At 80, he was leading a normal, quiet retired life in Leipzig, Germany. At least until today, when Martin Naumann, a former East German secret police officer, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the murder of a Polish firefighter at a Berlin border crossing in 1974.
The sentence after 50 years of judicial inactivity
Naumann, a former Stasi agent, was a first lieutenant in the police at the time of the incident and was operating at the Friedrichstrasse crossing. On March 29, 1974 he shot the 38-year-old Polish Kukuczka in the back from a distance of 2-3 meters, responding to the order to ”neutralize” the victim. Judge Bernd Miczajka expressed regret that those who gave the order could no longer be prosecuted and stressed that Naumann had committed the murder “without mercy”.
After years of silence and mystery surrounding the case, the first details emerged in 2016. Naumann was linked to the murder of the Polish Kukuczka thanks to the tenacity of two historians, a German and a Pole, who had done research in the Stasi archives, and to a machine, which recomposed the documents destroyed by East German secret police officers in the last days of the regime’s life.
Naumann, who has always denied the charges against him, was one of the first former officials in communist Germany to be charged with murder rather than manslaughter. Prosecutors had asked for a 12-year prison sentence for him, underlining the “particularly treacherous” nature of the murder, since Kukuczka was shot when he believed he had achieved freedom. Naumann’s lawyers had instead asked for acquittal due to insufficient evidence.
Why Naumann killed the 38-year-old Pole
On March 29, 1974, Kukuczka, a father of three, burst into the Polish embassy in East Berlin and threatened to detonate a (fake) bomb in order to obtain a visa to cross the border. The Stasi, alerted by the Polish authorities, immediately arrived at the Polish diplomatic headquarters: here, they deluded Kukuczka into believing that he had obtained a visa to leave communist Germany. The officers accompanied him to the nearby Friedrichstrasse border crossing. After passing through two checkpoints without incident, Kukuczka was convinced that he would become a free man. But his life was cut short by Naumann, who fired a gunshot, an act for which he was later decorated. The truth about the 38-year-old Polish man’s death was never revealed to his family.
In total, at least 140 people were killed while attempting to cross the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989, and hundreds more died attempting to escape East Germany by other means. During the 1990s, a total of 251 people were accused of crimes committed on behalf of the Stasi. However, only two-thirds of criminal cases ended in acquittal or no verdict and only 87 defendants were convicted, most with light sentences.