by Douglas Boyd
The Stasi interrogator Major Fleischer did not believe that a girl of 16, alone, could have so nearly crossed the GDR’s ‘anti-fascist protective measure’. Each night Miriam had two hours’ sleep before questioning from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m., with no sleeping allowed during the daytime. Realising they wanted to know her accomplices, she invented them and a meeting in a beer cellar – only to get into more trouble for wasting Stasi time when they staked out the beer cellar fruitlessly on several consecutive nights. Her sentence was eighteen months in the women’s prison at Hoheneck. On entry, she was ordered to undress and half-drowned several times in a bath of cold water by two wardresses before becoming Juvenile Prisoner No. 725 and having no other name for a year and a half. Apart from basic food, everything in the prison had to be bought or bartered for, including sanitary towels. The political prisoners were controlled by hardened criminals. When she was released, she was, in her words, ‘not really human any more’.
The reader might think that Miriam’s story could get no worse, but it did.3
Once the war on youth began, all young people constituted a target group, to be perpetually under surveillance – using especially IMs, who included their teachers, classmates, flatmates, youth workers and sometimes their parents and siblings. Fortunately Gabriele Schnell, a Potsdam resident, compiled a record of detainees’ experiences in the Potsdam interrogation prisons,4 where more than 60 per cent of inmates were younger than 30, and also made a special study of youthful victims of the Stasi.5
Like many young people, 20-year-old Potsdam swimming instructor Jens Baumann yearned to travel abroad, partly because he had relatives living in several European countries. For ordinary GDR citizens below retirement age, the only possible foreign destinations were other Warsaw Pact countries. In August 1982 Jens travelled to Bulgaria on holiday with the intention of walking across the south-eastern border into Turkey through wild country – until he found out that more young East Germans had been shot there by border guards than all along the inner German frontier. They were swiftly buried in unmarked graves in what is now the Grandzhda National Park – then dubbed the Death Triangle – still dotted with concrete bunkers to be used in the event of a Turkish invasion.6 Instead, Jens returned home and, filled with the lust for travel, filed a formal request to leave the GDR two days later. Innocently, he quoted Article 13 of the United Nations Charter of Human Rights:
Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to it.
He also quoted Article 15:
Nobody shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality, nor be denied the right to change his nationality.
Because the GDR had signed the Charter, of which he had found a copy in the Potsdam library, he thought this was safe. In an effort to speed up treatment of his application, he also requested support three days later in a letter to the IGM in Frankfurt, having heard about the organisation on a West German television programme. The IGM being on the list of ‘enemy organisations’ held by the Stasi’s mail censors, it was stamped Not to be forwarded and sent instead to the MfS district office in Potsdam, whose staff had, within the week, conducted a preliminary investigation of Baumann. Although an IM also working in the swimming pool knew nothing against him, his name did figure on a Stasi list of persons who had attended a pop concert – which the MfS termed ‘a negative-decadent youth rally’ – in the previous year. This and the fact that he had written to the IGM were enough to make his application to leave the GDR technically ‘unlawful’.
As though this was a military operation, on 1 September 1982 the Stasi district office drew up a five-page plan of operations, which was put into action the following day, the charge being that Baumann had attempted to contact ‘a state-hostile organisation’, for which the penalty was one to five years in prison. The full might of the Stasi and Volkspolizei were now brought into play, plus two IMs, who made enquiries of his colleagues and neighbours. Their report revealed nothing; on the contrary, it noted that the swimming instructor was ‘friendly, helpful and decently dressed’, and that his family put flags in their window on socialist holidays. Furthermore, far from making a secret of it, his divorced mother had openly told neighbours that he was applying to leave the GDR.
On 7 September he was summoned to the MfS office in the town hall, where he learned that his application had been turned down. Although disappointed, he still had no idea what lay ahead. Two days later, during a staff meeting at the swimming pool, Jens was arrested in front of his colleagues and driven away by two Stasi men. Although a medium-size town of less than 140,000 inhabitants, Potsdam had at least three interrogation prisons, to cope with the numbers of people arrested and interrogated. Forced to hand over his clothing and other property, Jens was given a grey tracksuit and locked in a cell without the right to inform his mother or anyone else. By chance a friend of his had witnessed the arrest and hurried to tell her, which gave her time to remove a letter and the Charter of Human Rights from his room just before a Stasi search team arrived to give it a thorough going-over.
Interrogations began the next day, the first lasting eight hours without interruption. The interrogators noted that their prisoner did not seem frightened, but he had no way of knowing that his father, who worked as a conductor on trains travelling between the GDR and the Bundesrepublik, had volunteered several years before to act as a Stasi IM with the code name ‘Schorsch’, reporting principally on passengers’ suspicious behaviour aboard the trains. On 10 September, ‘Schorsch’ reported to his case officer that he had had little contact with his son since divorcing his wife the previous year and only learned about the exit visa application from a neighbour on 2 September. Further, he reported that a friend of his son had also made an application, the two young men intending to stay with the friend’s father in West Berlin.
The paranoia intensified. On 23 September, with Baumann Junior still under interrogation, his father was ordered to report to a safe house, where he made a statement, confirmed in a written report, that he had distanced himself from his son since the divorce, and declared that his ex-wife was wholly to blame for the deviant behaviour. The mood of ‘Schorsch’ at the meeting was noted by his case officer as ‘disturbed’. A further meeting between the two men took place in October, at which ‘Schorsch’ furnished further information. His son was then still undergoing interrogation. The trial opened on 12 November after two months’ solitary confinement. The defending lawyer had never met his client before arriving in court, had no knowledge of the ‘case’ against him and was not allowed to see the record of interrogation. After an adjournment of two days, the presiding judge sentenced ‘the accused for traitorous activity to imprisonment for one year and eight months’. As a concession, which was not always granted in the GDR, the time spent under interrogation was to count towards the sentence. Conditions in the hard-regime long-term prison at Cottbus, where Jens was to serve his time, were extremely unpleasant, but this did not deter him from writing to the MfS district office in Potsdam to reinstate his exit visa application. As reason, he cited his total lack of prospects in the GDR after this imprisonment.
In the spring of 1983 a young man, just released from Cottbus prison, knocked on Frau Baumann’s door with a letter from her son, from which she learned that Jens intended doing everything in his power to leave the GDR and settle in the Bundesrepublik after his release. Not knowing that her ex-husband was an informer, she passed this news on to him, which enabled ‘Schorsch’ to update his case officer and give a full description of the young man who had brought the illicit letter.
With a father like that, young Baumann needed no enemies. Fortunately his name was included in a list of detainees bought by the Bundesrepublik and transferred there on 24 August 1983, to begin life anew as a swimming instructor in Berlin-Tempelhof with a start-up award of DM 2,000 from the West Berlin Senate. His father continued to report what he learned of his son through his ex-wife, making a total of eight clandestine meetings with his case officer tha
t year and twenty-two other reports. He was, however, about to get his comeuppance. With a son now living in West Berlin, ‘Schorsch’ was forbidden to work on railway trains that crossed the frontier and visits to his own elderly father in Heidelberg were also forbidden. Yet as late as 15 November 1989 – six days after the flood of people just walking through the Wall checkpoints in Berlin, IM ‘Schorsch’ met a new case officer and declared his willingness to continue spying for the Stasi.7
In 1983 Markus Riemann was twenty-two years old. As the son of a pastor, he and his four sisters had grown up in a loving and intellectually stimulating home, the only oddity being that Church policy required Pastor Riemann to move to a new parish every few years. Because of the discrimination against religious households, Markus was not able to attend university and had to earn a living as a gardener in Havelstadt, a suburb of Potsdam. Sharing a run-down flat in Potsdam with his girlfriend, he decided to form a circle of similarly environmentally conscious friends, who were worried at the nationwide pollution and damage to the environment caused by the GDR’s mining and burning of lignite.
The British tradition of using fir trees as Christmas decoration is due to Prince Albert importing the idea when married to Queen Victoria. In Germany, it was normal for every church to have a fir tree on display at Christmas. One of Markus’s friends suggested that a way of making other people aware of the damage to the GDR’s forests from acid rain would be to collect some conifers from near the Czech border, where whole swathes of forest had been poisoned by industrial pollution. Five of the group set off to collect some dead spruces from there after arranging to spend the night in the house of a local pastor in the region. The pastor’s telephone line was routinely tapped by the Stasi, with the result that, when they stepped off the train in Potsdam on their return, each holding a brown fir tree 1.5m high, they were arrested and interrogated all night long on the grounds that exposing environmental damage was ‘hostile to government policy’.
The whole impressive might of the MfS swung into action, including search warrants and house searches. In Markus’s flat, important evidence was seized: his record collection, an empty loose-leaf binder, an address list, photographs, letters and even empty envelopes and his copy of the New Testament. Meanwhile several pastors went together to the Town Hall to protest against the arrest of the five youngsters, informing the official in charge of ‘Church affairs’ there that at the Midnight Mass the congregations would be told, not just the familiar Christmas story, but also about the arrests. The Potsdam Five were then released, but the dead spruces were confiscated as ‘evidence’. The story did not end there, however, because fines were imposed on Markus and two of the other boys totalling 2,000 Marks for ‘failing to respect public order in that on 17 December with intent to disturb people they conspired to bring five environmentally damaged trees [to Potsdam] and display them with refuse in Potsdam churches’.8
Also in Potsdam, the technical college for training nurses and social workers was kept under particularly close scrutiny although the students were not rebellious intellectuals but ordinary kids seeking low-level professional qualifications. In September 1985 Carola Dessow began her studies there after failing an academic course at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Her divorced mother worked as a nurse in Leipzig, and this may have influenced her choice of back-up studies. Carola already had some black marks in her Stasi file, having voiced her opinions in Berlin about peace and disarmament, and frequented performances by young folk singers whose compositions touched on these issues. Unknown to the students at the technical college, the deputy principal and Carola’s class teacher were both IMs, who reported that she continued voicing opinions that did not conform with official policy.
Among her crimes they reported were failing to read the SED newspaper, Neues Deutschland, refusing to learn to shoot an air gun in sport lessons and alleging that the GDR was not a democracy. A heavyweight Stasi operation was mounted to trap this student nurse, who was considered to be infecting the student mass. This included co-opting another girl student to report on her circle of friends. On 29 March 1986 when all the students were in the classrooms a fire brigade survey of the student accommodation was conducted, the ‘firemen’ being Department XX Stasi officers in borrowed uniforms. The building was closed to the public, including students, and a janitor who was an IM opened the door of Carola’s room with a pass key. Photographs were made of handwritten and typewritten papers found among her possessions, including a draft ‘letter to the government of the GDR’.
At that time when mechanical typewriters were used, the Stasi had an entire department that held specimens of text produced by every typewriter in the GDR, each of which had minor irregularities, such as a particular letter microscopically higher or lower than the others. Thus, any typewritten dissident leaflets could swiftly be traced to their author. Such a person was immediately liable to a prison sentence of not less than two years under sections 219 and 220 of ‘the GDR law book’. It was not enough to arrest and imprison Carola, because the MfS wanted to catch all her ‘fellow conspirators’. An additional IM was therefore found among the student nurses to join her circle of friends and report from the inside. It was easier said than done because Carola was wary of anyone trying to do this. The Stasi captain in Dept XX who was in charge of the operation noted in his ‘Appreciation of the Working Plan’ in August 1986 that the several IMs watching Carola had been unsuccessful in ‘penetrating her circle’. Checks were run on all Carola’s friends in Leipzig, Potsdam and elsewhere, in case any of them had requested an exit visa.
At the start of the autumn term of Carola’s second year, a theatre group was formed in the technical college and a new IM was drafted in for this high-priority operation from the Potsdam film school, in the hope of getting close to her. In January another clandestine search was made of Carola’s room. The incriminating papers were still in her locker with new ones on the subject of Chernobyl. The deputy principal of the school was ‘informed of this by a student’ and a four-page plan of operation drawn up. At 7.30 a.m. on 22 January the student IM telephoned the Stasi district office to confirm that Carola was in class. The janitor and an MfS senior lieutenant entered her room and checked that the incriminating papers were still there.
Twenty minutes later the deputy principal took Carola from the classroom and accompanied her to her room, where the papers were ‘discovered’ and notification was immediately sent to the Ministry for Health Education, the SED district office in Potsdam and the college administration. Carola was taken in for questioning and, on the following day, a report on her case marked Urgent was sent by teleprinter to the head office of Department XX. But this was accompanied by the appalling news that the student body and the majority of the teaching personnel did not agree Carola should be suspended from the college, nor arrested. Rather, she should ‘voluntarily’ end her studies. And that, in short, is what happened. On 19 March 1987 she packed her remaining belongings and left the college.9
Hers was the good fortune to be found out late in the Stasi years, and thus avoid serving several years in prison, which would earlier have been the case. Her punishment was therefore to be denied any further education.
It is a measurement of SED paranoia that the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had been organising public demonstrations against government policy in Great Britain for forty years when the campaign against Carola Dessow caused much midnight oil to be burned in Stasi offices and many hundreds of man-hours to be wasted on this one futile ‘operation’, typical of tens of thousands of similar operations in the GDR, most of which ended more tragically for the Stasi’s targets, young and old. Among the victims were the punk rockers and their male and female fans in the GDR, who boldly but ill-advisedly displayed their dyed hair, shaven heads and body-piercing to the public gaze, making themselves natural targets for random round-ups by the Volkspolizei, the Stasi and even the Kriminalpolizei. Their very existence was taken as unlawful criticism of the regime and, when th
ey exacerbated this by flying paper aeroplanes bearing punk slogans or setting up an improvised pirate radio transmitter with very limited range to broadcast their music on a beach, for example, the full force of the GDR law was brought to bear on them. The GDR was governed by miserable old men and nowhere was this made more plain than in the Stasi’s war on youth.
Notes
1. Ironically, the author was imprisoned for the crime of illegale Eintritt – illegal entry into the GDR
2. A. Funder, Stasiland, London, Granta 2004
3. Ibid, pp. 15−32
4. G. Schnell, ’Das Lindenhotel’ Berichte aus dem Potsdamer Geheimdienstgefängnis, Berlin, Links Verlag 2007
5. G. Schnell, Jugend im Vizier der Stasi, Potsdam, Brandenburgische Landeszentrale, 2001
6. K. Kassabova, Street without a Name, London, Portobello Books 2008, pp. 258–9
7. Schnell, Jugend, pp. 40–6
8. Ibid, pp. 47−50
9. Ibid, pp. 51−7
7
LIES, SPIES AND MORE SPIES
By the beginning of 1945 a large proportion of Hitler’s millions of men in uniform were not ethnic Germans. They included Orthodox Russians and Ukrainians, Catholic Poles and Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs from India, Belgians, Frenchmen, Scandinavians and even Central Asian tribesmen who could speak no European language. Although multi-ethnic recruitment into the Waffen-SS made the numbers look good on paper, it was obvious to all Hitler’s senior officers that they could not win the war because it was impossible to replace the constantly escalating losses of men and materiel. The Nazi state imploded with its cities and factories flattened by ever-larger formations of bombers causing death and destruction by day and night, and its armed forces were trapped between the Soviet armies advancing inexorably on the eastern front and Allied ground forces driving in from the West. While the Western leaders were concentrating on winning the war against the Axis powers, Soviet supreme Josef Stalin was busily planning his strategy for the post-war world.