BERLIN — Cold War historians and spy novelists have long conjectured about hit squads working for communist East Germany. But a recent arrest is the strongest official acknowledgment yet that state-sponsored assassins were on the loose before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
German media say the 53-year-old man in custody was involved in as many as 27 killings for what federal prosecutors say was an East German commando unit that hunted down supposed traitors.
Prosecutors remain silent on details of the case, but suspicion has fallen on the Stasi — the dreaded communist-era secret police.
While documents found after reunification show that hit squads were set up, relatively little is known about how they were organized and operated. Now, with the Sept. 22 arrest, questions have been raised about a possible link to unsolved deaths in the 1980s: a Swedish journalist reportedly on the trail of arms deals, a soccer player who defected to West Germany and businessmen involved in shady east-west trading across the Cold War frontier.
"This is just the Stasi's style," Thomas Auerbach, a historian at the former secret police agency's archive in Berlin, said in a telephone interview this week. "They trained these kind of commando groups for decades. It seems very realistic."
Nearly 13 years after communism collapsed and Germany reunified, the arrest could crack open one of the former regime's deepest secrets.
Firm proof of assassinations has remained elusive; Stasi officials either destroyed files on them or the operations were so sensitive no detailed records were kept, Auerbach said.
But surviving Stasi documents indicate efforts to train a unit of elite agents for sabotage and assassinations in noncommunist West Germany, dating back to at least the 1960s. A 1973 Stasi manual cited by Berlin historian Hubertus Knabe lists possible methods: "Shooting, stabbing, burning, blowing up, strangulation, beating, poisoning, suffocation."
The unit had 548 members and 168 Stasi officers in 1988, the year before the Berlin Wall fell, Auerbach said.
The material came to light because the Stasi files were opened to historians and journalists after German reunification.
In a rare case that went to court, a Stasi agent was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison in 1994 for poisoning the food of West German-based dissident Wolfgang Welsch during a trip to Israel. Welsch had infuriated the Stasi by helping other East Germans flee. The poison made him and his wife violently ill, but they survived.
For the latest arrest, federal anti-crime agents reportedly swooped on a quiet marina near Rheinsberg in former East Germany where the suspect worked as a janitor.
The raid followed a two-year sting operation in which a federal agent posed as a CIA recruiter, leading the reclusive former soldier to brag about alleged exploits as an East German gun-for-hire, the weekly Der Spiegel reported.
Under questioning by investigators, the man reportedly retracted his story, saying he had made it up as a boast. The man, identified by authorities only as Juergen G., has not been formally charged.
But East Germany had plenty of potential assassination targets, raising the prospect that the arrest could help solve a series of mysterious Cold War-era deaths dating back two decades.
Lutz Eigendorf, a player for East Berlin's Stasi-controlled Dynamo soccer club who defected to West Germany in 1979, died at the wheel of his car in a 1983 crash. It was officially blamed on alcohol, but suspicions of Stasi involvement have persisted.
Also under fresh scrutiny is the death of Swedish TV reporter Cats Falk, whose body was retrieved in 1985 from a car submerged in a Stockholm canal.
The Berlin daily Berliner Zeitung reported last week it had received information that a Stasi team poisoned Falk and pushed the car into the water. The paper, which did not name its sources, said Falk had been investigating illegal shipments of computers and weapons by Swedish firms to East Germany.
Investigators are also looking again at the case of Uwe Harms, who headed a West German-based company that reaped hard currency for the communist regime but apparently balked at arms deals, Berliner Zeitung said. Harms was shot and killed in Hamburg in 1987, and his body dumped in an empty apartment in a garbage bag.