East Germany's last communist leader, Egon Krenz, was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison yesterday for his role in the deaths of citizens who were shot trying to cross the Berlin Wall. He was refused bail pending an appeal after a hearing which opened in November 1995 and was regarded as the last major trial of East Germany's hardline leadership.
Two co-defendants, the East Berlin communist party chief, Guenther Schabowski (68), who announced the opening of the Wall in November 1989, and the party's economic expert, Guenther Kleiber (65), were jailed for three years each.
The public prosecutor had asked for an 11-year prison sentence for Krenz (60), who replaced the East German hardliner, Erich Honecker, in October 1989, less than a month before the fall of the wall and ran the country for six weeks.
Schabowski's sentence is six years shorter than requested, while Kleiber's is 4 1/2 years less.
Krenz was remanded in custody pending an appeal but Schabowski and Kleiber were released until an appeal court ruling. Krenz became head of East Germany's youth organisation, the FDJ, in 1976. He entered the executive politburo of the communist Socialist Unity Party (SED) in 1983.
Yesterday, the court ruled that the SED politburo had been responsible for East Germany's restrictive border system.
"The politburo was the de facto organisational top of the state," said Presiding Judge Josef Hoch.
Krenz has long prided himself on securing a peaceful transition after Honecker was ousted following pro-democracy demonstrations in East Germany and the flight of thousands of East Germans to the West in 1989.
He had pleaded not guilty, saying the trial was a case of "victor's justice" as politicians in what was West Germany were seeking to deny the leaders of East Germany, an internationally recognised country, their legitimacy.
His sentence is shorter than that of the East German defence minister, Heinz Kessler, who was jailed for 7 1/2 years.
Krenz was forced out of office in December 1989 when his party was seeking to adapt to the new times as pro-democracy movements were sweeping East Germany.
Honecker, who ruled East Germany between 1971 and 1989, never stood trial for health reasons and died in 1994 in Chile, where his wife and former education minister, Margot, still lives.
Schabowski was chief editor of the SED party's daily newspaper, Neues Deutschland, and entered the politburo in 1984.
Kleiber was a politburo member since 1984. He occupied the post of deputy prime minister in charge of key economic portfolios.
He told the court he was not responsible for the country's border system.
More than 900 East Germans died on the border between the two countries before November 9th, 1989, when Schabowski announced that East Germans would be able to travel to the West freely.
In a first reaction, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the successor to the East German ruling party, rejected the verdicts as "victor's justice".