Honecker Still Dreaming

From Deutsche Welle:
"No apologies: Honecker's widow breaks silence"

"What was criminal about East Germany?" After years of silence, Margot Honecker, the widow of East Germany's last communist leader Erich Honecker, still defends the communist state. For years, journalists hoping for an interview with Margot Honecker traveled to her home in Chile in vain. The tough-minded widow of former East German leader Erich Honecker refused interviews with Germany's mainstream media - she would shout insults at reporters or spray them with the garden hose. But this year Honecker, who was East Germany's Education Minister from 1963 until 1989, published a book on popular education in East Germany. She also appeared in a rare interview Monday with the German TV network ARD. She said she never understood why people tried to escape to the West over the Berlin Wall when so many died in the attempt. "There was no need for that, there was no need for them to climb over the Wall. It's certainly bitter to have to pay for such stupidity with their lives," she said. Her husband Erich, who oversaw the building of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961, was forced to step down by his Politburo shortly before the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989. Most Germans who saw the interview on TV Monday disapproved of the widow's remarks - but hadn't expected any different from the opinionated hardliner. More than 20 years after the state's collapse, victims of communist East Germany, however, were outraged. "What kind of a woman is that?" asked a woman who was jailed for trying to escape across the Berlin Wall, and whose young son was then given up for adoption by the state. "It's shocking." Margot Honecker claimed forced adoption did not exist in East Germany - safe in the knowledge that she has avoided criminal charges. She receives a 1,500 euro ($2,000) monthly pension from the German state.

^ The fact that the current German Government does nothing (and did nothing to her husband) to Margot Honecker and even pays her pension continues their tradition of helping those that commit crimes in a German dictatorship (first Nazis and then East German Communists.) I am not surprised, but would have liked to see a change after all these decades. ^

http://www.dw.de/dw/article/0,,15857452,00.html