“That Mielke is on trial for something he did 60 years ago is a farce,” complains Andreas Filler, a mathematician at Humboldt University in the former eastern sector of Berlin. Mielke is one of several East German kingpins who have not yet been called to account for widespread abuses of human rights under communist rule. Honecker is holed up at the Chilean Embassy in Moscow, where he seems to be dying of kidney cancer. His successor, Egon Krenz, and former Prime Minister Hans Modrow face eventual trial, but only for election fraud. One former member of the communist Politburo has been sentenced to 18 months in prison on relatively minor corruption charges, and another went to trial in a similar case last week. So far, only a few East German small fry-border guards who shot people trying to escape-have been brought to justice in human-rights cases.
Mielke was carried into the courtroom for his trial. Enclosed in a bulletproof booth as his lawyers read petitions to dismiss the case, he intermittently moaned: “I have to get out of here” and “I can’t go on.” His lawyers claimed that the original charges against him were political. (Mielke was convicted by a Nazi court in absentia after he had fled to Moscow; after the war, the victorious Russians apparently gave him his Nazi dossier.) Some of his more recent victims were impatient. “The man has so many other [crimes] on his conscience,” said Dieter Kegel,a dissident filmmaker imprisoned in East Germany for four years. “When they finally get around to the important things, he’ll be dead.”
Last year a Berlin court ruled that Mielke was too sick to stand trial on charges more closely related to his role as a secret-police man, including illegal wiretapping and perversion of justice. Prosecutors say the Weimar murder charge is a way of punishing him now and of keeping him on ice until more recent crimes can be investigated. “We can’t differentiate between Nazi crimes and communist crimes,” says Hans-Jurgen Grasemann, spokesman for a center that compiles documentation on human-rights abuses in East Germany. “Murder is murder and has to be cleared up.” But for Mielke’s actions as a secret-police man, justice delayed may be justice denied.
