Memories Of Death Haunt East German Border

HOHEGEISS, Germany - A soft silence fills the piney air of Germany's Harz Mountains, sweet tened by a sparrow's cheery song. But to Marlit Schubert, this bucolic setting is a place of eternal sorrow.

Her first husband, Helmut Kleinert, was killed here by communist border guards nearly 28 years ago as he and Marlit tried to flee from East Germany to West Germany.

Marlit was just 22 years old and three months pregnant.

"Why did he have to give up his life? We weren't criminals," says Marlit, who was captured during the 1963 escape attempt.

At least 197 people died on the now-vanished frontier or at the Berlin Wall - some mutilated by East German land mines, some mowed down by sinister trip-wire weapons, most shot by communist border guards.

East Germany exists no more. But for survivors of the border killings and relatives of those who died, the suffering never has ceased.

No longer fearing communist reprisals, many of those survivors have been coming forward with disturbing testaments which they hope will help ensure justice is finally served.

Eberhardt Krause buries his face in the palms of his leathery hands, sobbing as he retells his own tragic story. Krause barely survived an escape attempt in which a buddy, Walter Kittel, was killed.

The predawn shooting occurred Oct. 18, 1965 at border fortifications separating East Germany from West Berlin.

"We were only about three meters from the fence, and then we were spotted by the troops," says Krause, sitting in a shabby chair in his humble flat in Gueterfelde, an East German village just south of Berlin.

"Flares went up. Somebody shouted `Hands up!' Bullets flew at us from everywhere," hitting Krause in the stomach and in the foot. More shots were fired, hitting Kittel.

"I was revived in somebody's garden," Krause recalls. "He lay next to me, and a border guard said, `He's dead.' "

Krause spent 11 months in a prison hospital and then 19 months in jail. Communist officials made him sign a paper vowing he would never talk about the border shooting, threatening him with a stiffer prison sentence.

Marlit Schubert is also haunted by the past, and the nightmarish summer day her first husband was killed.

On Aug. 1, 1963, Helmut and Marlit Kleinert rode a motorbike from Quedlinburg, East Germany, to the border, leaving their 2-year-old daughter, Antje, with Helmut's parents.

Reaching their destination, they set out on foot across the deadly no man's land that once existed along the frontier.

A border guard ordered "Halt!" and the Kleinerts threw themselves to the ground. Helmut sprang up again.

One of the guards fired as Helmut fled, wounding him in the thigh. He crawled into some brush. But the border guards had no mercy. One of them sprayed the brush with machine-gun fire.

Marlit received a relatively light sentence for the escape attempt: 10 months' probation. But the state had killed her husband, making her a widowed mother with no chance of getting ahead because of the failed escape attempt.

Marlit remarried six years later.

East Germany's relatively short history was littered with border tragedies.

Peter Fechter, 18, was gunned down during an escape attempt at the Berlin Wall Aug. 17, 1962.

A number of people were killed by self-firing SM-70 weapons that spewed a flurry of murderous steel projectiles at anyone who set off the trip wire.

Other victims were killed by border land mines, or while trying to swim or row to freedom in Berlin, across the Elbe River and even over the North Sea.

The Salzgitter Central Registration Office office was created by the West German government in 1961, after the Berlin Wall went up, to gather information about the border killings.

East German guards were sometimes brazenly open about the killings, other times more covert.

Fechter's agonizing death was watched by throngs of horrified people, including his mother who had heard the shots from her nearby East Berlin home. Communist guards refused to help Fechter after they shot him, or to let Margarethe Fechter go to her dying son.

"I ran to the Berlin Wall and heard a faint voice saying: `Why isn't anyone helping me?'. The border police were smirking. They just let him die," she tearfully recalled in an interview last year.

Fechter lay in the wall's death strip for 55 minutes, his pleas growing ever weaker, and finally died from a loss of blood. East German border troops carried his body away.

Preliminary investigations have already begun in many of the deaths, but prospects for criminal trials could become snarled in a web of legal complexities.

The biggest question to be answered is: Who was legally responsible?

Border guards who did the shooting will have to be tracked down. And like Nazi war criminals after World War II, they would undoubtedly argue they were merely following orders.

Top former East German officials might be deemed ultimately responsible, since they issued shoot-to-kill orders to border troops.

An arrest warrant already has been issued for 78-year-old Erich Honecker, East Germany's former leader, accusing him of manslaughter because of the border deaths.

But Honecker is far out of the reach of German justice officials. On March 13, Soviet authorities spirited him away to Moscow from a Soviet army hospital near Berlin where he had found shelter. Moscow maintained Honecker was in declining health and indicated he would never be handed over for trial.

The time for seeing justice served is quickly expiring for some victims' relatives.

Peter Fechter's mother died in February, at age 77.

During the nearly three decades after his death, Margarethe Fechter is said to have spent virtually every free moment at her son's grave.

She used her sparse pension money to keep fresh flowers at the burial site.

"Mother was never able to cope with Peter's murder," says Gisela Geue, Fechter's sister.

Gisela Geue said of her long-suffering mother:

"We pray that now after 29 years, she has finally found peace."