Former Stasi officer jailed for murder of Polish man at Berlin border

A former officer in the East German secret police was sentenced yesterday to 10 years in jail for the murder of a Polish firefighter at a Berlin border crossing 50 years ago.

- Kate Connolly

Martin Naumann, now 80, shot Czesław Kukuczka in the back at close range on 29 March 1974 as Kukuczka walked towards the last in a series of control posts at a transit area in the divided city, having been told he had a free pass to escape to West Berlin.

The truth surrounding Kukuczka's death was never revealed to his family. Instead, his cremated remains were sent in an urn to his wife, Emilia, weeks later.

It took the dogged research skills of a historian immersed in the history of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security, usually shortened to Stasi), which was the intelligence service and secret police of the communist German Democratic Republic, to unearth the details of the case years later.

Stefan Appelius found documents about the shooting and the subsequent attempts to cover it up in the archives of the former Stasi, and tracked down Kukuczka's family in Poland. They alerted the Polish judiciary to the case, who issued a European arrest warrant for Naumann in 2021, which put pressure on German investigative authorities to reopen the case after decades of inaction. Naumann was charged with murder in October last year.

Details specifically linking Naumann to the killing had emerged only in 2016, after documents shredded by Stasi officers in the dying days of the regime in order to cover up its activities were pieced together by a digital "puzzler" machine manufactured specially for the purpose.

Naumann, from Leipzig, who had repeatedly denied the charges against him, was one of the first former GDR officials to be charged with murder instead of manslaughter. Prosecutors had demanded a 12-year prison sentence for him, highlighting the "particularly treacherous" characteristic of the killing, namely that Kukuczka was shot having believed he had made it to freedom.