The document is now front-page news in German papers and there have been "calls for fresh prosecutions of former East German officials". I have written on occasion before that I find great comfort in history and the re-discovery of this Stasi shoot-to-kill order and the reaction it is receiving now from Germans is no exception. Here's why:

"For me this is proof that there always was a firing order at the border," Günter Nooke, human rights adviser to the German government, told the ZDF television channel. The German Democratic Republic was ruled by people who had issued orders to shoot at women and children, he said. "Today that would count as crimes against humanity, that's a case for the International Criminal Court in The Hague."

Despite having never voted for George W. Bush or his Republican enablers in Congress, have I and many other of my fellow Americans been "good" Germans Americans since Bush was allowed to take office? If, after 18 years since the Berlin Wall fell, the members of the East German communist dictatorship could be subject to fresh prosecutions, then maybe someday surviving members of the Bush regime will be brought to account for their alleged crimes against humanity?

Marianne Birthler, head of the government's authority which manages the Stasi files, said: "This discovery is important because to this day officials kept denying that there was a firing order at the Berlin Wall, and we haven't come across an instruction as explicit, clear and unlimited as this one."

From CIA black site prisons to torture to Guantánamo Bay detainment camp to the Abu Ghraib prison, there has been little if any accountability in the upper ranks of the American government. Written orders following down the chain of command have not been made public.

Of course whether the rediscovery of written orders of shoot-to-kill from 1973 will, indeed, open up new criminal investigation is in doubt. As memories of the Wall fade, so do the cries for justice. The strategy of running out the clock may prove to be effective once again, which returns me once again to my comfort in history. Even if the criminals escape justice, history can still hold them accountable. As the Spiegel article explains:

It was always obvious that East Germany's border guards were ordered to shoot at people trying to flee to the West. Had no such order existed, they wouldn't have killed an estimated 1,100 defectors making desperate bids for freedom across the Berlin Wall or the minefields of the 860-mile border between East and West Germany. Most of those victims were shot -- 18-year-old Peter Fechter, for example, who bled to death at the foot of the Wall in August 1962 after guards fired into his back as he tried to escape.

But after the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, East Germany's former leaders and top Stasi secret service officials insisted there had been no shoot-to-kill order, and the absence of evidence to the contrary helped many of them to escape prosecution or get away with only lenient sentences in a series of trials.

There was a shoot-to-kill order and the criminals who issued it likely will not escape quietly into history. Egon Krenz, East Germany's last leader, said "There was no kill order or firing order as you call it... I know that, not from files but from my own experience. Such an order would have been in breach of the law of the GDR." The abuses the world has witnessed allegedly by the hands of the Bush regime are a breach of the law of the United States too. History has proved Krenz and those in the East German government to be liars. If not proven in court, history will prove George W. Bush and his regime to be liars too.

Of all sad ironies, the United States is building its own wall along its border with Mexico. East Germany shot Peter Fetcher to keep him from trying to leave and America is likely planning to shoot Pedro Cerca to keep him from trying to enter. Construction of the border wall, according to U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, is to start this fall in Texas and is already well underway in Arizona.

Washington aims to have "operational control" of the border by 2013 by building the 700-mile (1,120-km) wall along parts of the frontier and creating a "virtual fence" in desert areas with drones, sensors, cameras, satellite technology and vehicle barriers.

The East German government would have been proud of such a wall.