by Douglas Boyd
The three western zones of occupied Germany became the Bundesrepublik or Federal Republic on 23 May 1949, prompting Moscow on 7 October 1949 to change its zone of occupation into ‘the German Democratic Republic’ (GDR), to which entity authority over eastern Germany was gradually transferred. The GDR was officially an independent state although transparently controlled by the USSR, which kept its armies of occupation there for more than four decades, facing off the NATO14 forces in the West. On 8 February 1950 responsibility for internal security was vested in the newly created Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS) headed by another Moscow appointee, Wilhelm Zaisser, with Erich Mielke as his deputy. Their massive headquarters building on the Normannenstrasse in Berlin-Lichtenberg is now a museum to the Stasi’s reign of terror that lasted until the fall of the Wall in 1989. In 1951 the MfS took over from the NKVD its interrogation and imprisonment premises including Hohenschönhausen and ‘the Lindenhotel’ prison in Potsdam.
What sort of person chose to work for the MfS? Hans-Joachim Geyer was a former NSDAP member employed by the West German intelligence agency Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) as a courier when arrested in East Berlin. Instead of resisting interrogation, he volunteered to become a double agent for the Stasi and betray all his contacts. Released, he was well remunerated by his new masters in addition to his BND salary for betraying more than 100 BND agents in the GDR from December 1952 for twelve months until the scale of his betrayals blew his cover. He continued to draw his Stasi salary in consideration of past services. After his death, the MfS paid his wife a pension and put his two sons through extended education, including medical school. Geyer was summed up as a family man with no political beliefs, no drink problem and no other vices, either. Exactly the sort of man of whom the Stasi management approved.15
In the Soviet Zone, the predilection for show trials shared by the Nazi and Soviet regimes during the 1930s was taken to new heights. A typical example was in June 1952, when a group of students who had been helping refugees escape from the GDR were put on trial and labelled ‘cold-blooded terrorists and border provocateurs’ in Neues Deutschland, the official newspaper of the SED.16 The intention of the show trials was to demonstrate to the population and the world that the SED had total control of the GDR and could punish any resistance to its regime.
The SED Central Committee – which was effectively the government of the GDR – decided to tackle the severe economic problems caused by the crippling reparations to the USSR and the SED’s rigid planned-economy approach to reindustrialisation of the GDR. Higher taxes were imposed, many state-controlled prices rose abruptly and a 10 per cent increase of work norms was announced, without extra pay. By June 1953 even the Soviet government was so alarmed at reports of unrest in the GDR that its president Walter Ulbricht was summoned to Moscow and ordered by the new chairman of the Council of Ministers, Georgi Malenkov, to release the pressure on the suffering population of the GDR before it exploded in open unrest.
Malenkov’s Diktat came too late. On 16 June eighty building workers downed tools in protest on the Stalinallee – one of East Berlin’s main thoroughfares, where the impressive facades of buildings had been erected to make a background for filmed and televised parades, but with no premises behind them – rather like the main street of a western town in a cowboy film. Strikes were forbidden in the GDR, where they were labelled ‘sabotage’. The downing of tools was reported immediately on the American-financed radio stations RIAS Berlin and Radio Free Europe, which beamed Western news across the Iron Curtain. What part these broadcasts played in the escalation is open to debate, although a number of Western sources list some very high-ranking US politicians and military ‘coincidentally visiting’ the divided city at the time. The fact is that by the following morning, nearly a half-million striking workers were in the streets of Berlin and 150 other towns and cities,17 waving banners and chanting demands for the government to resign. They believed their safety was guaranteed by the US, British and French garrisons in the Allied sectors of Berlin and the presence there of Western reporters and camera crews. Hundreds actually crossed into the western sectors to plead for armed support that was not forthcoming, despite recommendations of a number of Allied officials that arms be supplied.
Soviet High Commissioner Vladimir Semyonov and Marshal Andrei Grechko, who commanded the occupation forces, despatched middle-rank SED functionaries to several cities in an attempt to calm things down while Ulbricht and the other SED top brass spent 17 and 18 June cowering under Russian protection in the Red Army HQ at Berlin-Karlshorst. Some 20,000 Soviet occupation troops with T-34 tanks and armoured personnel carriers, plus 8,000 men of the GDR’s Volkspolizei-Bereitschaften or paramilitary riot police, were deployed to suppress the demonstrations with water cannons, rifle butts and bullets. In Karlshorst, Russian intelligence operations now lay with the Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (MGB) or Soviet Ministry of State Security. The senior MGB officer commented, ‘[The unrest in the GDR] was the reaction of people to the blunders of the country’s leadership. Moreover, it was inadmissible to use tanks in such a situation.’18 In fact, tanks were in the streets to fight the demonstrators but the gunners usually fired over their heads. Semyonov also picked up a broadcast from RIAS to the effect that there was no longer a viable government in the GDR, and commented to Ulbricht and the other nervous leaders of the SED that this was almost true. The background to this is that Stalin’s death three months earlier had left Beria, Malenkov and other Party heavyweights arguing that they should solve one problem by abandoning the GDR. When Khrushchev gained control of the Praesidium, that was one of the charges levelled against Malenkov.19
Armoured personnel carriers of the paramilitary Bereitschaft units of the Volkspolizei equipped with water-cannons were used, but the Russian edict meant it was forbidden to machine-gun the demonstrators within sight of Western observers, although many were shot elsewhere. Some Volkspolizisten panicked and used their handguns. Official casualty figures alleged twenty-one deaths, although a West German report in 1966 alleged there had been 383 people killed during the demonstrations in which 1.5 million people took part all over the country. A further 106 were executed under martial law and 5,100 arrested, of whom 1,200 were sentenced to a total of 6,000 years in hard-regime labour camps. Party functionaries, who at first had thought the demonstrators in Berlin were alone in their protests, learned to their horror that a mob in Görlitz, near the Polish border, had sacked the local party HQ, the Stasi regional office and the prison.
The left-wing poet Bertolt Brecht, who had returned to Berlin after being expelled from the USA, suggested a solution in verse to the essential problems of the GDR:
After the rising of 17 June, the Secretary of the Writers Union
had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee, stating that the people
had forfeited the confidence of the government
and could win it back only by redoubled efforts.
Would it not be easier, in that case, for the government
to dissolve the people and elect another?20
What happened was not, in effect, so very different. The flight to the West of hundreds of thousands of discontented GDR citizens,21 many of them qualified professionals, was causing severe economic problems in the GDR. The SED’s solution was to make even thinking about ‘flight from the Republic’ a crime punishable with several years’ imprisonment. Although the long, so-called ‘green’ border between the GDR and the Bundesrepublik had already been sealed off, it was still possible in Four-Power Berlin for a GDR citizen to board an S-Bahn overhead railway train in the Russian sector and get off at a station in one of the western sectors. A single person travelling without baggage might well get away with this, but family groups or individuals unwise enough to take a suitcase with them were liable to be hauled off the train at the sector boundary and face interrogation, leading to automatic arrest.
So, after the uprising of June 1953 the Stasi’s interrogation prisons were full t
o bursting with arrested demonstrators, would-be border-crossers – and Jehovah’s Witnesses, who had been similarly persecuted for years by the Gestapo and Allgemeine-SS in Hitler’s concentration camps. SED paranoia also created a number of VIP prisoners. Paul Merker was a member of the GDR Politburo and was arrested for daring to voice his disapproval of SED policy. The GDR’s Minister of Trade, Karl Hamann, and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Georg Dertinger, were also arrested for similar reasons. On Moscow’s orders, Dertinger was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment and his child forcibly fostered out under another name in a family considered loyal to the SED.
But Moscow’s alarm over the riots of 17 June caused Zaisser to be sacked and replaced by a man who was called behind his back ‘the walking pancake’. Ernst Wollweber’s brief was to tighten the screws of the MfS in repressing the population of the GDR and especially escalate the clandestine war against agents of West German intelligence, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, controlled by Reinhard Gehlen. Described as fat, bald and frightening – physically the very opposite of Gehlen’s slim frame and disciplined manner, although a fair match in deviousness after a lifetime as Comintern agent and saboteur – Wollweber first hit the headlines as a seaman who caused a mutiny in the Kaiserliche Marine during the First World War. In between his sabotage operations in the 1920s and 1930s, directed mainly against British and French ships, he took over the International Seamen’s Union and pushed his way into the World Federation of Trade Unions. Elected to the Reichstag, he ran for his life when the NSDAP took over in 1933 and set up a Soviet spy network in the Baltic countries. When the Wehrmacht invaded Denmark in 1940 he abandoned the Comintern office there, moving to neutral Stockholm, a good base from which to organise sabotage of Nazi shipping – except that, to avoid being repatriated to Hitler’s Germany, he had to accept a prison sentence.
In 1944 he was granted Soviet citizenship and returned to his homeland on the heels of the Red Army, to be appointed Director General of Shipping and Transport for the Soviet Zone of Germany. It was the ideal cover for sabotage schools, whose alumni caused much damage when taken aboard British and other Western ships. Aged 55 in 1953, Wollweber’s great opportunity had finally come. How long his reign might have been is anyone’s guess, but the habits of a lifetime of deceit and treachery caused him to conspire against First Minister Otto Grotewohl and eventually Walter Ulbricht himself. In 1957, after only four years in office, he retired ‘on grounds of ill-health’ and was divested of all his offices, replaced at the head of MfS by Erich Mielke and put out to grass, although not imprisoned. He died ten years later.22
After the far bloodier Russian suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 a wave of revulsion swept the GDR, providing the Stasi with another crop of VIP victims, in addition to which it kidnapped ‘hostile’ figures from West Berlin. Tricked into insecure rendezvous and in many cases drugged with knock-out drops, journalists, lawyers and officers of the BND and the internal security organisation Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) – literally Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – were bundled into the boots of cars that drove at speed through the sector crossings and delivered them into Stasi interrogation prisons. With the head of the victim being concealed in a sack until he or she was locked into a cell in a windowless ‘Minna’ prison van, the victims had no idea where they were by the time they were locked into their prison cells.
By the end of the 1950s, convict labour had been used to expand the Hohenschönhausen facility with a further 200 cells and interrogation rooms, plus two cells whose walls were padded with slabs of rubber, where prisoners who had gone insane after prolonged torture were finally locked up.23 All prisoners forfeited their identities, being required, when a guard entered the cell, to face the wall with hands behind the back and identify themselves with the number of the cell and their bed number, if the cell had more than one bunk. It was also obligatory in all the interrogation prisons to sleep during the hours when this was permitted – although prisoners were frequently interrupted by exhausting nocturnal interrogations – with both face and hands outside the scant bed coverings, so the guards could check them through the Judas-hole. Their rounds were frequent and unpredictable because they wore felt slippers so that no sound of footfalls should alert the prisoners. The overall effect of this strict regime was to impress on every detainee that he or she was helpless in the grip of an all-powerful state apparatus. It took exceptional willpower not to be broken and confess to whatever the interrogator wanted and suffer the consequences at a trial in the Volksgericht, or people’s court, where the ‘defence lawyer’ was a government employee who was not permitted to defend the client, nor was the accused allowed to speak.
As to how many people underwent this treatment, the figure for prisoners in Hohenschönhausen alone from its inception in 1951 to 1989 is close to 20,000 people of both sexes.24 In addition, the MfS used forty-nine other interrogation prisons and the Innenministerium or Interior Ministry operated forty-four prisons for convicted persons, where political prisoners and convicted criminals were detained for long periods in harsher conditions than anywhere in Western Europe. As more and more citizens were tracked down and sentenced, the MfS personnel manning the prisons of the GDR doubled every ten years. To feed the prisons with more victims, the Stasi increased its staff to an eventual 91,000 officers. Each day 90,000 letters were opened and read and 20,000 telephone conversations listened in to. Ironically, the enormous budget of the totally unproductive MfS rose by 1989 to 4 billion Marks, which contributed significantly to the economic collapse of the GDR.
In addition, there were nearly 200,000 inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, or regularly used but unpaid informants, most of whom were coerced into spying on colleagues, neighbours, friends and relatives, so that parents betrayed their own children and children betrayed their parents. Promoted in 1957, the Minister for State Security with the rank of lieutenant-general, Erich Mielke called the latter meine Hauptwaffe – his most important weapon in the unrelenting war against his own people. His organisation required, in addition to the headquarters in Berlin, fifteen regional HQs and 209 outstations. By comparison, under Nazism the Gestapo terrorised the entire Third Reich – not just the part that became the GDR – with a maximum of 13,500 officers. With an official ratio of one full-time MfS officer for every 180 citizens, as against one KGB officer for 600 citizens in the USSR in the 1980s, the Stasi was the most powerful and oppressive secret police force in the world, working with varying degrees of closeness with Soviet ‘advisers’.
A new member of staff who arrived at the KGB district office in Dresden in August 1985 was Major Vladimir Putin, nicknamed ‘Little Volodya’ by his five colleagues in this most westerly KGB outpost, where much attention was concentrated on reporting political developments inside the GDR. The Dresden outpost was also tasked with identifying potential agents to work in the West, particularly targeting US bases in the Bundesrepublik, like that of the Green Berets special forces in the Bavarian town of Bad Tölz. According to a colleague in Dresden named Major Vladimir Ussoltsev, Putin’s job was mostly trolling through exit visa applications received from the Stasi’s Dresden office in the hope of finding would-be emigrants with relatives living near the bases. Curiously, at that time the Stasi was distancing itself from its Russian comrades in their office 100m away. Stasi General Horst Böhm, a personal friend of Honecker, actually barred the Russians from entering his HQ building.
There were also a number of other KGB outstations in the GDR. Ussoltsev wrote later that the paranoia in the GDR was ‘like an Orwellian fantasy, a leftover from the Stalin era. The Stasi employed more people in the Dresden district alone than did the KGB in all of Byelorussia.’25 In the Soviet Union a joke had it that there were three kinds of people: those who had been in prison, those who were in prison and those who would later be in prison. Although the GDR was often referred to in Western media as a police state, it could more accurately have been called a prison state after the erection of
the Berlin Wall on the weekend of 13–14 August 1961, physically dividing the western sectors from the Russian sector. On the Monday morning, thousands of workers trying to cross the sector boundary to reach their places of work were told they could no longer do so. Elsewhere, the entire country was fenced off from the Western democracies with barbed wire and minefields, inside which every GDR citizen was liable to arrest and imprisonment on trumped-up charges without anything approaching normal legal process.
At this crucial moment in the isolation of the GDR, the exchange rate was one Westmark to four Ostmarks. Far from ending the economic decline, in the next twenty-eight years the exchange rate tumbled to 10:1 before the Wall was breached on 9 November 1989.
Notes
1. Depending on the source
2. K. Lowe, Savage Continent, London, Penguin 2013, p. 38 and end notes thereto
3. The full story of the Tulle massacre may be found in Boyd, Blood in the Snow, Stroud, The History Press, pp. 102–13
4. Some estimates of the rapes put the figure twice as high, the difference being accounted for by women who concealed what had happened to them
5. Sheffer, Burned Bridge, p. 25
6. A. Applebaum, Iron Curtain, the Crushing of Eastern Europe, London, Penguin 2013, pp. 36–7
7. H. Kierstein, ed., Heisse Schlachten im Kalten Krieg, Berlin, Verlag Das Neue Berlin 2008, p. 83
8. The correct title of the Nazi party
9. An auxiliary ‘army’ raised by Josef Goebbels for a last-ditch defence of the Reich.
10. Sheffer, Burned Bridge, p. 26
11. H. Knabe, ed., Gefangen in Hohenschönhausen – Stasi-Häftlinge Berichten, Berlin, List 2012, p. 10