Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). On 17/18 October 1989, members of the SED Politburo, led by Prime Minister Willi Stoph, forced their long-standing General Secretary Erich Honecker, whose policies they had unquestioningly supported, to resign. This marked the beginning of a veritable process of self-destruction within the party, which Gregor Gysi and others began to transform into a reformist party of democratic socialism (PDS), culminating in the expulsion of leading representatives of the SED, especially, but not only, members of the Politburo.
With the previous party leadership being pilloried in this way, it was hardly surprising that opposition figures hostile to socialism seized on this and concentrated their angry and often hateful attacks not only on the MfS but above all on Honecker and the Politburo. It was shameful that Head of Government Hans Modrow (from November 1989 to April 1990) did not dare to provide his long-time party and state leader with secure accommodation to protect him from persecution after his apartment in Wandlitz had been terminated. Lawyer Wolfgang Vogel arranged for Pastor Uwe Holmer and his wife to take him in at the rectory in Lobetal. Modrow’s government policy, which was flanked by the ‘reform’ policy of the PDS under Gysi, also had an impact on the judicial authorities. With the arrest of Honecker, the public prosecutor’s office joined the campaign to eliminate the party. 2
Certainly, much was amiss with the party leadership and corrections were urgently needed. In this situation, however, one should have remembered Friedrich Engels, who once warned against looking back too much in situations of sharp class conflict, but rather to look forward. 3 But seeking advice from the classics was alien to the protagonists of this ‘turning point,’ led by Gregor Gysi, who sought salvation on the well-trodden paths of social democracy.
Honecker was expelled from the SED on 1 December 1989. In the preliminary investigation by the public prosecutor’s office, he was accused of having ‘abused his position as General Secretary, Chairman of the State Council and the National Defence Council for financial gain for himself and others’. Later, he was also accused of giving the ‘shoot-to-kill order’ at the ‘inner-German border’. After undergoing surgery for cancer (kidney tumour), he was arrested in his hospital room at the Charité on 28 January 1990, admitted to the prison hospital in Berlin-Rummelsburg the next day, and released a day later because he was unfit for detention.
On 13 March 1991, a Soviet military aircraft took him to Moscow. However, the Russian government under Boris Yeltsin announced that it would extradite him to the Federal Republic of Germany. He then fled with his wife to the Chilean embassy on 11 December 1991. As Chile was also preparing to extradite him to the Federal Republic of Germany, the Honeckers left the Chilean embassy on 29 July 1992. Honecker was flown to Berlin, arrested on arrival and taken to Moabit prison. Margot Honecker flew to Santiago de Chile on an Aeroflot plane, where she stayed with her daughter Sonja and lived until her death on 6 May 2016.
Honecker’s trial was controversial because the West German judiciary was prosecuting a politician whom it had received with full ceremonial honours in Bonn, Munich and other cities as recently as 1987. Honecker’s speech before the tribunal on 3 December 1992 caused a great international stir. He accepted political responsibility for ‘the deaths at the Wall,’ but rejected any ‘legal or moral guilt,’ justifying the construction of ‘the Wall’ on the grounds that otherwise a ‘third world war with millions of deaths’ could not have been prevented, and that this measure had been approved by the socialist leaders of all Eastern Bloc countries. Citing advanced cancer, the proceedings were ultimately discontinued at the request of his lawyers on 13 January 1993 and the arrest warrant was lifted. Honecker then flew to Santiago de Chile to join his wife and daughter. On 29 May 1994, he succumbed to his serious cancer.
Notes:
1 See the article Pioneer of ‘unity’ – How Gregor Gysi contributed his mite by Gerhard Feldbauer in WELTEXPRESS.
2 In December, the public prosecutor’s office launched investigations against 30 former top GDR officials, including Honecker and ten members of the Politburo. Most of them were remanded in custody. They were accused of personal enrichment and squandering public assets.
3 ‘We are still a long way from being able to wage an open struggle,’ he wrote to Paul Lafargue on 31 January 1991, emphasising the duty “not to suffer defeat, but to win the first great battle when the moment comes. I subordinate every other consideration to this one.” MEW, vol. 38, Berlin/GDR 1968, p. 20.
