Document fuels debate on East German border deaths

BERLIN, Aug 12 (Reuters) A recently unearthed document has provided new evidence of written orders to East German soldiers to shoot would-be escapers to the West, fuelling debate about who was to blame for hundreds of deaths at the former border.

Marianne Birthler, who heads the authority looking after the archive of the East German Stasi secret police, said the find would make it harder for former communist leaders to dispute whether they should be held to account.

''The order is the most explicit and clear we have yet seen and is without constraint,'' Birthler told German television broadcaster ZDF.

The document, written in October 1973, details an order for Stasi operatives infiltrated into border guard units to help prevent soldiers escaping to West Germany.

The order said: ''Don't shy away from using your weapon, even if the breach of the border involves women and children, which is a tactic often used by the traitors.'' The discovery comes as Germany prepares to mark the 46th anniversary tomorrow of construction of the Berlin Wall, which divided the city for 28 years from 1961 until 1989.

The director of a Berlin-based organisation representing Stasi victims said the find in Magdeburg, close to the former border, was effectively a ''licence to kill'' and urged state prosecutors to investigate.

The order could be interpreted as incitement to murder, Hubertus Knabe told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper.

TRIALS Trials of former border guards who fired at escapees and the officials who ordered the shoot-to-kill policy have generated huge controversy since German unification in 1990.

Many of the accused argued that their actions at the time did not constitute offences under East German law and accused the Western-dominated courts of practising ''victors' justice''.

The total number of people killed while trying to cross the border is uncertain. Berlin prosecutors count 270 deaths through shooting or mines along the whole of the border between East and West Germany, including the Berlin Wall, up to 1989.

A separate government study from 2000, estimated the number killed at 421. Other estimates run as high as 1,000 deaths.

Most of those who died trying to escape were ordinary citizens but some border guards were shot by their comrades.

East Germany's last communist leader, Egon Krenz, was centenced to 6-1/2 years in jail in 1997 for four shootings along the Berlin Wall in the 1980s.

Wolfgang Tiefensee, the cabinet minister responsible for the former eastern German states, was quoted as saying it was ''an historical fact that the criminal order to shoot existed''.

''But the documents discovered apparently confirm this now in black and white,'' Die Welt newspaper quoted Tiefensee as saying.

Whether the latest find would influence individual criminal proceedings would have to be assessed, the minister told the paper.

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