The German Member of the European Parliament Gisela Kallenbach was shown dozens of files from the archives of Bulgaria's Border Police about the targeted killings of the East Germans trying to escape to the West before 1989.

The two cardboard boxes of "murders files" were shown for the first time in public at the request of Kallenbach, who is a member of the group of the Greens in the European Parliament.

Kallenbach is in Bulgaria in order to collect data about the East Germans shot dead by the Bulgarian Border Police before 1989 while trying to make their way to Greece and Turkey.

At the end of 2007 the German magazine Spiegel published materials about the so called "fugitives from the republic", disclosing the Embassy of the former German Democratic Republic in Bulgaria had paid the communist regime in Sofia BGN 2000 for every East German shot at the Bulgarian border while trying to escape from the Eastern Block.

The public debate in Germany on these cases was triggered by the book of the historian Stefan Apelius called "Bulgaria - the Far East of Europe". According to the investigation of the German author some 2000 East Germans were shot by border patrols while trying to cross the border into Greece and Turkey.

"Before the dozens of files coming from the archives of the Interior Ministry could be investigated, they need to go through a special and very complicated procedure", said members of Bulgaria's Committee on the opening of the communist era files.

The Interior Ministry files contain information about 415 East Germans arrested at the Bulgarian borders, but also about a number of Polish and Hungarian citizens. Ekaterina Boncheva from the Files Committee said in 1975 there was a proposal to destroy these files.

However, many pieces of documentation from the Interior Ministry files are missing. The files from the Ministry of Defense and the National Investigation Service have not been opened yet.

Apart from information about the targeted killings of East Germans in Bulgaria, the opened files also contain information about the cooperation between Stasi, the secret service of the former East Germany, and Bulgaria's State Security Services. The correspondence between them was conducted only in Russian.

The partially opened archives from the Interior Ministry also reveal that 22 Bulgarians were shot while trying to escape to Greece and Turkey only in the period of 1964-67.

"I am not happy to find out that persons who worked for the former communist services currently occupy high-ranking positions in Bulgaria", the German MEP stated during her meeting with the Files Committee.

Kallenbach said it was possible that the relatives of the murdered East Germans might try to hold the Bulgarian border police guards responsible for the targeted killings.

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