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The Cold War's Forgotten Victims

Avenging East Germans Killed in Bulgaria

By Michael Sontheimer and Barbara Supp

Part 2: 'Defending an External Border of the Warsaw Pact'

The Bulgarians, says Günter Fiedler, once stationed in the East German embassy in Sofia as a Stasi officer, saw themselves as "the Prussians of the Balkans. They were defending an external border of the Warsaw Pact. That was where socialism ended."

Appelius has already spent three years collecting information about cases and names, border incidents and escape attempts -- and about those who paid with their lives.

The dead included Werner Gambke, an agricultural expert from Potsdam near Berlin. He died in 1965. Peter Nötzel, a jewelry designer from East Berlin, was killed in 1975. Karl-Heinz Engelmann and Siegfried Gammisch died in 1966. Wera Sandner and Rolf Kühnle, 1972. Eberhard Melichar, 1974. Brigitte von Kistowski and Klaus Prautzsch, 1975. Bernd Schaffner and Rudi Nettbohl, 1977. Frank Schachtschneider, 1988. And finally, Michael Weber, 1989.

The first case Appelius encountered, in the archives of Germany's Foreign Office, in a file titled "Deaths of GDR Citizens in Bulgaria," was that of Gunter Pschera, killed in 1967. The file contained Pschera's autopsy report and the information that he had been buried in Burgas, a city on the Black Sea coast.

Pschera was 23 when he died, on Aug. 31, 1967, at the Bulgarian-Turkish border. His friend Peter Müller, 28 at the time, survived their joint escape attempt.

There is a faded photo of the two young men at a campsite in Nesebar, a seaside resort on Bulgaria's Black Sea coast. A few minutes later, the two would say goodbye to four friends and head south, toward Turkey. "Enjoy the West, we told them. Write to us." Günter Möstl tells the story, 41 years later, of how he took the snapshot and said goodbye to his friends. Möstl, a physicist, lives near the Babelsberg Observatory in Potsdam, where he worked until recently. He was familiar with the border to West Berlin, which passed close by the observatory. He saw it every day, complete with barbed wire, patrols, searchlights and attack dogs. "You didn't stand a chance there," he says today.

But perhaps in Bulgaria, Peter Müller thought. Möstl and Müller were friends until Müller's death in 1994.

Leaving the GDR had long been a topic of discussion. Möstl and his friends, all of them from Karl Marx City (known today by its original name, Chemnitz), discussed escape in the late 1950s, when they were students and would get together on weekends back in their hometown. They spent many an evening sitting in the basement bar of the Chemnitzer Hof Hotel, an establishment that played Western music, hits by American artists like Bill Haley. They were interested in rock 'n' roll, not the officially sanctioned "Lipsi" dance music.

They talked about going to the West after finishing school, convinced that life there would be better for professionals -- architects, doctors, engineers. However, Möstl's exams were in 1962, one year after the Wall went up. Möstl found work, a wife and an apartment, and stayed in East Germany.

"We were opposed to the GDR. But we weren't revolutionaries."

Who goes? Who stays behind?

Those who seek to revolutionize a country cannot leave it behind. Those who want a better world for all stay put. Those who can work with the system stay put. But those who do not believe -- or no longer believe -- in a better world in their own country are the ones who decide to get out.

Hope drives people to flee, the hope that things will be better out there, or at least that one's own life will be, and the hope of finding a better place to live, a good job, freedom and blue jeans.

Peter Müller was unusual among the fugitives. He was a good-natured young man who believed everything was possible. For a while, he was even convinced that socialism could work in the GDR. One evening, as Möstl recalls -- the year must have been 1961 -- he was sick in bed, when his friend Peter knocked on the door, a bottle of whiskey in his hand. He said that there was something to celebrate.

"Did you win a prize?"

"No, I got kicked out."

He had slapped a party official in the face, at a teachers' seminar in Mühlhausen, after an argument over Western television. Peter said: "Of course I watch it. You hypocrites, you watch it too."

Müller was put on probation and sent to the Erzgebirge Mountains, where he was put to work building reservoirs. He became reintegrated and even joined the government party, the SED, perhaps because it was important to him, or perhaps because he believed that he could infiltrate the party, as Möstl believes. He went to school in Glauchau to become a civil engineer, and it was there that he met Gunter Pschera. By early 1967, the two were talking about escaping through Bulgaria.

At first it was more of a game than anything else. Gunter, a quiet type, had an uncle in Sweden. Peter was a risk-taker. "We'll give it a try," they told each other.

Peter had been to Bulgaria four times, but he had never seen the border.

What he didn't know -- or perhaps didn't care about -- was that Bulgarian border guards, like their East German counterparts, also had orders to shoot, since 1952, in fact, and that Bulgarians trying the flee the country were subject to the death penalty. Like many others, he had believed that Bulgarian border guards were easily fooled. For many East Germans, Bulgarians were people who sat on their donkeys drinking Raki, more or less oblivious to the world around them.

But no one really knew what the Bulgarian border looked like, or even where it was exactly. The roads and paths were confusing and maps were deliberately inaccurate.

The restricted zone along the border was up to 15 kilometers (nine miles) wide and could only be entered with a special permit. Signs posted there read "Warning, Border Zone," in both Bulgarian and German. There was a raked strip of ground in front of the border, followed by a fence that was roughly three meters (10 feet) tall and relatively easy to climb. By then, a fugitive could easily believe that he had already crossed the border and was safe. In reality, he had touched a signal fence, triggering an alarm at the next border post. Before even reaching the real border, another two kilometers (1.3 miles) past the first fence, he would usually have been captured by border guards.