German Office for Cold War Crimes Is No More

Germans proudly passed a post-unification milestone Sunday by shuttering a police investigative unit that sought to bring Communist-era abusers to justice, from sports officials who doped young athletes into ill health and infamy to border guards who shot at people trying to escape over the Berlin Wall.

Declaring its work done, the Central Investigative Office for Government and Unification Crimes quietly slipped into history after nine years and more than 20,000 cases taken up on behalf of eastern Germans who were victims of the Cold War regime’s physical, psychological and financial abuse.

The police agency--known by its initials, ZERV--had been rendered redundant by time, because the statute of limitations on the crimes committed by many East German bureaucrats expired with October’s 10th anniversary of German reunification.

But in the new Germany, there remains much unfinished business with the old, most significantly in the frantic work still underway at the huge repository of files from the hated East German secret police, the Stasi.

Even as ZERV agents packed up their offices in the last days of 2000, clandestine tape recordings made by the Stasi were the subject of a strident battle between politicians loyal to former Chancellor Helmut Kohl and investigators probing allegations that he sold political favors during his 16 years in office.

A parliamentary committee investigating the case has subpoenaed recordings allegedly related to the bribes, while Kohl’s attorneys argue that the tapes made by Stasi eavesdroppers represent an unconscionable violation of his privacy.

Although the Stasi archives threaten to fuel the debate over victor’s justice for years to come, ZERV’s role in the post-unification process was aimed at righting more specific and identifiable wrongs.

“We have always understood our work to be for the victims of the East German regime,” longtime chief investigator Manfred Kittlaus told journalists as his 700 colleagues in the agency prepared to return to the state police units to which they once belonged.

When the agency was founded on Sept. 1, 1991, the investigators were charged with “fulfilling the national demand for comprehensive responsibility.”

ZERV evidence and testimony played roles in trials of the Communist regime’s most infamous stalwarts, from proceedings against East German leader Erich Honecker, who died in exile in Chile in 1994, to the last Communist Party chairman, Egon Krenz, whose 6 1/2-year sentence for crimes against the people was upheld just months ago.

Krenz was among those members of the East German Politburo held accountable for dozens of deaths and thousands of injuries and incarcerations of citizens caught trying to flee the regime across the barbed wire and booby traps on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain.

But it was probably the nuts-and-bolts police work involved in bringing former East German sports authorities to justice that represented the office’s most significant accomplishment.

On the strength of 9,000 interviews with sports figures who helped propel the Communist state to prominence in Olympic competitions, ZERV evidence led to the convictions of 107 coaches, trainers and officials who pushed anabolic steroids and other banned performance-enhancing drugs on their athletes. Many of the athletes today suffer from disfigurement and illnesses.

In the most notorious case, former East German Sports Minister Manfred Ewald and sports medical chief Manfred Hoeppner were sentenced just last July for systematically damaging the athletes in their charge. The 74-year-old Ewald was given 22 months in prison, and 66-year-old Hoeppner drew an 18-month term, although both sentences were suspended in view of the defendants’ ages and infirmities.

Less well known was the police agency’s role in tracking down Communist-era officials whose legal manipulations allowed them to steal the property and resources of the people. ZERV probed more than 4,000 cases of economic crime, recovering state assets worth more than $1.2 billion from the defendants.

East Germans whose privacy was violated and professional lives damaged by intrusions of the Stasi have been able for the past decade to peruse their files and seek damages against individual perpetrators, if they can be identified and their actions are deemed contrary to the laws of those times.

But mostly the Stasi files are a resource for confirming suspicions long harbored by those who were watched, eavesdropped upon and reported on by Communist-era neighbors, co-workers and even relatives and friends. ZERV, by contrast, performed the street work in investigating crimes by those in office, and outstanding cases are no longer punishable by law since the expiration of the 10-year statute of limitations.

“With the closing of ZERV, a chapter in German history comes to an end that has significance for all Germany,” Berlin Interior Minister Eckart Werthebach observed as the agency ceremonially unscrewed the identifying plaque from its headquarters. “ZERV was an important factor in the reconstruction of inner German unity in dedicating itself to the interests of the victims of East German aggression and despotism.”