The Party That Never Dissolved

On 8 December 1989 the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), the party that had ruled East Germany for forty years, opened an extraordinary congress in an East Berlin sports hall. At the end of the debate a delegate from a farm-machinery combine in Erfurt stood up and moved that the party dissolve itself. He said he was acting on instructions from the members who had sent him, and he asked for a vote. When the vote came, not a hand went up for it. According to Günter Benser, a delegate who later wrote up the congress for the party’s own historical commission, both the jubilation and the relief were considerable¹.

Because the SED did not dissolve, it never had to be founded again, and in law a party that is never re-founded stays the same party. Within two months it had been renamed twice and was called the PDS, the Party of Democratic Socialism². In 2005 it became Die Linkspartei.PDS, and since 2007 it has been Die Linke³. At no point did one legal person end and another begin.

So someone who says Die Linke is rechtsidentisch with the SED, legally identical to it, is not name-calling. The claim rests on what the Constitutional Court, the Bundestag’s research services and an independent commission that reported to the Bundestag have put in writing. The question is what that identity carries, and above all whether it makes today’s party guilty of the deaths at the Berlin Wall. The answer is clear-cut: it carries a balance sheet, but not a crime.

The claim, conceded in full

The strongest version of the claim is stronger than its opponents admit.

In 2023 a member of the Bundestag asked its research services how party mergers work, with Die Linke as the example. Their papers do not speak for parliament, but this one traces the chain. The 2007 fusion with the WASG, a left-wing party from western Germany, was a Verschmelzung durch Aufnahme, a merger by absorption, in which the Linkspartei.PDS absorbed the WASG. It follows, in the paper’s own words, that “[j]edenfalls zivilrechtlich ist damit die Linkspartei.PDS mit der heutigen Partei DIE LINKE. identisch”: in civil law at least, the Linkspartei.PDS and today’s Die Linke are one and the same. The Linkspartei.PDS in turn, it goes on, came out of the SED, which added PDS to its name in 1989, became the PDS in 1990 and the Linkspartei.PDS in 2005. A change of name affects legal identity no more than a switch between a registered and an unregistered association does. The paper also records a dissenting scholar, for whom the merged party of 2007 is in constitutional terms a new one³.

The blunter version is older. In 1998 the Unabhängige Kommission set up to audit the assets of the GDR’s parties reported to the Bundestag that, because the party had never been re-founded and its members had simply stayed members, the PDS was not merely the SED’s legal successor but the same party. The commission put it in seven words: “Sie ist die in PDS umbenannte SED” (it is the SED, renamed PDS)².

The Constitutional Court used the same grammar. When the PDS went to the Federal Constitutional Court in 1991 to challenge the freezing of its property, the court wrote of assets “die sie als Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) erlangt hatte”, which it had acquired as the SED, and added that in the GDR it had held the position of a state party⁴. It is all in the pronoun. The applicant standing before the court and the party that built the Wall are one grammatical subject.

Nor has the address changed since. Kleine Alexanderstraße 28 in Berlin, the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus, which the PDS gave as its address in that 1991 case⁴², is the address Die Linke has on file with the Federal Returning Officer today⁵.

The applicant standing before the court and the party that built the Wall are one grammatical subject.

Why they kept it

More telling than the party’s survival is why it wanted to survive.

The asset commission’s account is unsentimental. The group around Hans Modrow, Gregor Gysi and Markus Wolf came to the December congress with two aims, “die Auflösung der Partei zu verhindern und eine neue Führung zu wählen” (to prevent the party’s dissolution and to elect a new leadership), and achieved both. At that congress, the commission records, the property played a determining part in the question of saving the party, apparently for the first time. Gysi, who was elected chairman the next morning with about 95% of the votes, told the hall that dissolving and re-founding the party would be a catastrophe: “Das Eigentum der Partei wäre zunächst herrenlos” (the party’s property would at first be ownerless), and several new parties would then be founded and end up fighting in court over the succession².

In mid-December the party commissioned opinions on what a change of name would do to its property. Their upshot, as the commission records it, was what the party needed: a renaming changes nothing about a party’s existence or its continuation as a legal person, as long as it does not dissolve or constitute itself anew².

Critics are right that the continuity was real and deliberate, and that a deciding motive was money. It was not the only one. Benser, the delegate, objects that reducing the decision to property and the jobs of the party’s staff ignores what was at stake for the German left as a whole¹. Either way, the continuity meant that the party itself had to answer for the money.

What identity carried

Legal identity makes no metaphysical claim about a party’s soul; it is a rule about who owes what. In this case the rule was enforced against the party, and thoroughly.

Because the PDS was the SED, it kept the SED’s debts along with its buildings. In October 1989 the SED had employed around 44,000 full-time staff. By the end of June 1990 the PDS had paid those who left the equivalent of 41 million Deutschmarks in bridging money, and in the second half of that year it paid a further 67 million in severance, under a plan the asset commission called unusually generous². The Constitutional Court’s 1991 decision treats that payroll as the PDS’s own liability. It records the government’s assurance that the party could draw on the frozen assets for the wages, salaries and severance of staff it had taken over from the SED, even where there were more of them than a party of its size could justify, so that these debts would not swallow the income it needed for ordinary party work⁴.

Then it lost the rest. The commission’s final report describes a party whose cooperation was hesitant and tactical from the start, and which “verfolgte eine Strategie der Vermögensverschleierung”: it pursued a strategy of concealing its assets⁶. The PDS had never separated the cash it held on 7 October 1989 from the dues and donations that came in afterwards, and it had always spent far more than those brought in, so none of its money counted as properly acquired. On 31 August 1991 the Treuhandanstalt, the trustee, had everything in the party’s accounts moved to its own: 205.7 million Deutschmarks. From 1 September the party had to operate on new money alone⁶. The PDS went to court against almost every one of the trustee’s orders. The dispute ended in a settlement at the Berlin higher administrative court on 18 July 1995, under which “[d]ie PDS nahm alle Klagen und Restitutionsanträge zurück und verzichtete unwiderruflich auf ihr gesamtes Altvermögen”: it withdrew every claim and irrevocably renounced all its old wealth. In return, “[d]ie PDS ihrerseits erhielt vier Grundstücke zurück”: the PDS got four properties back, two of which had belonged to the Communist Party (KPD) before 1933⁶. One of the four is the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus, which had been the KPD’s headquarters².

Counting seized assets, sales, repaid loans and interest, about €1.17 billion had been secured from the party’s assets by the end of 2005⁶.

The PDS was not the only party left with GDR-era party property. The western CDU and FDP took over the GDR’s bloc parties, the smaller parties that sat in its parliament and government without any influence of their own. The DBD joined the CDU der DDR in August and September 1990, and the CDU der DDR merged with the West German CDU on 1 and 2 October 1990. The LDPD and NDPD, by then combined in the Bund Freier Demokraten, joined the FDP in August 1990, and the FDP took over their money and property⁶. The parallel is one of inheritance, not identity. The PDS is the SED under another name, whereas the eastern CDU’s state associations joined a party that already existed. The commission calls the western CDU and FDP the legal successors of the bloc parties, although it found the FDP’s merger void on formal grounds and let it keep only part of the assets. Today’s CDU is the heir of a party that sat in the GDR’s government and parliament, not that party itself⁶.

There are two more differences. Of all the organisations it examined, the commission found, “hatte die PDS mit Abstand das umfangreichste Vermögen”: the PDS had by far the largest assets⁶. And on 15 November 1990 the CDU irrevocably renounced all of the CDU der DDR’s old wealth that the trustee held, keeping only the eastern party’s cash⁶. That was more than four and a half years before the PDS did the same, in a settlement that ended its lawsuits.

The dead

That leaves the deaths at the Wall, the part most people care about.

Between 1961 and 1989 at least 140 people were killed at the Berlin Wall or died in direct connection with the border regime. The figure comes from a joint project of the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam and the Stiftung Berliner Mauer, which examined 576 deaths and suspected deaths and published a biography of each of the 140⁷⁸. It sorts them into five groups. The fifth is the GDR’s own border soldiers: eight of the 140, killed on duty by deserters, by comrades, by a refugee, by an escape helper and by a West Berlin policeman⁸⁷.

Other tallies exist, and the differences between them come down to two questions: who counts as a victim, and what counts as evidence. Prosecutors and police counted only deaths caused by an act of violence. The 140 also include people who drowned, fell or took their own lives while trying to get across⁹⁷.

Six counts of the dead at the Wall

People who died at the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989, as counted by each body. Only the ZZF / Stiftung Berliner Mauer count documents every death with a published biography. The prosecutors and the police task force published no names, and the Arbeitsgemeinschaft 13. August has never disclosed the sources of its lists.

The numbers

Counted by	Dead at the Berlin Wall	Evidence
Zentrale Erfassungsstelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen, Salzgitter	78	its 1991 report; deaths by shooting and mines only
Staatsanwaltschaft Berlin	86	only deaths proven to result from an act of violence; no names published
Der Polizeipräsident in Berlin	92	police count
ZERV, the police task force on government crime	122	suspected crimes only, no accidents; no names published
ZZF Potsdam and Stiftung Berliner Mauer	140	576 cases examined; a published biography for each of the 140
Arbeitsgemeinschaft 13. August	more than 200	lists of names published; their sources never disclosed

Hold on to the number that comes with 140 published biographies, even though it is not the largest. A count that documents every death, with a biography and its sources, is a different kind of thing from one that does not, and this paper’s rule is to show that difference rather than average it away.

Beyond Berlin the picture widens. The Forschungsverbund SED-Staat at the Freie Universität Berlin attributed 327 deaths on the inner-German border between 1949 and 1989 to the border regime, a figure that includes 24 guards killed on duty and 44 suicides of border personnel¹⁰. Those categories are contested, and Gerhard Sälter of the Stiftung Berliner Mauer has argued in print that up to a hundred of the listed deaths might not survive a close check¹¹. An archived page of the federal government gives at least 140 at the Wall and at least 260 on the inner-German border, with a footnote saying that higher figures quoted elsewhere rest on scientifically contested categories or uncertain sources¹². The Stiftung Berliner Mauer uses about 650 for the border regime as a whole, a figure that also counts those who died in the Baltic¹³.

That the shootings were policy, and not accident, is not in doubt. The Constitutional Court’s 1996 decision on the border shootings sets out the documents. A decision of the National Defence Council of 14 September 1962 required that border violators “in jedem Fall als Gegner gestellt, wenn notwendig, vernichtet werden müssen”: they were to be confronted as enemies in every case and, if necessary, destroyed. The order read out to each platoon before it went on duty told it to allow no breaches of the border and to arrest border violators “oder zu vernichten”, or destroy them. At a session of the National Defence Council on 3 May 1974, Erich Honecker said that firearms must continue to be used ruthlessly against attempted breaches, and that comrades who had used them successfully were to be commended¹⁴¹⁵.

The Berlin Regional Court, whose findings the Constitutional Court reproduces, also found that no formal, written order to shoot ever existed. That changed nothing, it held, because border soldiers were told orally that a refugee’s death was to be accepted if that was what it took to prevent a breach, and because the practice deliberately went beyond the text of the laws and the written orders¹⁴.

The end came down the same chain of command. On 3 April 1989, seven months before the Wall opened, Fritz Streletz, standing in for the defence minister, passed on the party leader’s displeasure at recent incidents on the border to the commanders of the border troops. Their note of the meeting records the new rule in one line: “Lieber einen Menschen abhauen lassen, als in der jetzigen politischen Situation die Schußwaffe anzuwenden” (better to let someone get away than to use a firearm in the present political situation)¹⁶.

Who was tried

Germany did prosecute, on a scale people tend to underestimate and with results they tend to overestimate.

For all GDR wrongdoing except espionage, investigations were opened against roughly 100,000 people. Just over 750 were convicted in final judgments, and 46 received a prison sentence that was not suspended (own calculation from the table of sentences in the Humboldt University study that compiled these figures). Rainer Eppelmann, who chaired the foundation that published the study, drew the conclusion in his foreword: against that background, anyone who talks of victor’s justice “macht sich lächerlich”, makes a fool of himself¹⁷.

For violence at the border alone, charges were brought 466 times, against 450 different people. In 385 cases the trial ended in a final verdict, and in 275 of them the verdict was a conviction¹⁷. In the Berlin and Neuruppin prosecutions, which Chronik der Mauer counts as the Berlin Wall cases, 164 people were convicted: ten members of the SED leadership, 54 of the military leadership and 100 border guards¹⁸.

Who was convicted, and what the sentences were

Above: everyone convicted in the Berlin and Neuruppin prosecutions, which Chronik der Mauer counts as the Berlin Wall cases, though the leadership trials also covered deaths on the inner-German border. Below: every conviction for violence at the inner-German border nationwide, by the sentence it brought.

The numbers

Berlin and Neuruppin prosecutions	Convicted
Members of the SED leadership	10
Members of the military leadership	54
Border guards	100
Total	164

All border-violence proceedings, nationwide	Charges
Brought (against 450 people)	466
Ended in a final verdict	385
Acquitted	110
Convicted	275
— prison sentence, suspended	236
— prison sentence, not suspended	30
— guilty, no penalty imposed	8
— a fine	1

The difference between ranks was deliberate. Border guards convicted of intentional killing were as a rule given suspended sentences. The markedly higher sentences, the ones that had to be served, went to members of the military and political leadership and to guards who had gone beyond their orders. The study’s authors, Klaus Marxen, Gerhard Werle and Petra Schäfter, read the pattern as evidence that the courts weighed individual guilt carefully, and note that in sentencing, the judges to some extent saw the ordinary border guards as victims themselves¹⁷.

The leadership did go to prison, if not for long. Heinz Kessler, the defence minister, was sentenced to seven and a half years and Fritz Streletz, his deputy, to five and a half. The Berlin Regional Court had convicted them of incitement to intentional homicide, and on appeal the Federal Court of Justice found them guilty as indirect principals and left the two sentences as they were. Hans Albrecht, a member of the National Defence Council who was convicted at first only of aiding, had his sentence raised from four and a half years to five years and one month¹⁹¹⁴. Kessler and Streletz served their sentences in open detention and were released after about two thirds¹⁹. Egon Krenz, Honecker’s successor as party leader, was sentenced in August 1997 to six and a half years as an indirect principal, for four deaths including that of Chris Gueffroy, and was released early by order of the Berlin appeal court in December 2003¹⁹²⁰. Günter Schabowski and Günther Kleiber, both former Politburo members, were sentenced to three years and served about nine months in open detention before the governing mayor of Berlin pardoned them for the tenth anniversary of unification²¹. Erich Honecker’s trial was stopped in January 1993 because he was dying, and he left for Chile the next day²².

Every stage of this survived review. The Federal Court of Justice held that the GDR’s state practice could not justify the killings, because it was an obvious and intolerable breach of elementary requirements of justice and of internationally protected human rights. It also adopted the doctrine of indirect perpetration through organisational structures, to reach the men who signed the orders and not only those who pulled the triggers¹⁵. The Constitutional Court dismissed the resulting complaints in October 1996¹⁴. In March 2001 the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights held that there had been no breach of the ban on retroactive punishment: unanimously in the cases of Streletz, Kessler and Krenz, and by fourteen votes to three in that of a border guard tried for a 1972 killing¹⁹²³.

Why guilt cannot be inherited

None of those proceedings had an organisation in the dock, the SED included, because German criminal law convicts only individuals. That puts Germany in a minority. Of the 40 parties to the OECD’s anti-bribery convention that had rules on the liability of organisations in 2016, 27 made it criminal, two used both routes, and Germany was one of eleven that did not²⁴. Its central provision is a fine under the law on administrative offences. A 2020 government bill to sharpen it, for businesses only and still short of corporate criminal law, was never passed²⁴. Since 2013 that fine can follow an organisation to its universal successor, though never for more than the assets taken over are worth²⁵. German law lets a balance sheet be inherited. It does not let a conviction be.

Behind that lies a principle rather than a drafting accident: German criminal law rests on personal guilt. The Constitutional Court has repeatedly held that the principle of guilt has constitutional rank, anchored in human dignity and the rule of law, and that “[d]er Grundsatz ‘Keine Strafe ohne Schuld’ (nulla poena sine culpa) setzt die Eigenverantwortung des Menschen voraus”: no punishment without guilt presupposes that a person is responsible for himself, determines his own conduct and can choose between right and wrong. A criminal sanction without a finding of individual culpability, the court says, would be incompatible with the guarantee of human dignity²⁶. None of this forbids sanctions on organisations, which the court said in 1966 were nothing foreign to German law. But it added that a legal person cannot act by itself, so the only guilt that can count is that of the people who acted for it²⁷.

That is why the prosecutions produced a list of names. Marxen, Werle and Schäfter put it directly: punishment, as an act of individual attribution, shows society “dass bestimmte Personen und nicht etwa Apparate und Kollektive die schweren Menschenrechtsverletzungen geplant, organisiert und vollzogen haben” (that particular people, not apparatuses and collectives, planned, organised and carried out the grave human-rights violations). They add that this does not deny the weight of hierarchies and indoctrination, which sentencing takes into account, but that the verdict makes clear that pointing to collective structures cannot relieve anyone of personal responsibility for human-rights violations¹⁷.

German law lets a balance sheet be inherited. It does not let a conviction be.

So the answer is no: legal identity does not make Die Linke guilty of the deaths at the Wall, and the reason has nothing to do with favouring this party. Criminal law offers no route by which those deaths could be laid at the door of any organisation, renamed or not, and it offered none for the SED in 1990, when finding one would have been easy and popular.

But the ledger has a second column. The Bundestag assigned responsibility in the ordinary, non-criminal sense to the SED as a party. On 17 June 1994 it adopted a resolution on the report of its first Enquete commission on the dictatorship, moved jointly by the CDU/CSU, the SPD, the FDP and the Greens. It states that “[d]ie Hauptverantwortung für das Unrecht, das von diesem System begangen wurde, trägt die SED”: the main responsibility for the injustice committed by that system lies with the SED. The suffering, it goes on, is to be laid chiefly at the door of the SED as a party, and first of all its leadership, and the bloc parties and mass organisations share in the responsibility²⁸. A year later the same sentence went into the mandate of the second Enquete commission²⁹. It is a finding by the elected parliament, and it concerns the party and its leadership, not named individuals.

One distinction belongs beside that finding. Unlike the victims of the Nazi crimes, Sälter writes, the dead at the border were not intended by the SED leadership. In the language the criminal courts used, they were accepted as a price worth paying¹¹. That acceptance is what the courts counted as intent when they convicted border guards¹⁴.

So on political responsibility parliament’s answer for the SED is yes, and a party that kept the SED’s legal identity cannot easily disown it. On criminal guilt the answer is no, and nobody can inherit that.

The same party, a different body

There is one more sense of “the same” to test. It is the one most people mean, and it is where the claim is weakest.

In May 1989 the SED had 2,260,979 members and 64,016 candidates³⁰. By the end of 1990 the PDS had 280,882³¹. The decline then continued for three decades, with a pause after the 2007 merger³¹³².

Two and a quarter million, then fifty thousand

Members of the SED and of the party that continues it. The 1989 bar is broken because the SED was eight times the size of the party it had become by the end of 1990.

The numbers

Year (31 December)	Members
1989 (May)	2,324,995	SED, members and candidates
1990	280,882	PDS
1995	114,940
2000	83,475
2005	61,270
2007	71,711	merger with the WASG
2010	73,658
2015	58,989
2020	60,350
2023	50,251	the trough
2025	123,558	the party’s own figure

Niedermayer sums it up: even after the WASG merger and the recent growth, the party had 79% fewer members at the end of 2024, when it counted 58,532, than the PDS had at the end of 1990³². Then something changed. The party passed 100,000 members in February 2025, around the federal election at which it won 8.8% of the second vote and 64 seats³³³⁴, and ended the year with 123,558³⁵.

The newcomers are what matters. In 2024 Die Linke was the youngest of the parties Niedermayer tracks, with an average member age of 45 against the SPD’s 62, and the average age of its new members that year was 29³². Someone who was 29 at the end of 2024 was born around 1995 and was not alive when the Wall came down.

As far as we can find, nobody has ever measured how many of Die Linke’s current members were once in the SED. Niedermayer’s series is built from the parties’ own membership files and records sex, age and region, but not previous party membership³². What exists are estimates for the early years. Speakers at a PDS conference in April 1991 said that 95% of the party’s adherents were former SED members, the political scientist Patrick Moreau reported³⁶. For the mid-1990s Viola Neu cites an estimate of 90% and adds that exact figures do not exist³⁷. In 2008 the Bundestag’s research services wrote that of the just under 60,000 members the party had before its 2007 merger, most had already belonged to it in SED days³⁸. From the party comes a figure pointing the other way: in 2020 its co-chair Katja Kipping said in the Bundestag that she could make things easy for the party and say that at least 80% of its members had certainly never been in the SED, because they were too young or had joined much later. She gave no source³⁹. A reviewer of a recent history of the party’s integration notes a related gap: the book offers no deeper social history of the party’s officials and members⁴⁰. Age narrows it further. At the end of 2024, 61% of the party’s members were 50 or younger (own calculation from Niedermayer’s age table), which means they were 15 at most when the Wall came down³².

What is still owed

If the criminal question is closed and the property question was settled in 1995, what is left is what the party itself has said about the Wall. Here the record is uneven.

The speech everyone cites was given when the congress reconvened a week later. On 16 December 1989 Michael Schumann told it “[w]ir brechen unwiderruflich mit dem Stalinismus als System” (we break irrevocably with Stalinism as a system), and the speech remains the party’s founding act of self-criticism⁴¹. Read it in full, though, and the victims it names are the victims of Stalinism: communists convicted or banished in the Soviet Union, Social Democrats arrested by the security services, people jailed after 1956, the rehabilitation of the persecuted. The word Mauer (Wall) does not occur in it once. The border regime gets a single clause, as something the old leadership had failed to see must change, and the people who died at it get none⁴¹.

The party’s programmes follow the same pattern. The Erfurt programme, adopted in 2011 and still in force while a revision is under way, quotes the 1989 formula and adopts it, then at once qualifies it: reducing the history of the GDR, and of the SED, to Stalinism is “jedoch unhistorisch und unwahr”, unhistorical and untrue. A passage about the GDR’s films, novels and fine arts follows⁴². The programme does speak of state arbitrariness and of a surveillance apparatus turned on the GDR’s own people. But the words Unrechtsstaat (state of injustice) and Staatssicherheit (state security, the Stasi) do not appear in it at all. Unrecht (injustice) appears once, in a passage recalling that the PDS asked religious believers for reconciliation in 1990, and the only Mauer in it is the Great Wall of China, in the Brecht poem that opens the text⁴².

One exception came in Thuringia, and it was hard-won. The 2014 coalition agreement that made Bodo Ramelow the first Die Linke minister-president of a German state has a preamble saying that because, among other reasons, rights and justice could end whenever one of the powerful wished it, “war die DDR in der Konsequenz ein Unrechtsstaat”: the GDR was, in consequence, a state of injustice⁴³. The federal co-chairs defended it. Of the wording reached in the Thuringian talks, Bernd Riexinger said “[w]ir stehen voll und ganz hinter der Formulierung” (we stand fully behind the wording)⁴⁴.

These quotations are from an article by Sebastian Prinz in the journal of the Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung, which is close to the CSU. It also records the doubters. The negotiating delegation wrote to members that, had it been up to them alone, “hätten wir auf den Begriff verzichtet”: they would have done without the term. Asked why he had gone along with it, Gysi answered “[d]ie andere Seite hat darauf bestanden”, the other side insisted⁴⁴. He explained his own refusal to use the term in an interview: the GDR was a dictatorship and not a state under the rule of law, but “wenn ich Unrechtsstaat sage, delegitimiere ich alles, das Leben fast aller Bürger” (if I say state of injustice, I delegitimise everything, the lives of almost all the citizens)⁴⁵. The party’s own historical commission distanced itself from the preamble, and its spokesman called the term “eine politisch stigmatisierende Bezeichnung”, a politically stigmatising label unsuited to scholarly discourse⁴⁴.

On the Wall itself the record is longer than the programme suggests, and it shows how long one word took. The December 1989 congress apologised to the people, in the party’s name, for the crisis into which the old leadership had led the country¹. In July 2001, forty years after the Wall went up, the PDS executive declared that no ideal and no higher purpose could justify the injustice bound up with it. Its remembrance, it said, went to those who had died at the border, to the injured, to the imprisoned and to their relatives (“sowie ihren Angehörigen”), and it regretted the injustice for which the SED was responsible. The same declaration explains why it would not apologise: it called the demand a tactical calculation⁴⁶. A motion to add “Wir bitten die Angehörigen der Maueropfer um Vergebung” (we ask the relatives of the Wall’s victims for forgiveness) got two votes on the executive⁴⁷. Ten years later the two party chairs again chose regret over apology⁴⁸. In 2014 the chairs and Gysi renewed an apology for injustice committed, in general terms and without naming the Wall⁴⁹. An apology that names the Wall came on 6 March 2020, in the Bundestag, from Kipping: “Deshalb bitte ich heute im Namen der Linken alle, die unter der Mauer gelitten haben, erneut um Entschuldigung” (so today, in the name of Die Linke, I once again apologise to all who suffered under the Wall). She apologised in the same breath to all who had lost relatives³⁹.

We could not find that sentence in anything the party has adopted: not in a congress resolution, not in a decision of its executive, and not in its programme, which does not mention the Wall. That is a statement about our search rather than about the world, and we would be glad to be sent one.

The two senses of the same

The claim holds and the inference drawn from it does not, which is why the argument never ends.

Die Linke is the SED in the sense that matters to a register of legal persons, to a creditor and to a court. That was a choice, made in a sports hall in December 1989 and made in good part for money, and in the end the money was lost anyway. The party gave up nearly all the old wealth and kept four properties, and about €1.17 billion was secured from its assets for the state’s trustee.

Die Linke is not the SED in the sense that matters to a criminal court, because a German criminal court tries people, not organisations. The 140 people who died at the Berlin Wall have 140 biographies, and the Berlin and Neuruppin trials over the border killings ended with 164 convicted individuals (ten from the party leadership, fifty-four from the military leadership, a hundred guards). That list of names is what a legal system produces instead of a verdict against a collective.

And it is not the SED in the sense that matters to anyone asking who is in the room: a party of 123,558 people, more than half of whom joined in 2025 alone (own calculation)³²³⁵, and whose average new member in 2024 was born six years after the Wall came down.

Three numbers

What the record contains.

140

people who died at the Berlin Wall, 1961–1989

576 cases examined; each of the 140 has a published biography

164

individuals convicted in the Berlin and Neuruppin trials over the border killings

10 of the party leadership, 54 of the military leadership, 100 border guards

29

average age of a new Linke member in 2024

born about 1995, six years after the Wall came down

Guilt cannot be inherited, and the property has been given up. What remains is what the party has said about the history it chose to keep. On that, the file is longer than its critics allow but later than its defenders remember: regret in 2001, and an apology for the Wall from its co-chair in 2020.

Neither is in the party programme.