Gartenschläger’s short life, which ended in such tragic disaster, was ran completely counter to the prevailing Zeitgeist. One could see the inglorious end of the SED system as offering a kind of post-hoc vindication for his combative anti-communism emphasising action for action’s sake. The trial of the members of the task force that killed him, held by the Schwerin Regional Court ten years after Gartenschläger’s death, and the not-guilty verdict the court handed down in it, clearly reveal the tragic isolation of this hero, who was born in the wrong age.

The fate of this labourer’s son, born in the town of Strausberg, not far from Berlin, on 13 January 1944, was closely bound up with border between the two German states. Michael Gartenschläger was doing an apprenticeship as an automobile mechanic when construction of the Wall began on 13 August 1961. With the border now definitively closed, a fog of lethargy and a crippling silence had descended over the GDR in those days. The Western powers did nothing, the government in Bonn urged people to remain calm and the upswelling of public indignation in West Berlin, which Willy Brandt had articulated so evocatively, seemed to be receding, subsumed in the tide of business as usual. Even in the GDR there were many who believed it was more prudent to wait than to strike a match in a haystack.

Gartenschläger and his friends had no desire to remain calm and prudent and await events. They went out at night and painted slogans (including, reportedly, “Better dead than red”) on the walls of buildings. They even set fire to a barn in a field as a symbol of resistance. Driven by fear, one member of the group betrayed it. All of those involved were arrested on 19 August 1961. The case provided the regime with an opportunity to set an example. Gartenschläger and his friends were seen as delinquent adolescents. They had enjoyed going to West Berlin to see a film or attend a rock’n’roll concert. Thus, in addition to fitting well within the picture of “the enemy” as perceived by the state, they ticked the boxes for a stereotype that evoked great hostility in many middle-class Germans. The arson offense also fed into the propaganda cliché of the teenage hustlers who were supposedly committing acts of sabotage in the GDR, egged on by RIAS (Radio in the American Sector) broadcasts to pave the way for West German imperialist aggression. The trial was covered widely in the media, contrary to the usual practice, and collectives and schools sent delegations to observe it.

Although they were minors at the time of the offense, Gartenschläger and his friend Gert Resag received life sentences. Other members of the loosely knit group received sentences ranging from six to 15 years. The West German government purchased Gartenschläger’s freedom after he had spent ten years of his youth behind bars.

By that time, “change through rapprochement” was the watchword for West German policy towards the GDR. But Gartenschläger, then living in Hamburg, was not interested in rapprochement with the despicable builders of the Berlin Wall. He and other former GDR prisoners formed a group to arrange to smuggle people out the GDR via the transit route. And he planned the sensational acts that would ultimately cost him his life. A week before he was killed, he managed to take down two SM70-type anti-personnel mines mounted on the metal GDR fortification fence on the inner-German border. Activated by a tripwire, the devices fired small, sharp-edged cube-shaped metal projectiles that would literally shed their victims. Nothing could be more embarrassing for the SED leadership, which was eager to improve its international reputation, than to have these brutal killing machines presented to the public. The SED hastily declared that the objects were fakes. The alarm bells must have begun to ring even louder when authorities in East Berlin got word of a plan to hoist one of these anti-personnel devices on a flagpole in front of the GDR’s permanent mission in Bonn on 1 May.

It is still not clear exactly what happened at Boundary Post 231 on the night of 30 April/1 May 1976, despite the trial of the task force members in Schwerin. What is certain is that someone in Gartenschläger’s group was an informer. It is also indisputable that a GDR State Security firing squad was lying in wait when the three men approached the border that moonlit night. According to the testimony of the two people who were with Gartenschläger, no one called out and no warning shot was fired. That Gartenschläger was the first to fire is probably a lie invented by those who did the killing after the fact. Their testimony that they were under orders to arrest the “border violator” is also of doubtful credibility. Nonetheless, nearly 24 years after event, the judges of the Schwerin Regional Court ruled in favour of acquittal on the basis of this testimony, allowing the men accused to leave the court building with their reputations untarnished. It is on record, though, someone wrote the words “very good” in the column headed “performance” in the operation log. Once upon a time, the men who shot Michael Gartenschläger received a medal and a cash reward. The body of their victim was buried under strict secrecy as an allegedly “anonymous corpse retrieved from the Elbe River”.