still happy that the united Germany tried to deal with the wrongs in East Germany,” says Karin Gueffroy. “The most important thing was that these trials happened at all. I find the sentences unjust, but I can live with them.” Today Karin lives in Berlin and meets regularly with school groups to tell the story of her son and the Berlin Wall deaths.
Official figures say that Chris Gueffroy was the 136th person killed fleeing to the west, although some say the true figure is much higher.
Today a pillar marks the spot where Chris Gueffroy’s short life ended on February 6th, 1989, between the garden colonies with the names “Harmony” and “Free from Cares”.
The same day in Poland, communist authorities held their first session of “round table” talks with Solidarity trade union officials that would end in a negotiated transition to democracy.
Hours after claiming its final victim, the first crack had appeared in the Berlin Wall.