They were harassed and targeted by The Firm. They lost their jobs. Stasi agents did their best to break up the Poppes’ marriage and turn their son Jonas against them. A Stasi report explained how they could achieve their objective:To encourage UP in her . . . intention to separate from her husband . . . [we should] suggest that if she were to drop all her public activities and stop co-operating with the enemy she might be able to embark on a programme of advanced study . . . She should be encouraged to believe that if she separates from her husband she will be financially secure . . . The travel ban [against her] could be eased. To exacerbate the marriage crisis, contact person ‘Harold’ will be introduced to Mrs Poppe with the aim of establishing an intimate relationship . . . Gerd Poppe must be prevented from improving his professional and social prospects. Through a campaign of ‘anonymous’ letters he is to be discriminated against in the workplace . . . The headmistress of School 15 in Prenzlauer Berg is to exert a positive influence over Jonas Poppe. The success of a socialist education will demonstrate, within their own family, the uselessness of their hostile actions.
Poppe, once a leading figure at a scientific research institute, found a job as a swimming pool attendant.4
The most unsettling was perhaps the case of Vera Lengsfeld. Her father had been a Stasi officer from its inception after the war. Throughout her youth she was a loyal and obedient nomenklatura child, but later she rebelled. She became a member of the Communist Party but was expelled in 1982 when she became a Christian convert. She joined a peace group linked to the Lutheran Church, which began to protest against nuclear missiles based in Europe - including the presence in the GDR of Soviet missiles. She was constantly watched, jailed for brief periods and was fired from her job as a teacher at a Berlin social research academy. Sixty Stasi officers were on permanent assignment to keep tabs on her and report on her every move. The busiest of them turned out to be her husband, the mathematician Knud Wollenberger, father of her two sons, who to all intents and purposes appeared to be a loving companion and a doting parent. He reported to his Stasi handler under the codename ‘Daniel’. He passed on every detail of her life, their intimate moments and pillow talk, her every headache, shopping trip, bad mood, emotional vulnerability and telephone call. Wollenberger met, courted and married her on orders from the Stasi. ‘The marriage was false from the start,’ she said. ‘Our home life, everything . . . was a lie.’ It was ‘unimaginable’ that a man could marry a woman just to spy on her and ‘still more incomprehensible that he could father children in the process’.5
When she found out ‘it was as if one had died for a moment and then returned to life . . . the surprising thing was that the reports were written as if about a stranger, not a wife . . . To him I was an enemy of the State and he had done everything, to fight me, the enemy.’ He said that he had been a loyal citizen of the GDR and when the Stasi asked him to help them, ‘I felt I couldn’t say no’. He said that when he went to work from home it was ‘like going through a mirror and being in a totally different world’.h6
Many thousands of East Germans felt they could not refuse what the Stasi asked of them. Of course the fattest files were on writers, artists, journalists and people married to foreigners - including from Eastern bloc countries. But they were interested in performers of all kinds - sportsmen and -women who went abroad for international competitions, which were extremely important for the rulers’ prestige. Stasi officers seemed obsessively interested - probably because most of them were men - in the Miss GDR beauty contests. All the competitors were routinely spied on. The extent to which people were willing to denounce their neighbours is unnerving. There are many reports from informers with acquaintances whose daughters were seen wearing a cross on a chain around their necks, or whose sons cut their hair in a style that ‘seemed to be punk’. As time went on the regime began to be seriously worried by rebellious youth and, like the neighbouring Czechs, began mounting campaigns against rock music. Informers reported on contacts who they had observed, or suspected, had received mail from Drüben - ‘over there’ (meaning West Germany).
Mielke had been an intelligence agent for more than fifty years. A street thug who had fought for the Communists against the Nazis in the 1920s, the Soviets spirited him out of Germany to Moscow in 1931 after he had murdered two policemen and loudly boasted of the achievement one night in a Berlin bar. He became a full-time KGB officer. In the Spanish Civil War he earned medals not, as a former colleague said, ‘for fighting the fascists, but for killing Trotskyites and anarchists’. Immediately after the Russians liberated Berlin, he was sent to help establish a ‘sword and shield’ for the Party in East Germany. Mielke was convinced that he ran the most efficient spying organisation in the Communist world and he had set opinions about intelligence work. The most effective spies, he maintained, were simply those who had the most contact with the public. The Stasi cultivated tram conductors, cleaning women, doctors and nurses. Teachers, for example, were particularly good at identifying children whose families watched Western television - those people who Mielke said ‘emigrated to another country at eight o’clock in the evening’. It was permitted to watch Western broadcasts from the late 1970s. In fact the regime tolerated it as a form of nightly political amnesia. But nonetheless the Stasi wanted to know about these watching habits. Informers did not receive much payment - approximately 400 East Marks, around 10 per cent of the average wage. Most did not do it for the money, but from a desire for approval, the hope of better job prospects or a place for a relative’s son or daughter at a better university. As the Stasi became a state within the state, spies spied on other spies. And Mielke kept extensive files on all his fellow Communist oligarchs in the GDR - including his long-time colleague Erich Honecker, who the Stasi chief knew had plenty of secrets to conceal.7
One writer described the Stasi as a state of mind. It is a powerful idea to describe the condition of life in a police state. But Berliners had no need for metaphor. They had the Wall. It was the concrete symbol that East Germans - East Europeans - were imprisoned in an arbitrarily divided country. The Wall separated families, destroyed dreams and almost extinguished hopes. The Wall turned Berlin into an unreal city where major through routes suddenly became dead ends, solely because of politics. If you tried to leave the wrong way you could die - 119 people were killed trying to jump it, climb it, tunnel under it or fly over it. The first obstacle was a three-metre-high concrete wall - the ‘hinterland fence’. Then a two-metre-high ‘signal fence’ of barbed wire and steel mesh which triggered an alarm if touched and, along some stretches, activated floodlights. Anyone who made it through those defences had to cover ground full of hidden devices such as steel bars in the earth covered with metal spikes. Escapees by now would almost certainly have been spotted by guards from observation towers positioned - at the Berlin section of the border - every two hundred metres or so. The next barrier was the so-called ‘death strip’, a six-metre area covered with sand (along which footprints could easily be seen) and patrolled by Stasi-trained dogs. Finally came the three-and-a-half-metre-high Grenzwall 76 (named after the year it was fortified) which was topped by razor wire and a sewer pipe designed to stop anyone trying to climb from getting a good grip. There was no sense of logic to it. The Wall did not divide districts, but often sections of streets. It was the result, simply, of where Russian troops had reached on the day fighting ceased on 6 May 1945. At night on one side the streets were lit by eerie searchlights. It was a physical manifestation of a few people’s fear and paranoia.
There had been, in effect, an open border in Germany after the two sides were officially divided in October 1949, when the GDR came into being. In Berlin, people could come and go as they pleased. Many lived on one side and worked on the other, using the U-Bahn metro system and S-Bahn overground rail network to travel around the city. They had to negotiate various checkpoints, where Eastern border guards would check travellers’ papers. But they were allowed to pass unhindered. Over time increasing n
umbers were leaving the East as they saw what was happening. The regime was becoming more authoritarian, particularly after June 1953 when a strike in a few factories turned into anti-government riots that were suppressed by Soviet tanks. The East was fast becoming relatively poorer, more regimented, greyer, duller, less free compared to West Germany. As the Cold War became icier, people voted with their feet - the only way they were allowed to vote. By 1961 the exodus was reaching crisis proportions. From 1955 around 20,000 people a month were leaving and heading to West Germany, where they were granted instant citizenship. The Federal Republic did not recognise the existence of the GDR. Now about 30,000 people a week were trying to emigrate and the austere Stalinist in charge of the East German regime, Walter Ulbricht, decided something had to be done. At first the Soviets were firmly against the idea of sealing the borders, and particularly opposed to the plan to build a Wall. They were worried about how the West would react. But Ulbricht finally convinced his masters in Moscow that it was necessary for the very existence of the state - and he was almost certainly right. More than three million people had fled the GDR over the last dozen years, over a sixth of the population. Half were under twenty-five, well educated, the brightest and best in the nation.
When Khrushchev assured himself that the US would do no more than complain about the construction of a Wall, he reluctantly gave his approval. Ulbricht put his protégé and right-hand man, Erich Honecker, in charge of the highly secret Operation Rose. It was the younger man who coined the phrase ‘Anti-fascist protection barrier’ to describe the Wall and from then on, in public at least, he never called it anything else. It was planned with the utmost secrecy - even half the East German leadership was not told the details. Building began, suddenly, overnight, on the weekend of 12-13 August 1961 and proceeded with supreme efficiency. In central Berlin, for several hundred metres around Checkpoint Charlie, the barrier which divided the Soviet and American sectors of the city, workers toiled around the clock and the job was finished within three days. The logic of Communist rule had been established with a powerful and ugly symbol - and the career of Erich Honecker was inextricably linked to its concrete foundations.
Erich Honecker, said a one-time comrade and former colleague in the East German leadership, Wolfgang Leonhard,had the main characteristic . . . essential for success as a young functionary: absolute average intelligence. In a Communist Party on the Stalinist model, you have to have a good memory and an ability to absorb reams of resolutions and turn them into directives, so you need a basic intelligence. You can’t be plain dumb, as was required under the Nazis, because the ideology is much more complicated. But you can’t be too intelligent, because people of above average intelligence have a tendency to challenge the arcana and spot the flaws . . . which can make them disobedient. When the system is in crisis the bright people come to the fore: Kádár in Hungary, Dubek in Czechoslovakia, Gorbachev . . . But during normal times, it is the average who rule: the Ulbrichts, the Honeckers. The system demands them.8
The central fact of Honecker’s life was the ten years he spent in a Nazi prison. That formed him as much as his childhood in the Saarland, the border area with France, where, the fourth child of six, he had a hard upbringing. His coal-miner father, Wilhelm - himself a militant leftist - was out of work much of the time and the family was often near to starvation. He was saved by the Young Spartacists, the youth wing of the Communist Party, which took him under its wing, gave him a cause to believe in and in 1930, when Honecker was eighteen, sent him to Moscow for further education at the Lenin School. Five years later he was ordered back to Germany undercover to set up an office in Berlin and act as an aide to the head of the Young Communists, Bruno Baum. His first mission ended in lamentable failure and Honecker was shown up as anything but a hero. Though he stated later as a Party chieftain after the war that these ‘were days of fortitude’ and he never flinched from his Communist ideals, the facts tell a different story. He was arrested in a farcical manner. Soon after he arrived in Berlin he arranged to meet a courier from Moscow who was to hand over some money and confidential documents. He realised after the meeting that he was being followed, panicked, and ran away leaving the documents and incriminating evidence behind. He was picked up by the police the next day. Under interrogation, he gave them detailed information about the Communist underground in Berlin, including the names of leaders like Baum, who was jailed, later went to Auschwitz, but survived to play a leading part in the Ulbricht regime in East Germany. The Russian courier, Sarah Fodorova, suffered ghastly torture but gave nothing away.
The decade in Brandenburg Prison turned an already hard man into granite. After the war his record was forgiven by the Soviets - many activists had done far worse things. He made himself useful to Ulbricht, whom Stalin installed as the satrap in his German fiefdom. Ulbricht liked Honecker’s energy and he was groomed by the leader as his eventual successor. He was head of the Communist Youth wing until he was into his forties, then rose through the Party machine. When Ulbricht was removed - partly with the help of Honecker and other officials wielding an axe - he slithered into the leader’s chair, with the approval of Moscow.
A stern, unsmiling and unbending man with a cold, stand-offish demeanour, he liked the company of women. In matters of sex Honecker was not the pillar of Bolshevik rectitude expected of a high-ranking and high-flying Party apparatchik. He was married three times, though his official biography is curiously vague about his wives. His first marriage, to Lottie Grunel immediately after the war, was never mentioned in the Party CV at all - possibly because she was politically suspect as the daughter of a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. She had a mental breakdown and died in 1946. He was coy about the dates of his second marriage, to Edith Baumann, which he remarked once happened ‘around 1948, as far as I remember’. He did not say when he was divorced. His third wife was the politically ambitious, shrill Margot Feist, who became a top Party functionary in her own right. The Education Minister for many years, she was as stern as he was and known throughout the country, even by those who worked for her, as The Witch or The Lilac Dragon.9
Several senior Party chiefs knew of Honecker’s philanderings. ‘He had quite a taste for blonde girls in blue uniforms,’ the long-serving Berlin Party chief, Günter Schabowski, revealed. The uniforms were those of the Communist Youth movement. The spy chief Markus Wolf, who ran East Germany’s foreign intelligence service, said that not long before Honecker became supreme leader ‘I once received a report from a puzzled employee . . . who had seen Erich Honecker . . . slipping surreptitiously through the back streets of Berlin after dismissing his driver at dusk. It was clear to me that Honecker must have been visiting a secret girlfriend . . . Once I joked to this effect with Erich Mielke [his boss] saying “well, we hardly have to keep that on the files” and I made to throw away the report. “No, no,” came the reply. “Let me have it. You never know.” It joined other unflattering details of Honecker’s life in [Mielke’s] red boxes.’10
East Germany seemed like the success story of the socialist bloc. There were no food queues and almost no absolute poverty in the mid-1980s. It was an ordered society of reliable workers, living in dreary but functional box-like apartment blocks. Its cradle-to-grave welfare provisions were the envy of the rest of the Soviet empire. There seemed to be little open dissent. The Stasi had eradicated it. From an early age it was instilled into East Germans that they must conform and not stand out in any way that might attract attention. The country seemed to be riding high - especially in sport. The regime spent vast sums on glory at the athletics track, skating rink, ski-jumping slope and swimming pool. In the 1980 Olympic Games the GDR won forty-seven gold medals compared to Britain’s five and France’s six. In the 1984 Winter Olympics, East Germany won nine golds, more than any other nation, beating both the USA and the USSR. Honecker regarded these victories as highly significant. The regime was satisfied that this sporting prowess gave the Communist state legitimacy it might otherwise have lacked. T
here were other important achievements. The standard of education was as high as anywhere in Europe. If anything, the workforce was over-qualified for the menial tasks most people were expected to perform. In 1984 the World Bank reported that the GDR was the world’s twelfth most successful economy and the following year the CIA declared in a top-secret memorandum to President Reagan that East Germany’s GNP was fast approaching the Federal Republic’s.
But it was all a mirage based on a series of elaborate lies. The country was in a terminal crisis forced by foreign debt. Honecker and a few of the very top leadership knew, but continued borrowing and spending regardless, in a state of absolute denial. They wanted to keep the public content with consumer goods and social benefits; they spent twice as much as most of their East European allies on defence and ‘security’ - including the Stasi - and they seemed oblivious of the consequences. One of the Party’s top finance experts, Günter Ehrensperger, was looking at the growing debt problem and went to Honecker to warn of a potentially serious crisis. At that point foreign debt was increasing tenfold in six years. ‘I was summoned to him again that same evening,’ he said. ‘Honecker told me I was immediately to cease working on such calculations and studies. I was to receive no further material . . . and I was to have all the statistical bases in the department destroyed.’ Manfred Uschner, former chief aide to Hermann Axen, a member of the top leadership, said that figures were kept highly confidential, only seen by a few of the elite. When some numbers did come ‘they were presented in an almost unreadable format . . . on purpose’. Quickly all the documents were gathered up and shredded. ‘We had to strain ourselves, and in great haste, to see the magnitude of our indebtedness. Then it became clear to us: the GDR was totally bankrupt and there was no way it could get out of the . . . fatal circle of indebtedness, renewed indebtedness, new credits and the growing burden of interest payments.’11
Revolution 1989 Page 17