A former officer in communist East Germany's notorious Ministry of State Security, or Stasi, went on trial for murder on Thursday over the 1974 fatal shooting of a Polish man at Berlin's Friedrichstrasse train station.
The man from the eastern city of Leipzig, a former Stasi lieutenant who is now 80 years old, stands accused by prosecutors of having killed 38-year-old Czesław Kukuczka "with a targeted shot to the back from a hiding place" as he crossed the border to West Berlin on March 29, 1974, according to the indictment.
At the time of the crime, the German officer is said to have belonged to a Stasi operative group and to have been tasked with "neutralizing" the Pole.
The accused remained silent during the trial at the Berlin District Court. His defence lawyer stated at the start of the trial that her client denied the accusation.
According to a court spokeswoman, the trial relating to the fatal shooting at the busiest border crossing between East and West Berlin will be recorded due to its "outstanding historical significance" for the Federal Republic of Germany. The audio recordings will be made available to the state archives.
Two public prosecutors from Poland and a historian who was involved in investigating the case also attended the start of the trial.
The investigation into the case made no progress for many years. According to the Berlin public prosecutor's office, however, it was not until 2016 that a decisive clue regarding the identity of the shooter was obtained from the Stasi archives.
However, according to a spokesman, the authorities initially assumed that the offence was manslaughter. In this case, the offence would have been time-barred. In the meantime, however, the public prosecutor's office believes the murder criterion of malice aforethought has been fulfilled, hence the charge of murder.
Children of the Polish man who was killed - a son and a daughter - are appearing as co-plaintiffs in the trial.
A chief inspector was expected to be summoned on the first day of the proceedings.
Stasi officials had allegedly granted Kukuczka permission to leave the country and even accompanied him to the border crossing at the railway station.
However, as he passed the last checkpoint there in the early afternoon of March 29, he was killed by the fatal shot.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, courts in Berlin prosecuted a number of former East German soldiers, police and high-ranking officials for killing people trying to escape the country. A total of 130 people were convicted.
But Thursday's case marks the first prosecution in two decades, and the first time that an East German official has been accused of murder - instead of a lesser charge - for a death at the former border, according to historian Gerhard Sälter.
The investigation into Kukuczka's death picked up in 2016 after files in the Stasi archives revealed the identity of the suspected shooter, according to Sebastian Büchner, a spokesman for the public prosecutor's office in Berlin.
A lawyer for the victim's family, Hans-Jürgen Förster, said he pressed authorities to bring murder charges in the case, citing an order signed by then-Stasi boss Erich Mielke.
The defendant has not commented publicly on the allegations against him.
The district court has initially planned a total of seven trial days. A verdict could therefore be reached on May 23.