After 1016 days, the escape from responsibility ended: It was Wednesday, July 29, 1992. At exactly 4:32 p.m., Erich Honecker left the Embassy of the Republic of Chile in Moscow. In front of the waiting photographers and camera teams, he raised his clenched right fist in the air, showing the traditional communist salute. Then, dressed as usual in a dark blue suit with a subtle red tie and hat, with a trench coat over his arm, he got into a car bound for Vnukovo Airport. Destination of the Russian special machine with a complete team of doctors on board: Berlin-Tegel.
On October 18, 1989, Honecker's resignation from all his offices was announced in the eastern part of the city, which was still divided at the time. His former crown prince Egon Krenz overthrew him after a little over 18 years in power by means of a vote in the Politburo. And even Honecker himself voted to leave. Since then he lived unsteadily.
On December 8, 1989, the GDR general public prosecutor's office filed charges against the formerly most powerful man in the SED; In the meantime, Krenz's successor had also been dismissed without violence. Honecker was initially accused of abuse of power and corruption.
Honecker first evaded arrest by going to the hospital for surgery for a kidney tumor for which he had been treated months earlier. Immediately after his release from the East Berlin hospital on January 29, 1990, Honecker was arrested and taken to the Rummelsburg prison. But after just a few hours, a court granted an exemption from detention due to “incapacity to be held liable”.
Since the previous Honecker house in the "Waldsiedlung", the SED special housing area near Wandlitz, was no longer available, Honecker and his wife Margot were initially supposed to move to the guest house of the GDR government in Lindow near Neuruppin. But that failed due to the violent protests of the neighbors; it was feared that the former SED leader might be lynched.
As a result, the singer-songwriter Reinhold Andert, who himself had been expelled from the SED in 1980, made contact with Pastor Uwe Holmer. The evangelical pastor had himself suffered from reprisals from the GDR regime for years - and now, in an act of Christian charity, took the Honeckers into his rectory in Lobetal, Brandenburg.
This was not a solution, because demonstrators soon stood in front of the house and demanded: "No mercy for Honecker!" Associations with the shooting of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauscescu and his wife Elena came up again. The Soviet military hospital in Beelitz near Potsdam admitted Honecker on April 3, 1990 – for further medical treatment.
From reunification on October 3, 1990, the former West German judiciary was responsible for the Honecker case. On November 30, the Tiergarten district court issued arrest warrants for inciting manslaughter in several cases because of the fatal shots at the inner-German border. As soon as the accused found out about it, his health deteriorated dramatically again - at least that's what it was said.
In order to protect him from legal action, the Soviet military had already flown the Honeckers to Moscow on March 13, 1990; Immediately before the ratification of the Two Plus Four Treaty by the Soviet Union, the Federal Government had no means of objecting. The prominent refugee couple came to a military hospital in Moscow. The allegedly necessary complicated intestinal operation was not possible in Beelitz, the Soviet military explained.
Now began a diplomatic tug of war over Honecker's extradition to the Federal Republic. Bonn's first request was dated March 15, 1991. The supposedly terminally ill Honecker was soon on his feet again, went for walks in Sokolniki Park with his wife and answered a reporter's question about his health: "I'm fine!"
But in August, supporters of the old Soviet imperialism staged a coup against CPSU leader Mikhail Gorbachev. They lost quickly, but the new strongman was now Boris Yeltsin. Honecker's friends moved away from their protégé. On September 10, Yeltsin advocated Honecker's extradition to Germany, but Gorbachev opposed it.
In early October 1991, Honecker demanded that the arrest warrant be lifted. He doesn't want to "make himself available to the avenging angels," explains the ex-Secretary General, during whose reign tens of thousands of GDR citizens were locked away because they wanted to exercise basic human rights such as freedom of expression or freedom of movement.
Bonn remained firm: the then Minister of Justice, Klaus Kinkel, made representations to Moscow, and the federal government also applied diplomatic pressure. In mid-November, the Russian cabinet under Yeltsin decided to expel Honecker, but he applied to the Soviet authorities for asylum and disappeared to be treated in hospital. When Yeltsin issued an ultimatum and Gorbachev's complete removal from power became foreseeable, the 79-year-old and his wife, who was 15 years his junior, fled to the Chilean embassy on December 11, 1991.
Chile agrees to serve as exile for the Honeckers; the Federal Republic protested. The supposedly immediately life-threatening cancer turned out to be fake. On July 23, 1992, Chancellor Helmut Kohl first confirmed reports that Honecker was about to return to Germany. Six days later, the time had come: Honecker landed in Germany, was immediately arrested and taken to a prison clinic.
The next day's detention hearing was almost exclusively about the defendant's health. Judge Hansgeorg Brautigam immediately commissioned medical reports: "Can you put a man on trial if you think he will not live to see the verdict?" The Berlin district court tried it and began the main hearing against Honecker and five on November 12, 1992 other former SED functionaries for manslaughter of refugees. The indictment ran to 783 pages.
But the ex-GDR head of state used every means of the rule of law to defend himself against trial and imprisonment. First he was allowed to use the stage of the trial for a political statement, then the Berlin Constitutional Court ruled on January 12, 1993 that the allegedly terminally ill patient was being violated in his human dignity by the trial. Hours later, Honecker boarded a plane to Chile, where his wife Margot had lived since leaving Moscow.
He had 16 months in freedom: On May 29, 1994, Erich Honecker died in Santiago de Chile at the age of almost 82. Incidentally, the average life expectancy of a German man in 1994 was 73.1 years.
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