by Douglas Boyd
No reply. An orderly came with a syringe. The injection was to be made in my buttocks, so I had to lie face down on the bed. When I refused, the doctor said, ‘Don’t forget, you are a prisoner under interrogation. You have to do everything we tell you to.’ I still refused. Two more orderlies were called. They forced me down onto the bed and one of them did the injection. The nurse undressed me and I did not recover consciousness until next morning. When I was in prison in Magdeburg, I had used the knocking code to communicate with other cells, but when I tried it here, the doctor appeared and said, ‘You’re not in Magdeburg now. No knocking here.’
A medical doctor came and asked me questions about my health. The shrink said they were going to treat me with drugs. When I asked what for, he said that the state prosecutor had ordered it. The treatment started the following day: injections in the morning, at midday and in the evening of the anti-epileptic drug Luminal, which had been used to kill people in the Nazi euthanasia programme. [It also has sedative and hypnotic properties.] A declaration was put in front of me, saying that I wished to remain in the GDR. I refused to sign and went on hunger strike, so they tied me down on the bed and put in a drip.
Soon, I was no longer aware if it was day or night. After I tried to hang myself with a strip of the bed sheet, my nightie was pulled up. One guard wrenched my hands above my head and kneeled on them and the orderly held my legs down, so they could put needles into my thighs for a drip. With the first drops, I felt the most terrible pain – as if my legs were being torn off. Tears ran down my face. I begged the doctor to stop the infusion, but he said he would do so when I ate and drank and signed the declaration he was holding out. I still refused and he continued the drip for three-quarters of an hour. When he pulled out the needles, I screamed. I could hardly recognise my legs. It was agony to move them, and where the needles had gone in was raw and swollen. When I pleaded for some painkiller, the guard called from outside, ‘Get yourself some from the West.’
I was warned that my sentence for refusing to sign the declaration would be not less than five years’ imprisonment. Sometimes I could not understand the interrogations, but the questions were always the same, about my contacts with the West. Since I still refused to eat, my weight declined each day until I was taken into a room with several orderlies. They made me sit on a stool, cuffed my hands behind my back and fastened them to the stool. An orderly pulled back my head and the doctor inserted a tube in my nose so that the nurse could pour fluid in through a funnel. The more I struggled, the harder they pulled my hair, until even the interrogator was fighting me and I lost the last shred of human dignity by soiling myself.
Back in my cell, I begged for some release from my suffering, but God did nothing. The interrogator said my family would pay for it if I did not retract my request [to leave the GDR]. Then came the day I feared, when he told me that my daughter Anita had also been arrested. They showed me a letter in her handwriting, in which one sentence stood out: Dear Mummy, Please find a solution for us all. I was so confused, I had to ask the interrogator what it meant. He said she had confessed to having written ‘all the letters’ to the West. I asked to see that in writing, but in vain. To reply to my daughter, I was given paper and a pencil. I was weeping so much, I could hardly write, but managed a few sentences, imploring her to stick to the truth and not be squeezed like a lemon into uttering falsehoods.
My thoughts were all with my daughter. When had she been arrested and why did she have to atone for what I was supposed to have done? Then I was told my husband was also in the prison hospital because he and my daughter were considered accomplices in my ‘crime’. The doctor came and pleaded with me to end the hunger strike, so my husband and daughter could be released and only I would be punished. But I was determined to continue until either I died or was given an exit visa. At my next interrogation, I was offered the same deal by the interrogator, who warned me that in the Bundesrepublik sick people like me received neither medical care or money. ‘In which case,’ I retorted, ‘why don’t all the people in the West come and live in the GDR?’12
By now many people in western Germany had taken an interest in Waltraud’s problems. Every week, she was shown a list of their letters, on which she was supposed to mark the names she knew, which would be proof that she had contacts in the West. She was also told her husband and daughter had signed statements that they did not want to leave the GDR, but when she asked to see the statements, they were not produced. Although it pained her greatly to think of her daughter undergoing Stasi interrogations, what had happened to Anita was even more Machiavellian. A young IM (Stasi informer) called Michael Schilling had been tasked by the Stasi with seducing and marrying her – all to convince Anita to stay in the GDR.
Although Waltraud was now a shadow of the woman who had been arrested, it was the interrogator who eventually cracked and admitted that things were ‘not wonderful, here in the GDR’. After his small admission, Waltraud agreed to end her hunger strike if she was given assurances that nothing would happen to her husband and daughter. A cup of broth was brought from the prison kitchen, but she was able to swallow only a little before being taken back to her cell. Although she now ate, the Luminal injections continued. On 14 July, after five weeks of this treatment, Waltraud was given back her clothes. She dressed and staggered in great pain to the main doors, where she was placed on a stretcher, which was lifted into an ambulance for an unknown destination. Seated beside her was her husband, who had been similarly mistreated in the prison hospital, but they were forbidden to speak to, or touch, each other.13
Suddenly, in January 1981 the family was given permission to leave the GDR legally with Anita, after their liberty was purchased by the Bundesrepublik. Welcomed by friends in the West, their relief and joy can be imagined from a photograph taken at the time. However, after being temporarily accommodated in a reception camp, they were informed that the quota of refugees for Bavaria, where they wanted to live, was already full. Settled in a rented apartment in Lower Saxony, where they knew nobody, they found themselves ostracised by neighbours as ‘troublesome Ossies’.
In September 2000, just before the expiry of the legislation covering all SED and Stasi crimes except murder, the Berlin county court heard the trial of neurologist Horst Böttger for his treatment of the Krügers. Defended by a former Stasi legal officer and calling as defence witness a former KGB psychologist from Moscow, Böttger was found not guilty after pleading that Waltraud’s suicide attempt justified his use of Luminal.
As to how many GDR citizens were arrested for attempting the crime of Republikflucht – flight from the GDR – they totalled 64,000 individual cases between 1958 and 1966. In the last years of the GDR, the figures were nearly 6,000 in 1987 and more than 9,000 in 1988.
Notes
1. J. Schönbohm, Two Armies and one Fatherland, Oxford, Berghahn Books 1996, p. ix
2. The pen name of Eric Blair
3. See Knabe, Gefangen in Hohenschönhausen
4. Ibid
5. F. Sperling in Knabe, Gefangen in Hohenschönhausen, pp. 147−53
6. Knabe, Gefangen in Hohenschönhausen, pp. 166−73
7. H. Fichter in Knabe, Gefangen in Hohenschönhausen, pp. 152−63 (abridged)
8. An example is displayed in the Normannenstrasse museum. The modus operandi was shown in the film Das Leben der Anderen/The Lives of Others, dir. von Donnersmarck
9. W. Janka in Knabe, Gefangen in Hohenschönhausen, pp. 174−91 (author’s italics)
10. S. Paul in Knabe, Gefangen in Hohenschönhausen, pp. 236−47
11. Ibid
12. W. Krüger in Knabe, Gefangen in Hohenschönhausen, pp. 303−7
13. Ibid
5
FEAR AS A POLITICAL TOOL
Many of the Stasi prisoners interrogated in Hohenschönhausen ended up like Fritz Sperling, serving their sentences in one of the two long-term prisons at Bautzen in Saxony. A hundred miles south-east of Berlin, close to the Czech and Polish frontiers, th
e city now promotes itself as a medieval tourist attraction although, to Germans who lived in the GDR, the name was a synonym for political persecution and inhumane prison conditions. The high-security prison designated Bautzen II had been a political prison under the Nazis, was taken over by the NKVD/MGB after the war and run by the GDR Innenministerium from 1956 to 1989. The guards wore not Stasi uniforms, but the blue uniforms of the Interior Ministry prison service. Most of the prisoners were political victims of the regime, but convicted criminals also served time here. Among the politicals were many former members of the state, party or military systems, sentenced for ‘treason’ or simply for Nestbeschmutzung – literally, soiling the nest, i.e. criticising the SED, the GDR, some political or official figure, or simply telling an indiscreet joke. There was also a significant number of foreigners, particularly West Germans and convicted ‘spies and saboteurs’ from the West.
For these to be arrested, it was not necessary even to set foot in the GDR. By 1950 approximately 700 people had been drugged and/or kidnapped in the West like Karl Fricke, and then driven across the border in the boot of a car driven by Stasi thugs – as in a novel by Len Deighton or John Le Carré. Both methods ended in the same way, with the victim delivered to a Stasi interrogation prison, forced into a real or false confession and sentenced to long periods of imprisonment. Particularly targeted were members of Western intelligence services, print and media journalists who had been critical of the SED, and anyone involved in helping refugees escape to the West. These political prisoners were subject to especially severe detention. The work they were allotted was unpleasant and/or hard; they had fewer privileges than convicted criminals; they were more likely to be given additional punishments and were generally harassed and spied on in various ways throughout their detention.
Extra punishments were regularly meted out to political prisoners. These included Arrest, which took the form of up to twenty-one days in a small, barred cell – which the victims called ‘the tiger cage’ – on reduced rations and with no bedding. When Werner König was sentenced to this, he was shackled by one foot and one hand to the bars and thus unable to reach the toilet. This obliged him to wet and soil himself, for which he was abused as a ‘filthy pig’ by the guards.1
Because everyone in the GDR was spied on, at Bautzen II this applied also to the guards. Documentary proof exists that regular reports on what they did and said were supplied to the Stasi and were used against them in some instances. In the ubiquitous paranoia of the GDR, even the informers who compiled these reports were themselves spied on.2
Even the word ‘paranoia’ is insufficient to describe the all-pervading fear. As late as August 1987, when it must have been obvious to many people that the SED regime was economically unsustainable and would soon collapse, the GDR Defence Ministry issued a formal order to all service personnel that their television sets must be ‘sealed up to block the transmissions of the enemy on Channel 25’ – i.e. West German television.3 Personnel who chose to ignore this ran the risk of their children reporting them in school. Even colleagues who were childless took to hanging lights on the outside of their houses to blot out the give-away glow from the television screen, so that neighbours would not see it after the GDR television transmissions ended early in the evening.4
For those in prison, of course, there was only one state channel of television to watch. In an echo of the duplicitous slogan over the main gate at Auschwitz, Arbeit macht frei – work will make you free – every prisoner in the GDR long-term prisons was obliged to work as ‘rehabilitation’. Some prisoners worked with others in workshops, assembling transformers and electric motors; those in solitary confinement were obliged to work alone. Female prisoners in isolation were put to sewing hand towels or sticking together the two halves of pencils – an activity that had been performed by machines in the West for 100 years and more. Others worked in groups, cleaning and polishing floors and fittings, or in the kitchen. Theoretically, there was a minimum wage, paid in Wertscheine, or prison currency, but because 82 per cent of earnings was deducted for ‘food and board’, and some of the remainder was kept back as savings, little was left to spend in the prison shop. Failure to keep up with work norms led to loss of earnings.5
An otherwise unknown man called Dieter Hötger was the only prisoner ever to escape from Bautzen II. Sentenced to solitary confinement, he was locked alone into work cell No. 19 at the corner of the main building between 5 a.m. and 3 p.m. each day. There, he succeeded in slowly removing twenty-three bricks from the external wall, where it was hidden behind a cupboard. Each evening, he replaced the loose bricks and the cupboard, and flushed the cement dust down a toilet. When he finally broke through his 50cm-wide hole in the 65cm-thick external wall, he found that it was 5m above the ground. He climbed through anyway and dropped down, to scramble over the outer wall and get away. There was little outside security since it was believed that Bautzen II was escape-proof.
Although in prison clothes with high-visibility yellow stripes on the sleeves, Hötger set out to walk the 100-plus miles to the frontier in Berlin. His escape triggered a nationwide manhunt, with hastily printed posters offering 1,000 Marks – the equivalent of two months’ average wages – for his recapture. Yet, for nine days Hötger managed to evade all the forces mobilised against him, until he was tracked down only 17km away from the prison. Here again, the paranoia that ruled the GDR came into play. Oddly, there was no laid-down penalty for his escape, if it really was a solo effort. So, all the weight of the Stasi system went into trying to prove that he had had accomplices, because a conspiracy was punishable. When this failed, in March 1969 he was accused of ‘espionage, collection of information, systematic hostile agitation, attempted illegal border-crossing and damage to socialist property’ – i.e. the hole in the wall. For this idiotic collection of trumped-up charges, with only the last having any semblance of reality, he was sentenced to eight additional years’ imprisonment. In September 1972 Hötger was freed after he was ‘bought’ by the Bundesrepublik.6
The Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit (KgU) or ‘combat group against inhumanity’ was regarded in the GDR as a terrorist organisation and any members who fell into the hands of the Stasi were treated as violent criminals. When the author was serving at RAF Gatow, an off-duty pleasure was sailing boats of the British Berlin Yacht Club on Lake Havel, but club members were warned not to stray too near the line of buoys at the southern end of the lake, which marked the border with the GDR. On one Sunday afternoon, a West Berlin lawyer who was a member of the KgU was sailing his yacht on the Havel well inside the British sector boundary when a Stasi high-speed launch crossed the boundary. The lawyer was dragged aboard it, next stop interrogation in Potsdam.
The inhumanity which the KgU was fighting is exemplified by what happened to a 22-year-old West Berlin girl named Sigrid Grünewald. In 1977, while visiting relatives in Thuringia, where she had been born, she fell in love. After her boyfriend’s request for an exit visa was predictably turned down by the MfS, Sigrid paid a Fluchthilfeorganisation – professional people smugglers – to bring him out of the GDR, but the attempt failed. Aware of the risks, if caught, the boyfriend made another request for an exit visa. Meanwhile, the Stasi had been interrogating one of the people smugglers and learned of the failed rescue attempt. The next time Sigrid visited her boyfriend, both of them were arrested. In March 1982 she was sentenced to five and a half years’ imprisonment in Bautzen II for ‘attempted treasonous human trafficking’; her boyfriend was sent to serve his sentence in another prison. In this case, love triumphed after all. In September 1982 their liberty was purchased by the Bundesrepublik and they married in West Berlin a year later. The same court that had condemned Sigrid quashed her conviction in 1991.
It must have taken exceptional courage to be a civil rights activist in the GDR, but there were some, all closely watched by the Stasi. Vera Lengsfeld was 36 when arrested and treated more delicately than most of her co-detainees:
I was thr
ust into a metal cell near the door of the blue prison bus. A female officer clapped handcuffs on me. They were the sort that tightened if you put any pressure on them. Then a male officer removed the cuffs. The bus set off and stopped after being backed up very close to a brightly lit garage – all lights and uniforms. A young, attractive woman with a nice face in the uniform of a wardress took me into a cell, where I had to undress, so she could check my mouth and ears and other bodily orifices. As I was crouching with legs apart for this, I noticed someone looking through the spy-hole in the door. When I protested, the nice girl took no notice. Given some horrible jail clothes, I was so relieved to have clean underwear that I made no complaint, and was escorted to a cell measuring five metres by three.
My interrogator demonstrated how much the Stasi knew about me by playing my favourite piece of music by Mendelssohn during our first session. It was interrupted by the arrival of the judge, who was accompanied by a young and pretty secretary with long hair, whom I should never have suspected of working for the Stasi. The accusation was that I had ‘participated in a forbidden meeting’. Before he could start taking down my statement, I informed him that before I had even been charged someone had spied on me while I was naked, which I considered an insult to my feminine dignity. The secretary looked at the judge, uncertain whether she should write this down. He said the conduct of prison staff was not his concern, but I insisted until he gave way. I then refuted his charges.
After a week, I was moved to another cell, with a 19-year-old East German girl who had been arrested trying to get on a plane at Budapest airport and locked up in a filthy Hungarian jail for two weeks, during which she had to take her shower watched by the all-male guards. She was now facing three years’ imprisonment.7
Vera Lengsfeld had been arrested as a warning, and was released after two months’ interrogation. Since several other civil rights activists connected with the Evangelical Church were imprisoned for exactly the same period, it is safe to assume that the Stasi was sending a warning to all civil rights workers. Arrested in her own home, Freya Klier, a 38-year-old mother, managed to compile a rough diary after her release: