Johann Burianek (16 November 1913 – 2 August 1952) was a former Wehrmacht soldier and CIA-backed insurgent who planned and committed several attacks against the German Democratic Republic and a member of the anti-communist KGU.^[1]

In a 1952 trial he was condemned to death in the country's Supreme Court for preparing attacks on railway bridges. He was the first person to receive a death sentence from the new country's justice system.^[2]

In 2005 Johann Burianek's conviction was found to have been unconstitutional, because of "serious disregard for basic rules [of justice]"^[10][11] in the original trial. The 1952 verdict was reversed. This reversal arose from an initiative by the "Arbeitsgemeinschaft 13. August" organisation^[12] which had been established, like the KgU before it, by Rainer Hildebrandt, and which now successfully applied to the Berlin District Court to have the 1992 Criminal Rehabilitation Act invoked for the Burianek case. In a judgement delivered on 2 September 2005, the court also held that between his arrest on 5 March 1952 and his execution on 2 August 1952 Johann Burianek had been unlawfully deprived of his freedom.^[13][14]

In Germany, under §189 of the criminal code, defamation of the memory of a deceased person is a criminal offence which upon conviction may attract a fine or a prison term of up to two years.^[15] The Burianek case hit the headlines again in 2012 and 2013 on account of a former Stasi officer, Colonel Wolfgang Schmidt,^[10] who used his internet site to describe Burianek as a "bandit" and as the "leader of a terrorist organisation".^[10][16] On 27 September 2012 Schmidt was convicted under §189 in respect of the matter by a court which evidently accepted that Schmidt's characterizations of Burianek had been false and defamatory. The court ordered Schmidt to pay a fine of €1,200.^[10]

The action against Schmidt had been triggered by Hubertus Knabe, the director of the Hohenschönhausen Memorial Museum on the northern edge of Berlin.^[17][18] It was not the first time Knabe and Schmidt had come across one another, Schmidt already having been fined €2,100 in 2009 for calling Knabe himself a "publicly unrestrained rabble rouser" ("öffentlich und ungestraft als Volksverhetzer") in connection with Knabe's earlier work on the Stasi.^[17][19]

Schmidt appealed against the €1,200 fine, imposed under §189 for defaming the memory of Johann Burianek, but on 18 March 2013 the District Court rejected his appeal.^[20][21] Knabe welcomed the court's verdict: "I am pleased that the Justice System stands up against historical revisionism from former Stasi operatives. Even today, we must not allow the perpetrators to denigrate their victims in public."^[10][22] He also stressed the significance of a court decision which, for the first time, extended §189 of the Criminal code to include negative portrayals of those convicted by the German Democratic Republic.

• Kai-Uwe Merz: Kalter Krieg als antikommunistischer Widerstand. Die Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit 1948–1959, München: Oldenbourg, 1987. ISBN 3-486-54371-7
• Rudi Beckert: Die erste und letzte Instanz. Schau- und Geheimprozesse vor dem Obersten Gericht der DDR, Keip Verlag, Goldbach 1995, ISBN 3805102437, S.237–248
• Karl Wilhelm Fricke, Roger Engelmann: Konzentrierte Schläge Staatssicherheitsaktionen u. polit. Prozesse in der DDR 1953 – 1956, Berlin 1998
• Gerhard Finn: Nichtstun ist Mord. Die Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit. Westkreuz-Verlag, Bad Münstereifel 2000, ISBN 3-929592-54-1, S. 119–124