A German holidaymaker visiting the Czech Republic with his family was arrested because his name remained on a police list, more than 40 years after he fled from the communist East Germany via Czechoslovakia.
The man was arrested while eating breakfast at a hotel in the Giant Mountains range in the north of the country and took him away for questioning, according to a report by the Czech newspaper Pravo on Thursday.
The man, who was originally from East Germany, fled to the West in 1984 while spending time at a socialist camp in what was then Czechoslovakia, another member of the Soviet-dominated Eastern Bloc.
As it turned out, a court in the town of Ceske Budejovice had placed the man on a list of undesirable persons after his escape more than 40 years ago, and nothing had changed since.
“We proceeded in accordance with the law,” emphasized a police spokeswoman.
She said that the police list did not specify why the man had been declared inadmissible to the Czech Republic and that it is up to a court to decide on whether to revoke the deportation order in individual cases.
Lawyer Lubomir Müller explained that similar cases continue to occur from time to time.
It is possible that foreigners have simply been overlooked when it comes to the legal rehabilitation of those persecuted by the communist justice system, Müller said.
In principle, the criminal offence of leaving the republic without permission was abolished by a 1990 law, enacted after the fall of communism.
However, Müller noted that some citizens of the former German Democratic Republic had committed other crimes during their escape, such as stealing a car or committing fraud.
During the Cold War, East Germany made it extremely difficult for citizens to flee the country, deploying a notorious internal secret police and a heavily fortified border to prevent escapes.
Scores of people were killed trying to escape to West Germany, either over the Berlin Wall or along the border dividing the NATO-aligned West from the Soviet-aligned East Germany.
Many East Germans sought to escape by first travelling to other Eastern Bloc countries, especially Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and then trying to head westward.
