Johann Burianek

Early years

Johann Burianek was born in the Rheinland at Düsseldorf, the son of a master shoe maker. He underwent an apprenticeship as a machinist and in 1932 relocated to Czechoslovakia, taking Czechoslovak nationality in 1932/33. He served in the German airforce during the 1930s and in 1939 took back his German nationality.

The good soldier?

During the Second World War Burianek served in the German army. In the final days of the war he arrested a deserting soldier whom he then delivered to his military headquarters. Because of this, in November 1949 Burianek was sentenced, by a court in what was by now becoming the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), to a year in prison for crimes against humanity.

A civilian dissident in the Democratic Republic

He was released on probation in April 1950 having served barely half of the sentence. He found work as a truck driver with the Volkseigener Betrieb (publicly owned business) Secura-Mechanik. Between July 1950 and March 1951 he smuggled several thousand copies of the western newsheets Kleiner Telegraf and Tarantel into the Soviet sector of Berlin. In March 1951 he joined a militant opposition group called "Struggle against Inhumanty" group (KgU / Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit) which was then being established by Rainer Hildebrandt with backing from the Americans. His contributions to the work of the KgU included numerous acts of sabotage and unsuccessful arson attacks on the 1951 World Festival of Youth and Students.

His most ambitious project, planned for 21 February 1952, would have involved blowing up a railway bridge at Erkner, on the south-eastern edge of Berlin, which would have de-railed the "Blue Express", the long-distance train running between Berlin and Moscow via Warsaw. He knew that this might cause fatalities. The necessary explosives would be provided by the KgU. However, the project failed to progress beyond the planning stage, probably because it proved impossible to get hold of a suitable truck to carry the explosives.

On 5 March 1952 East German state officials arrested Johann Burianek.

Trial and execution

Some ten weeks later, on 15 May 1952, Burianek found himself at the centre of a large show trial in the Supreme Court. The presiding judge was Hilde Benjamin, the court's vice-president. The accusation against Burianek was that he was an agent of the KgU.

The court delivered its verdict on 25 May 1952, and Johann Burianek became the first defendant in the German Democratic Republic to receive a death sentence. The country had inherited, in Dresden, a Central Execution Facility from the previous regime, and it was here, slightly more than two months after receiving his sentence, that Burianek was executed, with a guillotine that was another legacy of Hitler's justice system.

In 2005 Johann Burianek's conviction was found to have been unconstitutional, because of "serious disregard for basic rules [of justice]" in the original trial. The 1952 verdict was reversed. This reversal arose from an initiative by the "Arbeitsgemeinschaft 13. August" organisation which had been established, like the KgU before it, by Rainer Hildebrandt, and which now successfully applied to the Berlin District Court to have the 1992 Criminal Rehabilitation Act invoked for the Burianek case. In a judgement delivered on 2 September 2005, the court also held that between his arrest on 5 March 1952 and his execution on 2 August 1952 Johann Burianek had been unlawfully deprived of his freedom.

In Germany, under §189 of the Criminal code, defamation of the memory of a deceased person is a criminal offence which upon conviction may attract a fine or a prison term of up to two years. The Burianek case hit the headlines again in 2012 and 2013 on account of a former Stasi officer, Colonel Wolfgang Schmidt, who used his internet site to describe Burianek as a "bandit" and as the "leader of a terrorist organisation". On 27 September 2012 Schmidt was convicted under §189 in respect of the matter by a court which evidently accepted that Schmidt's characterizations of Burianek had been false and defamatory. The court ordered Schmidt to pay a fine of €1,200.

The action against Schmidt had been triggered by Hubertus Knabe, the director of the Hohenschönhausen Memorial Museum on the northern edge of Berlin. It was not the first time Knabe and Schmidt had come across one another, Schmidt already having been fined €2,100 in 2009 for calling Knabe himself a "publicly unrestrained rabble rouser" ("öffentlich und ungestraft als Volksverhetzer") in connection with Knabe's earlier work on the Stasi.

Schmidt appealed against the €1,200 fine, imposed under §189 for defaming the memory of Johann Burianek, but on 18 March 2013 the District Court rejected his appeal. Knabe welcomed the court's verdict: "I am pleased that the Justice System stands up against historical revisionism from former Stasi operatives. Even today, we must not allow the perpetrators to denigrate their victims in public." He also stressed the fundamental significance of a court decision which, for the first time, extended §189 of the Criminal code to include defamation of the memory of a victim of the old German Democratic Republic's One party dictatorship.

In a subsequent television interview Knabe, who is also known for his work as an historian, took the opportunity to highlight the way in which the Burianek show trial represented one of the darkest chapters in the history of East German justice because the Berlin Supreme Court had condemned a man to death not for anything he had done, but purely on account of something they believed he had planned to do.