ORIGINAL LINK : https://germanunification.tistory.com/14979439
After the unification, West Germany embarked on a task of settling accounts with the East German communist dictatorship. However, the punishment was much lighter than what some domestic personnel claimed. In the case of Stasi, the number one target for the settlement, only 87 out of 251 people indicted by the prosecution were tried and convicted. Most of them were fined or given suspended sentences, and only three people were sentenced to prison. They were one regular agent and two irregular agents. The regular agent was a person who was charged with terrorism for installing explosives at the “Maison de France” in Berlin in 1983, and the two irregular agents were those who attempted to assassinate Wolfgang Welsch, who helped escape from East Germany, three times, and those who tried to assassinate Siegfried Schulze, an escapee from East Germany, three times.
All three were serious offenders who attempted to kill people under direct orders from Stasi. Erich Mielke, the head of Stasi, was sentenced to six years in prison and was released in 1998 due to the suspension of execution when he was over 90 years old during his sentence.
Why were such judgments made?
It was because East and West Germany agreed to follow East German criminal law regarding criminal punishment, and because the defendant’s homeland, East Germany, had already disappeared.
The following document is a criminal prosecution-related document kept in the Stasi Document Management Office.
