Iron Curtain

by Anne Applebaum

  The legal basis for such arrests was order 00315 of the Soviet Military Administration, issued on April 18, 1945. This edict called for the immediate internment, without prior investigation, of “spies, saboteurs, terrorists, activists of the Nazi party” as well as people maintaining “illegal” print and broadcasting devices, people with weapons, and former members of the German civil administration. The order resembled the regulations put in place in the other Allied occupation zones, where “active” Nazis were also interrogated on a massive scale.54 The difference between the Soviet zone and other zones was one of degree: in practice, the Soviet order made it possible to arrest almost anyone who had held any position of authority, whether or not he or she had been a Nazi. Policemen, town mayors, businesspeople, and prosperous farmers all qualified on the grounds that they could not have been so successful unless they had collaborated.

  By the time of the Potsdam Conference at the beginning of August, the definition of who could be interned had grown even broader. In an ugly Hohenzollern palace surrounded by green parkland, the Allies—Stalin and now Harry Truman and Clement Attlee (following Roosevelt’s death and Churchill’s electoral defeat)—issued a new declaration stating that “Nazi leaders, influential Nazi supporters and high officials of Nazi organizations and institutions and any other persons dangerous to the occupation or its objectives shall be arrested and interned” (my italics).55 For the USSR this was an ideal formulation: “Any other persons dangerous to the occupation or its objectives” is a very broad category indeed, and it could be stretched to include anyone whom the NKVD disliked for any reason.

  The Red Army duly set up military tribunals, courts without lawyers or witnesses, which continued for several years. These were completely separate from the Nuremberg trials, which were created jointly by all of the Allies to try the most high-ranking Nazi leaders, and they had nothing to do with international law. Convictions were sometimes made on the basis of Article 58 of the Soviet criminal code, the statute that was used to arrest political prisoners in the Soviet Union and that had no relation of any kind to German law either. Sentences were sometimes translated into German but written out in Cyrillic, making them impossible for the accused to read. Prisoners were sometimes forced, after severe beatings and other kinds of torture, to sign documents they couldn’t understand. Wolfgang Lehmann, aged fifteen, signed a document stating that he had blown up two trucks, though he didn’t know it at the time. Other trials were held in Moscow, where prisoners were convicted in absentia by Soviet judges. Weeks later, they would learn what had happened.56

  Some of those arrested really had been Nazis, though not necessarily important Nazis. Little attempt was made to separate real criminals from small-time bureaucrats or opportunists. But in addition to the Nazis, the arrests soon swept up thousands of people too young to have been Nazis—Manfred Papsdorf was arrested at thirteen—or many who, like the teenagers of Mittweida, were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.57 A few were arrested because their enthusiasm for liberation was too great. Gisela Gneist was fifteen years old in 1945 and transfixed by the idea of democracy, a word she heard frequently on American Armed Forces Radio. Gneist lived in Wittenberg and was resentful of the Soviet soldiers there, some of whom had created a brothel on the top floor of her apartment block. She wanted something better, and along with some other teenagers she created a “political party,” complete with its own amateurish secret codes. They had no idea of the potential danger, and they didn’t have much of an ideology. “My idea of freedom,” she remembered, “was that people should be able to speak freely. I didn’t know what communism was, had never really heard of it.”58

  Gneist was arrested in December 1945, along with two dozen of her fellow “party members,” all teenagers. She was put in a “cell without windows” along with twenty other women, some of whom were her schoolmates. The toilet was a milk bottle. There were bugs everywhere, and lice. A Soviet officer interrogated her in Russian for many days running, in the presence of a barely competent translator. He also beat her on the back and on the legs until the blood ran. Gneist, not yet sixteen, eventually confessed: she admitted she had been part of a “counterrevolutionary organization.” A military tribunal found her guilty in January 1946 and sentenced her, just like a real war criminal, to incarceration in Sachsenhausen.59

  Surprising though it will seem to those unfamiliar with this odd twist of history, Sachsenhausen, a notorious Nazi concentration camp, underwent a metamorphosis after the war and lived a second life, as did the equally notorious concentration camp at Buchenwald. The American troops who liberated Buchenwald in April 1945 had forced the leading citizens of Weimar to walk around the camp’s barracks and to witness the starving survivors, the mass graves, and the corpses stacked like firewood beside them. Four months later, the Soviet troops who subsequently took control of the Weimar region had once again installed prisoners in those same barracks, and eventually buried them in similar mass graves. They followed the same practice in many places. Auschwitz was another one of many labor camps in Poland also to be reused in some manner after the war.60

  The Russians renamed Buchenwald Special Camp Number Two, and Sachsenhausen became Special Camp Number Seven.61 In total there would be ten such camps built or rebuilt in Soviet-occupied Germany, along with several prisons and other less formal places of incarceration. These were not German communist camps but rather Soviet camps. The NKVD’s central Gulag administration controlled all of them directly from Moscow, in some instances down to the last detail. The NKVD sent instructions from Moscow on how to celebrate the May 1 holiday in its German camps, for example, and carefully monitored the “political-moral” condition of the guards.62 All of the senior camp commanders were Soviet military personnel, although some had German staff too, and the camps were laid out according to Soviet designs. An inhabitant of Kolyma or Vorkuta would have felt immediately at home.

  At the same time, the German special camps were not labor camps of the kind that the NKVD ran in the Soviet Union itself. They were not attached to factories or building projects, as Soviet camps usually were, and prisoners did not go out to work. On the contrary, survivors often describe the excruciating boredom of being forbidden to work, forbidden to leave their barracks, forbidden to walk or move. In the Ketschendorf camp, inmates begged to work in the kitchens so as to have some kind of activity (and of course to have access to more food).63 In Sachsenhausen there were two zones, in only one of which people were allowed to work. Prisoners much preferred that one.64

  The special camps were not death camps of the kind that the Nazis had constructed either. There were no gas chambers, and prisoners were not sent to Sachsenhausen to be immediately killed. But they were extraordinarily lethal nonetheless. Of some 150,000 people who were incarcerated in NKVD camps in eastern Germany between 1945 and 1953—of which 120,000 were Germans and 30,000 were Soviet citizens—about a third died from starvation and illness.65 Prisoners were fed wet, black bread and cabbage soup so bad that Lehmann, who was later sent to the Gulag, remembered that “in Siberia the food was better and more regular.”66 There were no medicines and no doctors. Lice and vermin meant that disease spread quickly. In the winter of 1945–46, it was so cold that the prisoners in the women’s zone in Sachsenhausen burned bed slats to keep warm.67 As was the case in so many Soviet penal institutions, prisoners did not die because they were murdered but because they were neglected, ignored, and sometimes literally forgotten.

  The explicit goal of the Soviet special camps in eastern Germany was not labor or murder but isolation: the special camps were meant to cut dubious people off from the rest of society, at least until the new Soviet occupiers had got their bearings. They were preventative rather than punitive, designed primarily to quarantine people who might oppose the system, not to incarcerate people who had already done so. In the Soviet Gulag some contact with the outside world was possible, and inmates could even sometimes receive visitors. By contrast
, during the first three years of the existence of the postwar German camps, prisoners could not send or receive letters, and they had no news from the outside world whatsoever. In many cases, their families did not know what had happened to them or where they were. They had simply disappeared.

  Over time, conditions did improve, in part thanks to pressure from outside. The sudden disappearance of so many young people made family members frantic, and they bombarded officials with requests for information. German authorities were usually of no help. In 1947, a local official advised family members in Thuringia that they “might be able to learn more from the Russian prosecutor in Weimar.”68 Soviet officials in turn passed such requests up the chain of command and, in the general chaos, people got lost. One German student disappeared in 1945 and was finally “found” by his parents only in 1952.69 That was four years after the Soviet military administration in Germany had agreed to allow prisoners to notify their family members of their locations.70 In that same year, the NKVD had also increased the food allowances for the camps, in order to reduce the high death rate and to mollify the East German leaders who were petitioning the Soviet authorities for change.71

  The arrests, along with the prolonged detention of Wehrmacht soldiers in the Soviet Union (some would remain there until the 1950s), became a major source of friction between the public and the new authorities. But they also helped create a new set of standards for public behavior. Most of the newly liberated Germans were not communists and did not know what to expect from the Soviet occupation forces. The arrest and incarceration of thousands of young people on the slightest suspicion of any form of “anti-Soviet” politics immediately set the tone for others. It was a first lesson, for many, on the need to censor oneself in public. If a teenager like Gisela Gneist could be arrested for talking about democracy, then the penalty for more serious political involvement would obviously be much higher.

  Former prisoners and their families were even more afraid. After their release, they rarely spoke about what had happened to them. Lehmann, who had been in the Ketschendorf camp in Germany as well as the Soviet Gulag, didn’t tell his wife about either until after 1989.72 The use of selective violence and the creation of camps for potential enemies of the regime were also part of a broader Soviet policy. The Red Army and the NKVD knew that in societies as uncertain and unstable as those of postwar Eastern Europe, mass arrests could backfire. But arrests carefully targeted at outspoken people could have a wider echo: if you arrest one such person, ten more will be frightened.

  The Russians who arrived in Budapest in January 1945 knew little about the nation whose capital they had just conquered. Most assumed they had arrived in a country peopled entirely by Nazi collaborators—Hungary had been a German ally during the invasion of the USSR—and they were sometimes incredulous to find themselves treated as liberators. As in Germany, they were under orders to arrest all of the fascists they could identify. But whereas in Germany they had looked for Werewolves and in Poland they tracked down the Home Army, in Hungary they seemed unsure of how, exactly, a fascist might be identified.

  As a result, the first arrests in Hungary were often arbitrary. Men were stopped on the street, told they would be taken away to do “a little work”—malenkaya rabota in Russian, a phrase that became Hungarianized as málenkij robot—and marched off in convoys. They would then disappear deep into the Soviet Union and not return for many years. At the very beginning, it seemed almost anyone would suffice. An eyewitness from a town in eastern Hungary remembered that within days of entering his town, soldiers began collecting people: “Not only men but also children, sixteen- to seventeen-year-old kids and even a thirteen-year-old. No matter how we cried and begged, they did not react, just held their guns and told everyone to get out of the houses with sometimes nothing on, no clothes, no food, just the way they were there … We did not know where they were taken, they were just saying málenkij robot, málenkij robot.”73

  Some were considered suspicious because they appeared to be wealthy or because they owned books. George Bien, then aged sixteen, was arrested along with his father because he owned a shortwave radio. He was interrogated as a spy, forced to confess, and made to sign a thirty-page Russian document, of which he did not understand a single word. Bien eventually wound up in the camps of Kolyma, returning home only in 1955.74

  Soviet troops also seemed to be under orders to look for Germans, who they had been informed would be quite numerous. In practice, this meant that people with German-sounding names (very common in the former Hapsburg realms) were immediately treated as war criminals. József Révai, who was to become one of the most important Hungarian communists, complained to Rákosi in early January that Russian soldiers seemed to have “fixed quotas” they had to fulfill, and that they took as Germans “people who did not speak a word of German—people who were proven antifascists, had been interned.”75 The result of these policies was that somewhere between 140,000 and 200,000 Hungarians were arrested and deported to the USSR after 1945. Most of them wound up in the camps of the Gulag.76

  Many remained in Hungary as well. Internment—imprisonment without trial—had become common in Hungary in the late 1930s, but now it was expanded. “People’s courts” were created to try, sentence, and in some cases execute Nazi collaborators. A few of these trials were made into major public events, in the hope that they would educate Hungarians about the crimes of the past. Even at the time many observed that ordinary Hungarians mostly dismissed them as “victors’ justice.” A few years later, some of the verdicts would be overturned, on the grounds that it was time to drop the “retaliatory character of the punishments.”77

  Nor were they perceived as fair. Although decisions about internment and trials were nominally under Hungarian control, it was widely assumed that the NKVD influenced the courts. A. M. Belyanov, the Soviet official delegated to oversee security matters in Hungary, at one point berated a Hungarian politician about the slow pace of trials: “He urged that the people’s tribunals work faster, he criticized them for negotiating and talking too much. He wanted them to announce the verdict right after the prosecution speech. I told him that we had studied the Soviet justice system and there, in political cases, witnesses are heard publicly at the court. He smiled unwillingly and showed me his big yellow teeth, which were like those of a tiger …”78 The Red Army also held its own trials near Vienna, in an elegant villa in the resort town of Baden. There was no pretense about Hungarian sovereignty there: Soviet military tribunals simply convicted Hungarians of political crimes under Article 58 of the Soviet criminal code, just as in Germany.79

  The number of the accused was very high, and the nature of the charges very broad. A series of secret decrees had instructed the new Hungarian police forces to arrest, among others, former members of extreme right movements, including the fascist Arrow Cross movement, which had ruled Hungary during the final days of the war, from October 1944 until March 1945; military officers who had served under Admiral Horthy, Hungary’s interwar authoritarian leader, from 1920 until the Arrow Cross takeover; and also pub owners, tobacconists, barbers, and all of those who—in another hopelessly broad formulation—“due to their regular contacts with the public were the primary disseminators of fascist propaganda” (my italics). In practice, anyone who had ever worked for or praised any of the prewar governments, party leaders, or politicians was at risk. The NKVD, along with the new security police, also acquired lists of young people who had been members of the levente, Admiral Horthy’s paramilitary youth organization, and began tracking them down, just as they had tracked down Hitler Youth and alleged Werewolves in Germany. In total, Hungarian and Soviet security police interned some 40,000 Hungarians between 1945 and 1949. Around Budapest alone, the new regime built sixteen internment camps with a capacity to contain up to 23,000 prisoners.80

  Not all of those arrested had collaborated with the Nazis. On the contrary, from the moment of the Red Army’s entry into Hungary, the new Hungarian secret police�
�backed, of course, by the Hungarian communist party and its Soviet mentors—began to seek out and identify a different sort of “fascist” as well. Although the Hungarian wartime underground was never as large or as well organized as its Polish equivalent, there had been cells of anti-German opposition even at the highest levels of society. Immediately after the war’s end (much earlier than Hungarian chronology usually has it) the NKVD and the Hungarian secret police made these antifascists into a target. They were too independent, they believed in national sovereignty, and they knew how to create clandestine organizations. Many supported the Smallholders’ Party, which played a large role in the provisional government and did actually win elections in 1945.

  In a truly democratic postwar Eastern Europe, they would, like the Polish Home Army, have become the political elite. But even before the Hungarian government was fully under communist control, former members of the anti-German resistance knew they were under surveillance. István Szent-Miklósy, a member of one such secret grouping, later wrote that he and his friends “felt somehow hunted but could not give any tangible reason” immediately after the war’s end. Unlike their Polish counterparts, these were not armed partisans: Szent-Miklósy’s group was, he wrote, “without formal structure, without lists of names, without pledges, emblems or identity cards, without clearly delineated rules, without even an encompassing philosophy.”81 Many had been part of earlier groups such as the Hungarian Community, an antifascist (and also anti-Semitic) secret society, or the wartime Hungarian Independence Movement, which was also more of an anti-German discussion circle than a full-fledged resistance organization. Some of the group were among the founding members of the postwar Smallholders’ Party, and as such were trying to cooperate with a regime they thought might become a democracy. Eventually they were hardly more than a group of friends who were vaguely anti-Soviet and who met in one another’s apartments to exchange concerns.