The trial of Erich Honecker - crimes against humanity trial of former East German President Erich Honecker

National Review, March 29, 1993 by Melvin J. Lasky

And then suddenly he was scot-free, bundled into an official limousine and speeded to the airport. A day later he was in Chile, in the bosom of his exiled family. The Berlin court had heard the appeal to end the "cruelty" of the trial of Erich Honecker and made its favorable decision hurriedly, precluding any appeal to a higher court; the villain made a quick getaway.

In Germany the denouement was greeted by a groan of surprise and dismay. Was the sentimental factor of the "human dignity" of an ailing old man such an overwhelming constitutional consideration? Could anyone find a relevant precedent in the case books? (Quite the contrary. Nazi war criminals were sentenced in their dotage; and the memories were embarrassingly fresh of the 93-year-old wraith in Spandau, Rudolf Hess, finally committing suicide after vainly waiting for death.) Wasn't the Moabit prison hospital clean and competent enough to handle any medical problems? Or was the free mountain air of faraway Chile the only solution?

The newly unified German Republic, faced with the problem of meting out justice to the boss of a hateful totalitarian dictatorship imposed by a foreign tyranny, simply broke down in open court. The Germans of our day are seen to be chronically reluctant to make "a clean sweep," as the Anglo-American military governors had done with the Third Reich in 1945. Allied army commanders could command, and de-Nazification tribunals could run for years.

The new German society, by contrast, is unable, or unwilling, or not imprudent enough to go in for any kind of de-Bolshevization - even though the old Party faithful have reconstituted themselves, enjoy some millions left over in secret treasuries, make speeches in the Bundestag, and, through a vast old-boy network, continue to exercise a nefarious influence in commerce, culture, and other unpurged areas of Eastern life.

Under the Ulbricht and Honecker regimes there were four decades of a secret-police state, with crimes and corruption galore. Who now is guilty? Stalin is long since dead, and so is the reprehensible Walter Ulbricht. Could they get something on General Mielke, the secret-police chief? But did he do anything wrong under the laws and constitution of the Communist DDR state? Chancellor Kohl had conceded in the German Unity Treaty that not Western law nor natural justice but only the DDR canon would obtain in Eastern criminal cases. So Mielke is on trial for fatally wounding a few Weimar policemen in a riot in 1931!

Could they, conceivably, get the goods on spy chief Mischa Wolf? He had run the ingenious agent, Gunther Guillaume, who as Chancellor Willy, Brandt's private secretary had access to all Bonn secrets. But since when is it a treasonable crime for a recognized nation-state to have a secret service.? So Mischa Wolf is still running around free. And so is Colonel Schalck-Golodkowski, who begged, borrowed, and stole billions in cunning financial operations to prop up Honecker's near-bankrupt budget. (In one deal he peddled Old Masters quietly taken from the national museums, sweetening the bargain with lovely antiques which he had rudely sequestered from the few remaining private collections in Dresden and Leipzig.)

To round out the spare and fitful program of democratization: a handful of East German border guards have been prosecuted and sentenced for shooting refugees in the back in no-man's land. A mayor of Dresden is doing time for civic misdemeanors, and a trade-union boss for having his hand in the union till.

And yet, most of my friends have been outraged by the Honecker affair. Erno Von Loewensterin, deputy editor of Die Welt, wrote a column indicting the whole ridiculous spectacle of the mismanaged trial, and calling it "a scandal unprecedented in the history of our republic."

In one court-room report of the scandalizing 12 days, however, in The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" pages, the author thought she saw "an internal propriety [Honecker] has followed all his life." More than that, as she went on to write:

The spectators of the trial have a bit of

trouble grasping him; they see a villain.

They should look more closely, but they

cannot. They could see there a Young

Communist disguised as an elderly

grump. They might even see the remains

of a hero, the aftermath of heroism.

This incensed the Berlin correspondent of the Washington Post, and he included in his dispatch the following item:

Although Mr. Honecker himself appeared

strong and spoke in a firm voice in his

court appearances, his lawyers portray

him as virtually crushed by cancer. Mr.

Beeker's wife [Nicolaus Becker was

Honecker's defense lawyer] even wrote

an unsigned article in The New Yorker

magazine deriding the victims' lawyer as

a "petit bourgeois," calling Mr. Honecker

"a hero" and divulging details of in-camera

meetings of the trial judges, her husband,

and other lawyers in the case.

Mrs. Beeker - who in real life, as she insists, is the American novelist Irene Dische - gave the Post hell. She berated the low ethical standards of U.S. journalism, and retaliated against Marc Fisher, the Post correspondent, by writing in a private letter (to David Ignatius, at that time the Post's foreign news editor) which she thought fit to make public: "You have ein Arschloch working at the Post." With slightly more elegance she rejected the notion that readers might want to know that the author of an article calling Mr. Honecker "a hero" was married to his defense lawyer.