Русская версияOn Aug.
30, 1978 Hans Detlef Tiede boarded flight LOT 165 in the
Polish city Gdansk and used a toy pistol to divert the East
Berlin-bound jet to the American sector on the other side of the
Wall. The passenger plane made a safe landing at the US
military air base Tempelhof, and nine other East Germans aboard
took the chance of defecting to Allied occupied West Berlin,
including Tiede's accomplice Ingrid Ruske and her young daughter.
Only Tiede and Ruske could not walk free in Berlin's American zone,
since the act of hijacking a civilian airliner violated
international conventions long negotiated between NATO and the
Warsaw Pact. For the first and only time, a US court of justice was
convened in Berlin to prosecute the case. Herbert J. Stern, the
American judge who tried the case in a makeshift courthouse in the
departure lounge of Tempelhof airport, is currently a partner at
his own law firm in New Jersey and author of
Judgment in Berlin.
DW-WORLD.DE: Two East Germans want to escape a repressive regime.
They hijack a plane, which lands safely at one airport instead of
another in the same city. No one was killed or injured. Several
passengers even walked free and those that remained on LOT 165 were
a bit inconvenienced. So what's the problem here?
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Judge Stern (right) tried the case in Berlin's Tempelhof airport
Herbert Stern: All the countries involved -- the US, Poland, West
Germany and East Germany were signatories to an international
convention on air piracy. This meant that whoever diverted a plane
had to be either prosecuted (at the hijacked destination) or sent
back to be prosecuted. These accords had been instigated by the US,
which was worried about air traffic being diverted to Cuba in those
days.
The problem for the West Germans was that they regarded all Germans
as citizens of the Federal Republic. Nobody had ever been
prosecuted for escaping East Germany ever since the Wall went up in
1961, even if they had roughed up or shot a guard.
The West Germans had never ever sent anyone back. It would have
also been politically suicidal for them to prosecute the case
(against their own people), so how do they get out of the mess?
Well, Berlin was occupied territory. The West Berliners were
sovereign in the sense that they had a mayor, city government,
parliament, judges and all that, but the Allied occupation never
ended (until unification), because the West German government
didn't want it to end. If the Allies had pulled out, it would have
been the end of freedom for the 2 million people living in the
Western sector.
The West Germans were obliged by this air piracy agreement to
prosecute the case, but couldn't prosecute fellow Germans from the
East, so they were happy to let the Americans take over.
They insisted that the US take over, but there were no US courts in
Berlin. The West Germans begged the US to convene a tribunal for
the first time and agreed to pay all courtroom expenses -- the
prosecutors, defense attorneys, the judge.
The US State Department was keen on prosecuting the case...
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International conventions make air piracy a criminal act
They were absolutely committed to prosecute, make no mistake about
it. The State Department appointed me as US judge for Berlin. Even
the West German government wanted Tiede and Ruske convicted and so
did the Poles, because at that time it was viewed as an important
case in protecting all civil aviation against air piracy. So while
it was possible to be sympathetic to the individual defendants, the
integrity of air travel and air safety became foremost in the minds
of the West. In East Germany, they only wanted these defectors
to be punished.
You were at loggerheads with the US State Department prosecutors,
who got more than they bargained for when they appointed you as
judge...
State took the position that they had the right to define what
rights the defendants had, because Tiede and Ruske were neither US
citizens nor on US territory, but stood before an occupational
court, a conquerer's court so to speak, the kind of court they have
now instituted at Guantanamo, where the same issues (concerning
defendants' rights) have percolated up.
The State Department took the position that I was not an
independent judge as I would have been in the US. I was their
employee and I had to follow their instructions. They were willing
to grant some constitutional rights to the defendants, but not all,
and they would pick which ones.
So the US prosecutors didn't want to grant the East German
defendants the constitutional right to a jury trial...
They didn't want that, since they thought a jury comprised of West
Berliners meant sure acquittal and would be a sham proceeding that
would make the Poles, the Soviets and the East Germans very
unhappy.
What they said was that the defendants had no rights at all except
what the State Department was willing to give them, and that is not
a right.
I told them that nobody in an American court, no matter where it
sits, comes before a court with no rights... that is just absurd. I
told them if they didn't bring in a jury and give these defendants
their rights that I would throw the whole case out and turn them
free. That's why we had a good old fashioned jury trial in the US
sector of Berlin.
You seem very sympathetic to the defendants here, don't you?
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Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift:
Trials of Guantanamo inmates have begun
I tell you, once I ruled that the American prosecutors had to bring
German jurors into the room as the US constitution requires, they
tried to force the defendants to plead guilty. The case against the
woman, Ruske, was later dismissed by the prosecutors for lack of
evidence. Then I found out in Tiede's case they said: "If you plead
guilty, we will guarantee you a certain sentence," but he refused
the deal, so we had a jury trial.
In which the jury found Tiede innocent on all counts except one --
guilty of taking a hostage, so you sentenced him to nine months,
which wound up being the time he had already served in detention.
I'll tell you why I handed down that sentence. When the jury
convicted this fellow (on that one count), it became clear to me I
was dealing with a situation in which the occupying power simply
thought they had the right to do anything to anybody, so I
wasn't going to deliver the defendant to their hands.
To answer your earlier question ... of course I felt sympathetic to
the situation of defectors from East Berlin. But at the end of day,
it's not for me to decide questions of guilt or innocence. That's
why I brought in a community of West Berliners to make those
decisions.
I wasn't in that courtroom doing the pitching or
batting, but I certainly was going to call a ball a
strike. I just did my job (as defender of the US Constitution),
that's all.
(Deutsche Welle)
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