As far as public trials are concerned, all parties are in complete agreement: don't hold them. No one is qualified, they say to pass judgment on the East Germans, for no one knows with absolute certainty how he himself might have behaved under similar circumstances.

[...]

Apart from the public rehabilitation of the victims, the effort to bring East German administrative criminals to justice would serve no practical purpose: it would simply announce the intent of a society to protect, under any and all circumstances, certain basic rules of communal human existence.