# Berlin Wall Shooting Trials: Guards, Generals and the Politburo

> After 1990, Berlin prosecutors charged 246 people over violence at the Berlin Wall and 132 were convicted. Guards, generals, the Politburo and the ECHR.

Published 24 September 2026, updated 27 September 2026. Web page: https://victimsofthewall.com/articles/berlin-wall-shooting-trials/

After German unification, prosecutors put on trial both the border guards who had fired at people at the Berlin Wall and the military and political leaders who had given the orders. The Berlin public prosecutor brought 112 indictments against 246 people; 132 of them were finally convicted, while almost half of those charged were acquitted. Sentences rose with rank: the guards who fired usually received terms suspended on probation, while members of the East German leadership were given several years in prison.

These proceedings are often called the Border Guard Trials; in German the guards were known as "Mauerschützen", the Wall shooters. This article sets out what happened in the courts, which legal questions they had to answer, and how some of the individual cases ended. For the orders behind the shootings, see [the article on the shoot-to-kill order](https://victimsofthewall.com/articles/shoot-to-kill-order-berlin-wall/).

## How the cases came to court

The research project on the victims notes that the East German leadership knew from the start that the West Berlin police recorded acts of violence at the border and that West Berlin's public prosecution service dealt with them, and that a central registry in Salzgitter investigated and documented, for criminal-law purposes, every case it learned of.

In several cases, relatives set the proceedings in motion. The mother of [Chris Gueffroy](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/gueffroy-chris/), who was shot on 5 February 1989, filed a criminal complaint against "persons unknown" on 12 January 1990, and after reunification the Central Investigation Office for Government and Unification Criminality (ZERV) took over the investigation. In July 1990 the sisters of [Peter Fechter](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/fechter-peter/) filed a criminal complaint that eventually led to the conviction of two guards. The father of [Michael Schmidt](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/schmidt-michael/) had asked the East German state prosecutor about his son's death by mid-December 1989, although the Berlin public prosecutor did not open an intensive investigation until after unification.

## The first trial: the killing of Chris Gueffroy

The first of the many trials against guards who had shot at people at the Wall concerned Chris Gueffroy, the last person shot dead there. Amid great public interest, the Berlin public prosecutor charged four former border guards on 27 May 1991. On 20 January 1992 the Berlin Regional Court (Landgericht Berlin, which the victims' biographies call the Berlin district court) found the guard who had fired the fatal shot guilty of manslaughter and sentenced him to three and a half years in prison; of the other defendants, some received suspended sentences and the rest were acquitted.

The Federal Court of Justice overturned that verdict on 25 March 1993 and sent the case back to another chamber of the Berlin Regional Court. It found that the first court had given too little weight to the gunman's position at the lowest level of the military hierarchy. In the retrial, on 14 March 1994, he was sentenced to two years, suspended on probation, and his guard leader was acquitted. According to Gueffroy's biography, the case set a precedent: almost all later trials followed this line of rulings, which weighed in the gunmen's favour.

On 5 February 1992, the Berlin Regional Court convicted the two guards who had shot Michael Schmidt in 1984 of joint manslaughter. They were given suspended sentences of 18 and 21 months.

## What sentences did the guards receive?

The historian Hans-Hermann Hertle, summarising the outcome of all the Berlin proceedings, lists 132 defendants convicted with final effect of various forms of manslaughter: ten members of the SED leadership, 42 members of the military leadership and 80 border soldiers. Sentences were graded by rank; in his overview, guards who had fired the shots generally received between six and 24 months, as a rule suspended on probation, although some were given considerably longer terms, as the cases below show. Hertle describes the penalties overall as surprisingly low.

According to Hertle, the courts took into account in the defendants' favour, among other things, their place in the hierarchy of a totalitarian system, constant political indoctrination, the time that had passed since the shooting, and the defendants' youth at the time. In the case of [Werner Probst](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/probst-werner/), who was shot as he reached the West Berlin bank of the Spree in October 1961, the court assumed in the guards' favour that, although the order they acted on was "obviously unlawful", they had themselves been at the bottom of the hierarchy that gave it.

Typical outcomes, as recorded in the victims' biographies:

- **[Günter Litfin](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/litfin-guenter/)**, the first person shot dead at the Wall: in 1997 two men who had fired at him were found guilty of joint manslaughter and sentenced to one year and to one year and six months, suspended on probation. The court itself remarked how little such sentences did justice to the unlawfulness of the acts.
- **Peter Fechter**: two guards were found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 20 and 21 months in prison, suspended on probation.
- **[Manfred Weylandt](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/weylandt-manfred/)**, who was hit by a bullet in the Spree in February 1972 and drowned: two guards were given youth sentences of a year and ten months for joint manslaughter, suspended on probation.

A small number of cases ended differently. The Neuruppin public prosecutor brought a further 31 cases over shootings on the outer ring around West Berlin, which are not included in the Berlin figures. Among them was the case of [Walter Kittel](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/kittel-walter/), who was shot in Kleinmachnow in 1965 after the guards had already stopped him: the Potsdam district court (Bezirksgericht) in December 1992 sentenced a former border guard to six years for manslaughter, and the following year, on appeal, the Federal Court of Justice increased the penalty to ten years in prison for murder. The guard who shot [Hermann Döbler](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/doebler-hermann/), a West Berliner killed on a boat trip on the Teltow Canal in 1965, was convicted by the Berlin Regional Court of murder in conjunction with attempted murder and sentenced to six years, which his biography calls one of the harshest punishments ever given to a border guard. In the case of [Willi Block](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/block-willi/), the court could not establish who had fired the fatal shots, but assumed with a high degree of probability that it was the regiment commander; after an appeal by the prosecution and a ruling of the Federal Court of Justice, he was finally convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to three years in prison without probation. The man who shot [Dr. Johannes Muschol](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/muschol-dr-johannes/) in 1981 was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to three years in prison.

## Acquittals and dropped cases

Almost half of those charged were acquitted. Hertle explains that in some cases the person who fired the fatal shot could no longer be identified, and in others an intention to kill could not be proven. After 1990 the father of [Herbert Mende](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/mende-herbert/) set off an investigation into the guard who had shot his son. It was discontinued in the autumn of 1996 because the public prosecutor could not prove beyond doubt that the gunman had intended to kill; reopened after a complaint by Mende's father, it was closed again in February 1997, and in 1998 the Attorney General of Brandenburg, responding to a further complaint, declined to bring charges because a conviction was not likely.

Shots at armed deserters were treated differently. The guard presumed responsible for the death of [Michael Kollender](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/kollender-michael/), a National People's Army soldier who was shot in 1966 while deserting with a loaded machine pistol, was acquitted by the Berlin Regional Court in the autumn of 1995, while another guard was convicted of attempted manslaughter and given a nine-month sentence, suspended on probation. On the appeals of the prosecution and of the convicted guard, the Federal Court of Justice acquitted him too: it reasoned that East Germany's military criminal law of 1962 made desertion a crime, so in this special case ("Spezialfall") the guards could not have recognised that shooting a deserter was unlawful, and the killing was excused.

## The commanders and the Politburo

Erich Honecker, the former chairman of the GDR's National Defence Council, was charged in Berlin in 1992 with multiple counts of manslaughter (Totschlag) over the killings at the border, as a principal rather than as an instigator. When he was brought back to Berlin in July 1992, he was ill with liver cancer. His trial before the Berlin Regional Court began on 12 November 1992, but on 12 January 1993 the proceedings were discontinued after the Berlin Constitutional Court ruled that continuing the trial and his detention violated his human dignity. He left for Chile the next day and died in Santiago de Chile on 29 May 1994.

Other members of the leadership were convicted. On 16 September 1993 the Berlin Regional Court sentenced Fritz Streletz and Heinz Kessler, both members of the National Defence Council, to five years and six months and to seven years and six months respectively for Anstiftung zum Totschlag, which the European Court of Human Rights translates as incitement to commit intentional homicide. The deaths in their case included those of Michael Schmidt and Chris Gueffroy. On 26 July 1994 the Federal Court of Justice reclassified the offence as intentional homicide as indirect principals, leaving the length of the sentences unchanged.

On 25 August 1997, almost two years after the trial began, the Berlin Regional Court in Moabit gave its verdict against three Politburo members: Egon Krenz, Günther Kleiber and Günter Schabowski. Krenz was sentenced to six years and six months, in the European Court's words for intentional homicide as an indirect principal. The court held him jointly responsible for the deaths of four young people between 1984 and 1989: Michael Schmidt, [Michael Bittner](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/bittner-michael/), [Lutz Schmidt](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/schmidt-lutz/) and Chris Gueffroy. Hertle's overview gives sentences of 36 to 78 months for members of the SED leadership and 60 to 90 months for members of the National Defence Council.

## Were the trials lawful?

Defendants argued that the shootings had been legal under East German law at the time, and that punishing them afterwards broke the ban on retroactive criminal law. Two of the highest courts rejected that argument.

On 24 October 1996 the Federal Constitutional Court rejected the constitutional complaints of three former members of the National Defence Council and of a former border guard. The court held that the ban on retroactive punishment in Article 103 of the Basic Law is absolute, but that the special trust it protects is missing where a state has excluded punishment for the gravest criminal wrongs, encouraged such wrongs beyond its written laws and seriously disregarded internationally recognised human rights. In that situation, the court ruled, the strict protection of trust must give way. Hertle notes that the courts followed the Federal Court of Justice, which held that the intentional killing of unarmed refugees could not be justified because it was an obvious and intolerable violation of elementary principles of justice and of human rights protected by international law. Orders, regulations and laws that allowed firearms to be used to stop escapes were therefore not accepted as a justification.

Several of those convicted then turned to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. On 22 March 2001 its Grand Chamber ruled in two judgments. In Streletz, Kessler and Krenz v. Germany it found unanimously that there had been no violation of Article 7 § 1 of the Convention (no punishment without law). In K.-H. W. v. Germany, brought by a former border guard, it reached the same conclusion by fourteen votes to three. That guard had been sentenced by the Berlin Regional Court on 17 June 1993 to one year and ten months' juvenile detention, suspended on probation, for the killing of Manfred Weylandt.

## What the trials meant for the families

The victims project notes that for many families the truth about how their relatives died came out only in the 1990s, when the East German archives were opened and the crimes at the border were prosecuted. Peter Fechter's youngest sister, Ruth, took part in the trial as a joint plaintiff and spoke through her lawyer about the pressure and exclusion her family had lived with for decades.

The trials also produced records. The research project on the victims used the findings of the Border Guard Trials of the 1990s, alongside border troop and Stasi files, to reconstruct the circumstances of the deaths. Hertle records that to many people the number of acquittals seems too high and the sentences too low, but that the investigations and trials documented the human rights violations in East Germany comprehensively.

Not every trial concerned a guard who had fired. [Reinhold Huhn](https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/huhn-reinhold/), a border soldier, was shot dead in 1962 by a West Berliner helping his family to escape. In 1999 the Berlin Regional Court convicted the man of manslaughter and gave him a one-year sentence, suspended on probation; in 2000 the Federal Court of Justice found him guilty of murder but did not change the sentence. More about Huhn and the other soldiers who died on duty is in [the article on the border soldiers killed at the Wall](https://victimsofthewall.com/articles/border-soldiers-killed-at-the-berlin-wall/). For how the victims are remembered today, see [where to remember the victims in Berlin](https://victimsofthewall.com/articles/berlin-wall-victims-memorials/).

## Questions and answers

**How many people were convicted over the killings at the Berlin Wall?**

After 1990 the Berlin public prosecutor brought 112 indictments against 246 people. According to the historian Hans-Hermann Hertle, 132 defendants were finally convicted, among them ten members of the SED leadership, 42 members of the military leadership and 80 border soldiers. Almost half of those charged were acquitted.

**What sentences did the border guards receive?**

Most were mild. According to an overview by the historian Hans-Hermann Hertle, guards who fired the shots generally received six to 24 months, as a rule suspended on probation, although some received longer terms. In the separate proceedings brought by the Neuruppin public prosecutor over shootings on the outer ring around West Berlin, one guard was sentenced to ten years for the murder of Walter Kittel.

**What was the first Berlin Wall shooting trial?**

The trial of four former border guards over the killing of Chris Gueffroy, the last person shot dead at the Wall. The Berlin public prosecutor charged them on 27 May 1991, and the Berlin Regional Court gave its verdict on 20 January 1992.

**Was Erich Honecker convicted?**

No. He was charged in 1992, but the proceedings were halted on 12 January 1993 after the Berlin Constitutional Court ruled that continuing the trial and his detention, when he was terminally ill, violated his human dignity. He left for Chile and died there in 1994.

**Did the European Court of Human Rights uphold the convictions?**

Yes. On 22 March 2001 the Grand Chamber found no violation of the ban on retroactive punishment, unanimously in the case of Fritz Streletz, Heinz Kessler and Egon Krenz, and by fourteen votes to three in the case of a former border guard, K.-H. W.

## Sources

1. Hans-Hermann Hertle, Die strafrechtliche Aufarbeitung der Todesschüsse an der Berliner Mauer (Chronik der Mauer, from Die Berliner Mauer. Biografie eines Bauwerks, 2015): https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/system/files/dokument_pdf/HHH_Bilanz_strafrechtliche_Aufarbeitung_Todesschuesse_2015.pdf
2. Federal Constitutional Court, decision of 24 October 1996, 2 BvR 1851/94 and others: https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Entscheidungen/DE/1996/10/rs19961024_2bvr185194.html
3. European Court of Human Rights (Grand Chamber), Streletz, Kessler and Krenz v. Germany, 22 March 2001: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-59353
4. European Court of Human Rights (Grand Chamber), K.-H. W. v. Germany, 22 March 2001: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-59352
5. LeMO (Stiftung Haus der Geschichte): Erich Honecker: https://www.hdg.de/lemo/biografie/erich-honecker.html
6. Tagesspiegel: Was der Richter 1997 sagte: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/was-der-richter-1997-sagte-627478.html
7. Hertle/Nooke, The Victims at the Berlin Wall, 1961–1989: Findings (2017): https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/
8. Berlin Wall Foundation: Victims at the Berlin Wall: https://www.stiftung-berliner-mauer.de/en/topics/victims-berlin-wall
9. Chronik der Mauer: Chris Gueffroy: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180603/gueffroy-chris
10. Chronik der Mauer: Michael Schmidt: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180596/schmidt-michael
11. Chronik der Mauer: Peter Fechter: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180502/fechter-peter
12. Chronik der Mauer: Günter Litfin: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180480/litfin-guenter
13. Chronik der Mauer: Walter Kittel: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180534/kittel-walter
14. Chronik der Mauer: Willi Block: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180540/block-willi
15. Chronik der Mauer: Michael Kollender: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180545/kollender-michael
16. Chronik der Mauer: Manfred Weylandt: https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/victims/180573/weylandt-manfred

Cite as: “Berlin Wall Shooting Trials: Guards, Generals and the Politburo”, Victims of the Berlin Wall, Berlin Experiences. https://victimsofthewall.com/articles/berlin-wall-shooting-trials/