Erich Honecker will spend the last months of his life with his family in Chile, not in a Berlin courtroom facing charges he ordered border guards to kill people fleeing to the West.
Berlin courts, putting mercy above justice, halted the ailing Honecker's trial for manslaughter for killings at the Berlin Wall. He was freed from prison Wednesday and left for Chile.Reviled by many, pitied by others, the 80-year-old unrepentant Communist suffers from liver cancer that doctors say will kill him within six months. His trial had started on Nov. 12 and had been expected to continue for months.
Honecker flew from Germany late Wednesday and his jumbo jet landed this morning at Sao Paulo, Brazil. After a two-hour wait in a VIP lounge closed to the press, he flew on to Santiago, Chile, where he will be reunited with his wife, Margot, and daughter Sonja.
He will be hospitalized as soon as he arrives in Chile, his wife was quoted as saying Wednesday in Las Ultimas Noticias, a daily in Santiago.
"For the victims and for those who suffered under the regime, this is a slap in the face," said Berndt Seite, governor of the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, a region that had been under Honecker's rule.
Christian Fuehrer, the daring Lutheran pastor who helped guide East Germany's peaceful revolution in 1989, said he regretted that Honecker never showed any signs of guilt.
"Honecker can leave the country, without there ever being anywhere near a full discussion of the unjust system that he embodied," the Leipzig pastor said Wednesday.
That system ordered its border guards to shoot to death those trying to escape, and set mines and booby traps along the border.
Authorities say about 350 East Germans lost their lives in escape attempts between 1961, when the Berlin Wall was built, and February 1989.
To speed up prosecution, Honecker was charged in only 13 deaths. Now, only his underlings and the border guards who pulled the trigger can still be hauled before courts.
Honecker had proudly supervised the concrete barrier's construction. He and his Communist cronies called it an "anti-fascist protection wall" needed to protect Communists from the imperialist West.