Werner Teske

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Werner Teske (24 April 1942 – 26 June 1981) was a captain of the Ministry for State Security of East Germany who was executed under allegations of "planned treason". He was the last person to be executed in the German Democratic Republic, and the last person to be executed in Germany.^[1]

[edit] Life

Werner Teske was recruited by the Ministry as a student. After obtaining his doctorate in economics, he became responsible for economic espionage in foreign countries for the General Reconnaissance Administration (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung), the intelligence arm of the German Democratic Republic's Ministry for National Security. Starting in the mid-1970s, Teske considered a defection into West Germany. After some irregularities in his work had come to attention of the Ministry, he was sentenced to death in 1981. The sentence was carried out shortly thereafter, by a neck shot in the basement of the prison in Alfred-Kästner-Straße, Leipzig. Both the trial and the execution were kept secret by the East German authorities and were concealed even from Teske's closest relatives. His wife didn't know anything about the execution until German Reunification, she supposed her husband being somewhere in custody.

The sentence against Teske was overturned in 1993, and two of the jurists involved were sentenced for perversion of justice in 1998. These rulings were justified by the fact that the original decision had been disproportionate even according to East German law, since the plans of Teske had never been more than an attempt.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

This article is based on a translation of an article from the German Wikipedia.

• Works by and about Werner Teske in the German National Library catalogue
• (German) Werner Teske at the DDR-Lexikon

Persondata
NAME	Teske, Werner
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Stasi captain, executed for treason
DATE OF BIRTH	24 April 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH
DATE OF DEATH	26 June 1981
PLACE OF DEATH	Leipzig