Like the Polish UB or the Hungarian ÁVO, the Stasi was modeled closely on the NKVD (which also renamed itself after the war and eventually became known as the KGB), and the departmental structures of all three imitated those of the KGB. But the Stasi mimicked the KGB to an extraordinary degree. German secret policemen used Soviet methods of encoding and ciphering until 1954, and they even learned to sew police files together with thread, as Russian KGB clerks did in Moscow.47 Soviet comrades were consulted on matters such as secret ink and microphotography.48 More importantly, Stasi officers referred to themselves as “Chekists,” after the very first Bolshevik secret police organization, founded in 1918. They also used a symbol very similar to the KGB’s symbol, the sword and shield, and made frequent obesiance to the Soviet “friends” in their own literature.49 An internal Stasi history manual explained that “the Soviet Chekists under the leadership of Lenin and the Soviet communist party created the basic model of socialist state security organs.” All East Germans, the manual continued, knew that “to learn from the Soviet Union means to learn how to win.” Members of the security services knew, in addition, that “to learn from the Soviet Chekists means to learn to disarm even the most sophisticated enemy.”50
Initially the Stasi recruited only from the existing staff of K5 and from communist party cadres. Even so, 88 percent of the initial job candidates were rejected for having relatives in the West, for having spent time abroad, or for having unacceptable political biographies of one kind or another. As elsewhere in the bloc, the recruiters, acting under Soviet advice, favored the young, the uneducated, and the inexperienced over older communists with prewar experience.51 Some were “graduates” of the training and indoctrination programs set up in Soviet POW camps, but many of the first recruits had been teenagers at the end of the war and had no experience at all. One early Stasi recruit describes his colleagues—“our generation”—as “people who had not been involved in the Third Reich, but who had been formed by the war.”52 Many came from underprivileged or “proletarian” backgrounds, and if they had any training at all it was heavily ideological. In 1953, 92 percent were members of the East German communist party. In practice, they would need Soviet instructors and managers for many years.53
Wolfgang Schwanitz, a young law student who came to work for the Stasi in 1951, was, in this sense, a typical recruit. More than fifty years later, he remembered that he “didn’t know anything at all about the security organs, hadn’t heard or read anything about them, and I was curious what was expected from me … I was like a virgin before she committed a sin.” Convinced that it was “necessary to protect the GDR,” he agreed to take the job.54 Over the next few months, Schwanitz underwent intensive training. Almost without exception his trainers were Soviet secret policemen: “They really took us by the hand, the adviser would go through what I had to do during the day, and then in the evening would listen to what I’d done. He would tell me what had gone wrong or sometimes right.” They were taught practical skills—how to recruit an informer, how to set up a safe apartment, how to observe a suspect, how to conduct an investigation—as well as Marxist-Leninist theory and communist party history. Others had less training: another early recruit remembers having been “thrown into the job.” Put in a room with two or three other people—with one motorcycle to share between fifteen men—he was told to go out and organize Stasi cells in various cities. Afterward, the cells were meant to “clone themselves.”55
Schwanitz was flattered by all of this intense attention, as were many others. Günter Tschirschwitz, a young policeman whose family had left Silesia at the end of the war, was only twenty-one when he was told simply to “come to Berlin” for an interview in 1951. There he discovered that he was meeting with officers of the Stasi. His recruiters were older men, prewar communists. “They told me stories from their antifascist past,” he told me. He was equally flattered to be recommended by his local party cell, whose letter of approval he kept for decades. The young man it describes certainly sounds promising: “He has political knowledge above average. He tries hard to extend his knowledge by studying in his spare time. He industriously studies the German communist party, he is a class-conscious person. His attitude to the Soviet Union and the GDR is always positive. He is a member of the board of the fifth party cell, contributes actively to party work, and writes for the wall newsletter.”56
The recommendation went on to describe him as “reliable” and “comradely,” and in the end he was accepted. According to his account, he was at one point considered for the job of interrogator but wound up becoming a bodyguard, perhaps the most benign job in the secret police. This pleased him, he says, “because I wouldn’t have wanted to work indoors.”
Years later, Tschirschwitz’s understanding of the role the Stasi had played in creating East Germany hadn’t grown much deeper, and his positive feelings about his Soviet training had not changed. In a long conversation about his years in the security service, he mostly reminisced about the trips he had taken. In Prague there had been wonderful bohemian food, in Vienna he was given 200 schillings to spend, and in Budapest the Hungarian security guards were hospitable. He told fond stories about the time he rode on the train to Moscow with Otto Grotewohl, East Germany’s prime minister after 1949, and Wilhelm Pieck, and about the excellent cooperation he enjoyed with West German security guards during a trip to Bonn in the 1970s. His career in the Stasi had brought him social advance, a degree of material comfort, and education—all thanks to the fraternal comrades from the Soviet Union.57
The new recruits to the Eastern European secret police services learned espionage techniques, fighting skills, and surveillance methods from the NKVD and later from the KGB. From their Russian mentors, they also learned how to think like Soviet secret policemen. They learned to identify enemies even where none seemed to exist, because Soviet secret policemen knew the methods enemies used to conceal themselves. They learned to question the independence of any person or group that called itself politically neutral, because Soviet secret policemen did not believe in neutrality.
They were also trained to think in the long term and to identify potential enemies as well as actual opponents of the regime. This was a profoundly Bolshevik obsession. In March 1922, Lenin himself had declared that the “greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing … the better. We must teach these people a lesson right now, so that they will not dare even to think of any resistance for several decades.”58 In an essay written for the benefit of future cadres, one of the Stasi’s own historians explained that the organization “from the beginning could not be restricted to defending the attacks of the enemy. It was and is an organ that has to use all means in the offensive fight against the opponents of socialism.”59
At the same time, Eastern European secret policemen were also taught to feel the Soviet Union’s scorn and hatred for those whom it opposed. From the late 1930s, Stalin had begun to refer in public to the USSR’s enemies in what one historian has called “biological-hygienic terms.” He denounced them as vermin, as pollution, as filth that had to be “subjected to ongoing purification,” as “poisonous weeds.”60 Some of that venom is echoed in the young Czesław Kiszczak’s reports from London, quoted earlier: “Those who aren’t returning and are staying in England for material reasons would probably render certain services for money, as they are typical products of [prewar] Poland, people without deeper feelings, without ambition and honor.”61
Finally, the Soviet comrades taught their protégés that anyone who was not a communist was, by definition, under suspicion as a foreign spy. This conviction would become very powerful everywhere in Eastern Europe once the Cold War was fully under way, supported by black-and-white propaganda depicting the peace-loving East in a constant battle with the warmongering West. But in East Germany it quickly became an obsession. There, the proximity of West Germany and the relative openness of Berlin in the 1940s and 1950s meant that
the new East German state really was surrounded, and infiltrated, by large numbers of Westerners. The Stasi’s mentality was permanently shaped by the experiences of that era, to the point where its members later found it hard to distinguish between spies and ordinary dissidents. One internal Stasi historian described the postwar era as a period of struggle against the West German political parties as well as the “so-called Committee of Free Lawyers,” the Combat Group Against Inhumanity (Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit, or KGU), and other human rights groups active in West Berlin at that time. These groups, in the Stasi’s collective memory, had not been designed to promote free speech or democracy but rather were intended to “isolate the GDR internationally” and undermine the state. They had a “strong social base in the GDR” only thanks to the persistence of capitalist forms of production and fascist ways of thinking, and thus it had been necessary to fight them and their “libellous leaflets” with great energy.62
This fight against powerful, unidentified, and carefully masked representatives of foreign states would take many forms. From the beginning, it certainly required close surveillance of anyone who had any contact with foreigners, any relatives abroad, or had made trips abroad in the past. The East Germans kept lists of anyone in contact with the Western press, especially Radio in the American Sector (Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor, or RIAS), which broadcasted under the auspices of the American occupation authorities. Special efforts were also made to place informers and spies at the station.63
The same was true in Hungary, where all Hungarians with foreign contacts were assumed to be spies. After Ilona and Endre Marton, two native Hungarians, were appointed correspondents in 1948 for the American wire services, the Associated Press and United Press, they were followed day and night by policemen and informers, as their daughter Kati Marton has since documented. A trip to a café, a flirtation with a colleague, an afternoon’s skiing—all of this was recorded by the Hungarian ÁVO in a file that had reached 1,600 pages by 1950. Although they were not spies—on the contrary, some American diplomats were very wary of them—when the Martons were finally arrested in 1955, the “Plan for Mrs. Marton’s Interrogation” included discussions of “the people she has met since 1945 and what sort of connection she formed with them,” as well as “her connections to the Americans and her spying” and “her love of the Western way of life.”64
The fight against enemies also required the new security policemen, from the beginning, to master the delicate art of cultivating friends and informers. Because the enemy was hidden, the enemy could be uncovered only through subterfuge and careful collaboration with secret allies, both in one’s own and in the enemy’s camp. One early Stasi training document laid out very precisely how important this kind of recruitment was:
As it is the specific task of the [Ministry for State Security] to uncover and destroy the enemy in all areas using conspiratorial methods, unofficial cooperation with both citizens of our republic and patriots in the enemy’s camp is necessary. Those citizens who engage in this sort of cooperation are expressing an especially high degree of trust toward the MfS [Stasi]. Because this form of cooperation is of central importance to our work, all members of the MfS must be trained to love this important task as well as to respect and appreciate the fighters and patriots at the invisible front line.65
In practice, this meant that secret policemen had to be trained in the arts of persuasion, bribery, blackmail, and threat. They had to convince wives to spy on husbands, children to inform on parents. They had to learn, for example, how to identify and monitor people like Bruno Kunkel, alias Max Kunz, who began to work secretly for the Stasi in 1950, and whose intact file reveals just how much secret policemen needed to know about their very closest collaborators, the people who worked for them in a conspiratorial capacity. Kunkel’s file lists all of his political and professional affiliations (communist youth group, apprenticeship to a car mechanic) as well as all of his family members and their professional and political affiliations.66 It also contains several psychological profiles of him written by colleagues and superiors, not all of which are flattering (“K. does have a weak will. He has a light character and is superficial … His class-consciousness is only weakly developed. But he is friendly toward the Soviet Union and its anti-fascist democratic order”). By the time he was hired he had been thoroughly checked, but even so he was made to swear a dire oath:
I, Bruno Kunkel, definitely declare to oblige myself to work for the organ of state security of the GDR. I oblige myself to find people whose activities are directed against the GDR or the Soviet Union and to immediately report them. I vow to precisely carry out orders that my superior gives to me. It has been explained to me that my obligation for the organ for state security must remain secret and I oblige myself not to tell a second person, including my family members, about it. In order to keep all this secret I will sign the reports that I hand in in writing under the code name of Kunz. I will be severely punished if I spread this declaration, which has been signed by me.67
He signed as both “Bruno Kunkel” and “Max Kunz,” and was apparently a faithful secret employee, since he soon afterward stopped his conspiratorial activity and went to work for the Stasi full time.
In the years that followed, tens of thousands of others across Eastern Europe had to be convinced to sign similar forms. Once they had signed, they then had to be carefully monitored to ensure that they really were keeping secrets and that the information they were reporting was reliable. Informers kept an eye on the public, but the secret police had to learn to keep an eye on its informers. Eventually, Eastern Europe’s secret policemen would strive to maintain an impossible level of vigilance against an unknown and often unidentifiable enemy, inside and outside the country, inside and outside the party, inside and outside their own organization. It was not a form of thinking conducive to democratic cooperation.
Chapter 5
VIOLENCE
It’s quite clear—it’s got to look democratic, but we must have everything in our control.
—Walter Ulbricht, 19451
FROM THE VERY beginning, the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist parties pursued their goals using violence. They controlled the “power ministries” of the Interior and Defense in every country, and they deployed both police troops and nascent armies to their advantage. After the war’s end, this was not the mass, indiscriminate violence of the sort carried out by the Red Army during its march toward Berlin but rather more selective, carefully targeted forms of political violence: arrests, beatings, executions, and concentration camps. All of this they directed at a relatively small number of real, alleged, and imagined and future enemies of the Soviet Union and the communist parties. They intended both to physically destroy them and to create the sense that any armed resistance was useless.2
That was not what they said, of course. At least in the beginning, the NKVD and the new secret police forces loudly declared war on the remnants of fascism, while Soviet officials and local communist parties directed their fiercest propaganda at Nazi collaborators and quislings. In this they were no different from the restored national governments of France, the Netherlands, and the rest of formerly occupied Europe.3 But in every country occupied by the Red Army, the definition of “fascist” eventually grew broader, expanding to include not only Nazi collaborators but anybody whom the Soviet occupiers and their local allies disliked. In time, the word “fascist,” in true Orwellian fashion, was eventually used to describe antifascists who also happened to be anticommunists. And every time the definition was expanded, arrests followed.
Some of these “fascists” had been identified in advance. The historian Amir Weiner points out that the NKVD had been collecting lists of potential “enemies” in Eastern Europe—in Poland and the Baltic States in particular—for many years (though Weiner makes a distinction between the NKVD’s excellent “knowledge” of Poland and its very poor cultural and historical “understanding”).4 They collected names from n
ewspapers, spies, and diplomats. When they had no names, the NKVD prepared lists of the types of people who ought to be arrested. In May 1941, Stalin himself provided just such a list for the newly occupied territories of eastern Poland. He demanded the arrest and exile not only of “members of Polish counterrevolutionary organizations” but also of their families, as well as the families of former officers of the Polish army, former policemen, and former civil servants.5
Not all of the arrests took place right away. On a number of occasions, Stalin ordered Eastern European communists to proceed cautiously while establishing the new social order. The then-tiny Polish communist party received a message from Moscow in the spring of 1944, ordering its leaders to work with all democratic forces (“all” was underlined) and to direct its propaganda at “ordinary members” of other, more “reactionary” parties.6 Stalin’s initial policy was to tread softly, not to upset the Allies, and to win people over by persuasion or stealth. This is why free elections were held in Hungary, why some independent political parties were tolerated elsewhere, and why, as late as 1948, Stalin told the East German communists to follow an “opportunistic policy” that would entail “moving toward socialism not directly but in zigzags and a roundabout way.” To their horror, he even suggested they might consider admitting former Nazis to their ranks.7 The “national front” model had been drilled into all of the local communists who had arrived by plane from Moscow or on foot with the Red Army: don’t use communist slogans; don’t talk about the dictatorship of the proletariat; do talk about coalitions, alliances, and democracy.
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