Kohl Assails Berlin Wall; East Germans March in Tribute to It

West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl branded the Berlin Wall a “monument to inhumanity” while across the white concrete barrier in East Berlin, armed Communist militia marched in tribute to its anniversary Wednesday.

“We demand humanity and peace at the border through the middle of Germany,” Kohl told a meeting in West Berlin. “Walls, barbed wire and orders to shoot to kill must all go.”

In East Berlin, Communist leader Erich Honecker, speaking on a podium flanked with red flags, said the building of the wall in a lightning overnight operation 25 years ago had saved peace in Europe.

Members of the People’s Army, border guards and the Fighting Groups, the Communist workers militia that guarded the wall as it went up, marched down East Berlin’s Karl Marx Allee in a parade estimated by the East German ADN news service at 10,000 strong.

The Western powers--the United States, Britain and France--condemned the parade as a violation of four-power agreements on the demilitarization of Berlin.

And in Moscow, the Soviet Union said ceremonies organized by the West German government to mark the 25th anniversary during the next few days were increasing tensions in the city and warned of “serious consequences.”

“Our measures on Aug. 13 (1961) served peace. We can say with full justification that they opened the way from confrontation to detente,” Honecker said.

The militia threw a cordon of barbed wire and bricks 105 miles long around West Berlin in 1961 to stem a westward stream of refugees that was draining the East German economy.

The wall split families and sealed the division of Germany.

Chancellor Kohl, speaking in the former German parliament building (Reichstag) in West Berlin just yards from the wall, stressed the human tragedy it represents.

“We must not and will not come to terms with this monument to inhumanity, which tears families apart and prevents human contact,” he said.

Kohl and other political leaders laid wreaths to the 74 people killed in attempts to escape to the West.

Communist officials in East Berlin also laid wreaths to border guards who were “murdered,” according to East German accounts, by infiltrators from the West.

But the Communist leader also implicitly acknowledged the skepticism of many young people over the official view here.

Relating alleged Western sabotage acts, he added: “A knowledge of history will be a help most of all to the younger generation to understand the present and master their responsibilities.”

Chancellor Kohl said the wall was “perhaps the most visible expression of the moral gulf between moral democracy and totalitarian dictatorship.”

But he said that although Bonn will never come to terms with the way the wall divided Germans from Germans, it recognizes that the best way to bridge that gulf is to seek steady improvements in East-West German relations.

The chancellor also welcomed moves by East Germany to let more people visit relatives in the West but said it must go much further and allow all young people the chance to cross through the Wall and see the outside world for themselves.

Former Chancellor Willy Brandt, who was mayor of West Berlin when the wall went up, told the gathering, “It was an admission of failure by the East Germans that they had to wall in their own people to stop them voting with their feet.”

But Brandt also recalled the fear and tension when U.S. and Soviet forces lined up on each side of the Berlin divide a few weeks after the wall was started, the only time American and Russian tanks have faced each other in hostility.

West Berlin police reported that an East German staged a one-man protest Wednesday against the wall from the balcony of an apartment block overlooking the fortified border.

They said he held up two large placards, one of them reading “Die on the Wall,” the other: “25 Years of the Wall Are Enough.”

They said the man, who was clearly visible on the West Berlin side of the wall, disappeared into a flat after an East German police car arrived outside the building. It was not clear if he had been detained.

In Washington, President Reagan marked the 25th anniversary of the wall with the declaration that “one day it--and all those like it--will come down.”