East German leader freed from prison

Egon Krenz, East Germany’s last Stalinist leader who allowed the historic opening of the Berlin Wall during a brief seven weeks in office, was released from prison on parole today.

He had served almost four years of a more than six-year sentence for the shooting deaths of East Germans trying to flee to the West during the Cold War.

A court held him partly responsible for deaths at the Berlin Wall and other heavily fortified stretches of Germany’s former east-west border.

Krenz, aged 66, was paroled because he had served nearly two-thirds of his sentence, as allowed under German law, and has behaved well in prison, Berlin justice spokeswoman Annette Grabbe said.

“This is a person who causes no trouble and has a job. We don’t expect him to commit any more crimes,” Grabbe said.

“For us, he really is a prisoner like any other in the judicial sense.”

About 1,000 people were killed trying to cross from East Germany to the West between 1961 and the 1989 fall of the Wall.

Hundreds of former East German border guards and officials have been convicted since German reunification in 1990 for shootings along the former border.

Most received suspended sentences.

Krenz’s sentence allowed him to leave Berlin’s Ploetzensee prison during the day, when he worked as an economic adviser at a German airline, but he had to return to his cell every night.

Krenz has maintained he was illegally convicted in 1997, saying that stopping citizens from fleeing the communist country broke no East German law.

While East Germans brought down the former communist regime through months of peaceful protests, many were not so eager to see the former leadership put on trial under western German laws – bitterly encapsulated in the phrase ”victor’s justice.”