Germany: As Germany remembered the 15th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall yesterday, four former East German border guards were found guilty of the attempted murder of four easterners who died trying to flee.
The last so-called "wall deaths" trial ended with the four officers, now aged between 63 and 71, walking from court free men after the judge ruled that the deaths took place too long ago and the defendants were too old to go to prison.
The presiding judge, Ms Gabriele Strobel, had stern words for the four defendants before they left the court. "The right to life is the greatest gift we have," she said.
The four men were part of a team that constructed and maintained the mines and automatic machine-guns in the death strip between East and West Germany.
One of the cases ruled on yesterday involved three teenage friends who tried to flee in 1985 but who were cut down by the notorious SM-70 shrapnel mines, packed with explosives and tiny cubes of metal. Two of the young men died and the third was captured.
Judge Strobel ruled that the four defendants knew that the devices existed solely to kill anyone attempting to flee from the east. In nearly 30 years, over 1,000 people died trying to cross the border in Berlin and the "inner-German-border" between East and West Germany. But as the four men dressed in sombre suits with grey, receding hair, left the court yesterday, court officials knew it was end of 112 so-called "wall death" cases since 1991 involving a total of 270 deaths.
Former East German officials have condemned the trials as a "disgrace" and prolonged victor justice. However, Mr Bernhard Jahntz, the state prosecutor in most of the trials, expressed satisfaction yesterday with the convictions, even if the "punishments had come apart at the seams" with border guards often receiving tougher sentences than the political leaders of the time.
Mr Egon Krenz, the last general secretary of the East German Politburo, received a six-year sentence, partly served in an open prison.
His predecessor Mr Erich Honecker, who died of cancer in Chile in 1994 before he could be convicted, accepted political responsibility for the killings but denied to the last any legal or moral guilt.
Yesterday's court ruling was overshadowed by memorial ceremonies to mark the fall of the Wall on a chilly November night 15 years' ago.
The Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schröder, remarked how, for Germans, November 9th is a date of happiness and shame. Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and the Weimar Republic was declared on November 9th, 1918.
Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch was suppressed on the same date five years later. On November 9th, 1938, Nazi mobs looted Jewish shops and burned synagogues, "The pogrom night of 9th November 1938 marked the beginning of the decline into inhumanity," said Mr Schröder in a statement which also praised easterners for toppling a "dictatorship which trampled human rights".
Mr Wolfgang Thierse, the parliamentary president, called November 9th, 1989 "one of the happiest events in German history" and said it was a disgrace that, according to a survey, one in three Germans don't know the significance of the date.