BERLIN (Reuters) - Germans began celebrating the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall by honoring Monday the U.S. and Soviet leaders who ended their Cold War division.

But in a profound irony of timing, a court rejected an appeal by the East German Communist leader who opened the border on Nov. 9, 1989.

Egon Krenz was condemned to spend Tuesday's anniversary contemplating a lengthy jail term for his part in the killings of East Germans shot by border guards as they tried to flee over the Wall before it came down.

As former President George Bush was made an honorary citizen of reunited Berlin at a festive gathering in city hall attended by his then German and Soviet counterparts, Helmut Kohl and Mikhail Gorbachev, Krenz was consulting lawyers on how to stave off going to prison for manslaughter.

Leader of East Germany for just six weeks in the autumn of 1989, Krenz has never been among those credited with the peaceful resolution of Europe's 40 years of Cold War division and has consistently dismissed his treatment at the hands of the reunited German judicial system as "victor's justice."

"I will wear my prison uniform with more honor than certain judges do their robes," said the 62-year-old. He has already appealed to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

GORBACHEV PRAISED, KRENZ CONDEMNED

Kohl and Bush praised Gorbachev, whose reforms of Soviet communism paved the way for the popular pressure for freedoms that prompted Krenz to open the Wall.

"We can never repay the debt we owe Mikhail Gorbachev," Bush said of the former Kremlin leader, who was given Germany's highest civil honor Sunday.

Yet 120 miles away in Leipzig, judges upheld the six-and-a-half year sentence imposed on his one-time ally Krenz in August 1997. Out on bail since then, legal formalities mean it will be some weeks at least before he finds himself behind bars.

Three-year sentences on similar manslaughter charges were also upheld on fellow Politburo members Guenther Kleiber and Guenter Schabowski, the spokesman who announced the opening of the Wall to an astonished world.

Having eased out veteran dictator Erich Honecker three weeks earlier, the relatively youthful Krenz saw easing the travel ban that had divided German families since even before the Wall went up in 1961 as the key to silencing the guns of protesters who were demonstrating in ever greater numbers in support of reform.

But his plan for an orderly opening of the checkpoints the following day to East Germans bearing the right exit visas were wrecked when Schabowski, seemingly caught unprepared at a news conference, announced the frontier would be open "as of now."

Within minutes, thousands of East Berliners were besieging stunned border guard posts. After some anxious hours when it seemed the guards or the some of the tens of thousands of Soviet troops in the country might open fire, the helpless guards threw up the barriers and hundreds of thousands streamed through.

"IT WAS PURE JOY"

"Total strangers just fell into each other's arms. It was pure joy," said west Berliner Gisela Forschbach, 43, as she recalled that night 10 years later, speaking for millions of her compatriots. "It was the most moving day of my life."

Parties across the city will mark the anniversary Tuesday. But the euphoria of that first night, whether it be for easterners cruising West Berlin's glittering storefronts or westerners rejoicing in the defeat of communism, has cooled in the nine years since the two Germanies were formally reunited.

Twice as likely as their western counterpart to be unemployed, the one German in five who lives in the east is prone to nostalgia for the old certainties of socialist welfare.

Westerners, who have dug deep into their taxes to pay for rebuilding East Germany, some of which still bears the scars of World War II, accuse easterners -- "Ossis" -- of ingratitude.

The jail terms for Krenz and the others, who join only a small band of former Soviet bloc leaders to face real punishment, may reinforce some of those east-west resentments.

While some easterners, still bitter at communist repression, cheered the verdict, Germany's former Communist party, the PDS, which has seen a powerful surge in support in recent local elections in the east, condemned the ruling as hypocritical.

"It lacks credibility to award ... Gorbachev Germany's highest honor and almost simultaneously to condemn Krenz to prison," the PDS leadership said in a statement.

Also casting a shadow over the festivities, is the weight of several other anniversaries Tuesday that recall Germany's troubled 20th century -- including the founding of the ill-fated Weimar Republic in 1918 and Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch of 1923.

Above all, groups representing victims of Nazi oppression urged Germans not to forget Kristallnacht -- the Night of Broken Glass -- on Nov. 9, 1938, when Jews and Jewish properties were attacked in a foretaste of the coming Holocaust.