Comment by Lawrence G. Kelley, Col USMC (Ret.)
Gentlemen:
A section of your website (Collections->Western Military Missions)
contains two Stasi documents on the 1985 shooting (killing) by a Soviet
sentry in Ludwigslust, GDR, of US Army Major Arthur D. Nicholson, a
member of the US Military Liaison Mission to CINC GSFG. The media
flashed reporting of Nicholson's death around the world, and the
shooting prompted Gorbachev's first foreign policy crisis. However,
interesting as the Stasi's internal documentation may be, it contains
factual errors. The Stasi was not present on site to trail the Tour
Vehicle, nor did its personnel observe the shooting (which the MfS
documentation neglects to mention). Rather, MfS officers simply repeated
verbatim the account of the shooting provided by GSFG. HQ GSFG, for its
part, consciously falsified its account of events (including its
reporting to the General Staff in Moscow) in an effort to protect the
Command and conceal the multiple blunders of its personnel (incl. those
in the command echelon) - a point that has come to light via revelations
of former Soviet sources in the period since the fall of the USSR.
In discussions of the events that occurred at Ludwigslust, especially
those conducted in Internet fora, one often hears such assertions as"the truth about the incident will only be known, once the
then-superpowers open their archives." Such statements reflect ignorance
of the situation, as the US has already done so. The contents of that "archive" correspond exactly to the public account of the shooting the
the US provided at the time. In other words, no "cover-up" of events on
the US side occurred at all. Additional information on the shooting has
indeed emerged in the period since 1985, but it only fleshes out our
picture of events - it does not contradict the information that we had
and revealed at the time.
I personally wrote the official account of the Nicholson shooting in
1986, and in 2004 USAREUR declassified the document and made it publicly
available online. (The delay in declassification was prompted by
bureaucratic lethargy and relative priorities, not by security
considerations.) It appears as Annex F (Nicholson Shooting
Negotiations) to the 1885 USMLM Unit History. This document, like nearly
all the other annual histories that USMLM produced during the years of
its existence, can be read at/downloaded from: http://www.history.hqusareur.army.mil/uslmannual.htm Recommend that you
consider adding Annex F to your collection.
Regrettably, those responsible for the proofreading and preparation of
Annex F for publication inserted a handful of stylistic errors into the
text, but such errors will be obvious to the reader. If you would like
to see a cleaner copy of the portion of Annex F that pertains to the
Nicholson shooting itself, I can provide one to you. In 2005, I used it
as a press handout for the dedication of a memorial to Nicholson in
Ludwigslust, an event organized and conducted by the
AlliiertenMuseum-Berlin.
As background for you, I served as the Naval Representative and acting
Deputy Chief of USMLM from. Nicholson shared an office with me during
the final year of his service in the Mission. From the day of the
shooting until a year later, my principal duties involved the handling
of issues related to the shooting and conduct of the negotiations with
the Soviets that followed.
Regards,
Lawrence G. Kelley (lgkelley (at) vr-web.de)
