The File

by Timothy Garton Ash

  Then there is his predecessor Markus “Mischa” Wolf, the father and legendary longtime chief of this Department of Enlightenment. Tall, well dressed, distinguished-looking, Wolf strolls around his neighborhood like a king, nodding loftily to people who greet him in the street. As we approach the statues of Marx and Engels that still sit—but for how much longer?—in the very center of East Berlin, I ask him what was the difference in methods between the secret services of West and East. “I would say, none at all”—he answers without hesitation. If there was a difference, it was between the methods of both sides in Europe, which by the 1980s had become relatively “civilized,” and those of the CIA in Latin America, or of Mossad and other services in the Middle East.

  What good did the spies do?

  They helped to keep the peace in Europe. Each side knew so much that it was impossible for one to prepare an aggressive action without the other’s learning about it in advance. In particular, they reduced the danger of nuclear war. And, he insists, this was a real danger. The Cold War was not, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm argued to him only the other day, an imaginary war. He remembers sitting up through the night during the Berlin and Cuba crises, trying to collect every scrap of information “from our sources.” He really thought we were on the verge of war.

  Wolf is everything that people say of him—handsome, intelligent, cultured, interesting, witty, charming. So the great puzzle he presents is this: being all these things, how on earth could he have stuck it out for thirty-five years in that ministry, with that gang? It’s the Speer puzzle again. But Markus Wolf, the Albert Speer of East Germany, still awaits his Gitta Sereny. Sereny gradually, painfully brought Speer to acknowledge the full extent of his co-responsibility for the greatest horror of the Third Reich, the Holocaust. Wolf has yet to acknowledge his full responsibility for the horrors of domestic repression in East Germany—lesser horrors, of course, but still, as he says himself, “bad things.”

  He claims that he nurtured an ethos in his service rather different from the rest of the Stasi, and others confirm this. But then, recalling a description of East Germany as a “niche society,” he says that the HVA was his “niche.” A large office block in the main compound of the Ministry for State Security: some niche! The fact is, his service was closely integrated into the domestic apparatus of repression. They cooperated on innumerable cases—as even my own file shows. He was a deputy minister and worked closely with Mielke, year in, year out.

  Those whose business was spying on their own people are much less eager to talk. A few of them, nonetheless, have taken part in Pastor Schröter’s discussion group. Kurt Zeiseweis, for example, is a regular participant. He was deputy head of department XX in Berlin, responsible for watching and controlling the capital’s dissidents, cultural life, churches and universities, including the Humboldt while I was there. The classic work of a political secret police. Werner now invites Herr Zeiseweis to meet us in the Pankow vicarage.

  A small, silver-haired man, with tiny blue-gray eyes and rosy cheeks, Zeiseweis wears brown running shoes, gray trousers and a tracksuit top that incongruously proclaims “The Next Generation.” He was born in 1937. During his early years his father was away at the war. His mother was poor, dedicated, hardworking—and a communist.

  Under the new regime, he was sent to a Party boarding school. His mother, now a local Party secretary, then suggested him for a job in State Security. And that’s what he did, spending thirty years in the Berlin office, mostly in department XX.

  Little Herr Zeiseweis exudes an air of bureaucratic rectitude and quiet self-importance. He says that when he spoke during the so-called Red Week of political instruction at the Humboldt University, the students told him he was better than the deputy foreign minister. Today he wants above all to stress that he had high standards of conduct and decency. He was a devoted family man. He had always been true to his wife, and she to him. Their children were well brought up, on a housing estate occupied entirely by Stasi employees. The family never watched Western television, never, except just once—when the Americans landed on the moon.

  There were bad things in the ministry, yes, he admits it. For example, the Stasi’s Dynamo Berlin soccer team that Mielke was so keen on, and the corruption around it. But he would have nothing to do with that. “I am,” he says gravely, “an opponent of soccer.” Also, people in his department talked about “getting rid of” the dissident priest Rainer Eppelmann: arranging a car accident or something similar. He would have nothing to do with that either. Another time, they discussed trying to get a girl to infect the leading dissident Robert Havemann with VD. Again, he wouldn’t countenance it.

  Not he. No, he was a decent man. But once—just once—he had done wrong. During a break-in to someone’s flat they found a wonderful collection of what he calls “little model cars.” (Werner tells me afterward that everyone in East Germany used to call them “Matchbox cars,” but Zeiseweis’s internal censor still prevents him from using the Western word.) The other people in the search team were stealing things from around the flat. And he just couldn’t resist it. Yes, he pocketed a couple of those “little model cars.” He did. Afterward, the story came out, and he had to confess. “Then I was really ashamed.”

  When he has left, Werner and I look at each other, shake our heads and start quietly laughing. Otherwise we would have to cry. Here, in that chair, has sat before us a perfect textbook example of the petty bureaucratic executor of evil. A good family man. Proud of his correctness, loyalty, hard work, decency—all those “secondary virtues” that have been identified as a key to collaboration with Nazism (and that the Prussian Association now hopes to revive). He is incapable of acknowledging, to this day, the systemic wrong of which he was a loyal servant, yet filled with remorse for having stolen a couple of Matchbox cars.

  What of the officers on my case, in Main Department II? This, I learn from the experts, grew dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s, from a small counterintelligence outfit of about two hundred people to one of the largest and most important parts of the ministry, with more than fourteen hundred full-time staff at head-quarters alone by 1989. Its head from 1976, the General Kratsch who appears at the end of my file, became one of Mielke’s right-hand men. He was highly professional and quite ruthless, both on the job and in office politics. In 1987 he gained overall responsibility for all “counter-intelligence” in the ministry. Meanwhile, his own department was expanded in an effort to contain the many challenges that came from all the new détente ties with the West. They watched not just Western spies but also ordinary Western diplomats, Western journalists, Western scholars, Western artists, Western anyone who might potentially subvert the communist system.

  Unfortunately, the former officers of Main Department II are especially reluctant to talk. “The guys from counterintelligence are very buttoned-up,” Herr Hartmann explains apologetically. The Insider Committee can help me little, so I must proceed alone. At first I have only the surnames, ranks and departments of those who worked on me: Lieutenant Wendt, the desk officer, Major Risse, section head, Colonels Kaulfuss and Fritz, department heads, and General Kratsch, the boss. Then the ever-helpful Gauck Authority locates their personnel cards, with first names, dates of birth and old passport-size photos. Later I get their personnel files, which contain more details of their family background, recruitment, career and any disciplinary actions against them. Gradually, like a detective, I build up a mental picture of them and begin to track them down.

  I FIND MYSELF STARTING AT THE TOP. PASTOR SCHRÖTER obtains General Kratsch’s address with a single phone call. Kratsch is said to be unwilling to talk. His address is, coincidentally, in the same pleasant but run-down village on the outskirts of Berlin where my girlfriend Andrea lived in 1980. He has no telephone, or at least no traceable number. So I decide to combine a call on the general with a visit to Andrea’s old home, wondering if she is still there.

  A long journey out on the S-Bahn, the old-fashioned, aboveground sub
urban railway. Cobbled streets, then a dusty path leads to a bungalow with a fair-sized garden, enclosed by a rusty metal fence. I ring the bell. Frau Kratsch comes waddling to the gate. I ask for Herr Kratsch and she reluctantly lets me in.

  General (ret’d.) Kratsch stands in gardening shorts, holding a rake. A thickset man with an enormous belly, short beard straggling down a long double chin, and wary, piglet eyes.

  I explain that I’m a historian from Oxford, that his department had an OPK file on me and that I would like to discuss the background with him: the file itself, his own work, the Cold War altogether.

  He hesitates for a long moment, then agrees to meet two days later.

  As I leave I ask for directions to the street where Andrea used to live. “Oh, that’s quite a walk,” he exclaims, “let me drive you.”

  Now I hesitate, but he says, “Look, the Cold War is over, so I can give you a lift!” Which he does, in his small Volkswagen.

  ANDREA HAS MOVED, BUT I FIND HER IN THE ATTIC flat of a ramshackle villa, with a garden running straight down to a pretty lake. She looks much as I remember her, blond, smiling, but her children are now in their late teens, carefully brought up in this private world behind the Wall. She thinks it was easier to be a single mother in the East than in the West. She also feels the political transformation of 1989 came just at the right moment for her son and daughter. They had that safe, sheltered childhood—and now they have freedom.

  We reminisce, cautiously but pleasantly, about our long-distant amitié amoureuse. “Do you remember … ?” I tell her about the file and then about the wild suspicion that came to my mind as I sat down for the first time at the little plastic-wood table in Frau Schulz’s room in the Gauck Authority. That evening in Prenzlauer Berg, how she opened the curtains and turned on the light.

  She’s a little shocked. Surely I didn’t suspect her of working for the Stasi? But yes, of course she remembers that night. Actually, she doesn’t think she did open the curtains. But she did turn on the light.

  Why?

  “Because I wanted to see your face.”

  TWO DAYS LATER, I TRAVEL OUT AGAIN ON THE S-Bahn, early in the morning, for my interview with General Kratsch. He greets me at the gate, dressed in a shiny synthetic tracksuit, and we pass through a multicolored bead curtain into a bungalow full of little wooden ornaments and doilies. One shelf contains a good selection of cookbooks.

  He wants to start his story at the beginning, which is fine by me. He was fifteen when the war ended (the same age as “Michaela”), and his father was absent, a prisoner of war. He had only basic schooling, then became an assistant in an ironmonger’s shop. But he always yearned for adventure. He remembers seeing an advertisement in a West German magazine called The Ironmonger, which was illegally smuggled into East Germany and passed around in the shop. It was for a job in South Africa, and he toyed excitedly with the idea of replying to it. The way he tells me this I feel that he is really saying, If only I had! Then he wanted to join the navy. But instead they—“they,” the Party-state authorities—steered him to the ministry.

  He trained in Potsdam, where he was taught about the great British secret service, its matchless skills, its long tradition, its character as part of the development of imperialism, described by Lenin as “the highest form of capitalism.” Then he was put to work in counterintelligence, on what they called “the English line.” He, a twenty-two-year-old former ironmonger’s assistant from Thuringia, was to foil the legendary British secret service! Later he was put on “the American line,” and then he was in charge of the West German department. Again he had this feeling of incredulity. Here was little him pitted against the veteran General Gehlen, head of Eastern military intelligence for Hitler, then for the Americans, then for Adenauer.

  Nonetheless, he had notable successes against Gehlen, especially with double agents. When an enemy agent was caught, he liked to listen in to the interrogation, in the next room. He wanted to know why they had done it.

  And why had they?

  Partly for money. Partly the thirst for adventure. And then there was what he calls “ideology.” “They did it for freedom, as they would say.”

  What happened to them afterward?

  Oh, of course they were sent down for long sentences.

  Or the death sentence?

  Yes, that too, especially in the early years. But people knew the risks they were taking.

  In 1976 he became head of the whole Main Department. It was a chance to work closely with the minister, an exciting time, although he had that one great setback with Stiller—a Stasi officer who spied for and then escaped to the West. But in the 1980s he had a growing sense that things were going wrong. He used to escape from the ministry for a good lunch at the Café Moskau. Occasionally, since restaurant places in East Berlin were always scarce and tables had to be shared, he would find himself sitting next to American visitors. He liked to engage them in conversation. Little did they know….

  Sometimes, if he’d been away from his desk like that, the minister would telephone to ask where he’d been. Once—it must have been in the mid-1980s—he told Mielke that he’d been at one of the regular lectures in which a senior Party official surveyed current political developments and gave them the Party line.

  “And did he tell you,” barked Erich Mielke, “that the GDR is bankrupt?”

  “No,” replied Kratsch, “he didn’t tell us that.”

  “Well, I’m telling you that now!”

  So in the mid-1980s, at a time when East Germany was being treated by many Western analysts, politicians and businessmen as the most stable and prosperous state in the Soviet bloc, the head of its secret police was telling his counterintelligence chief that the country was bankrupt. They knew better.

  When he said “bankrupt,” did Mielke specifically mean the alarming figures for hard-currency debt?

  Yes, but not only that. It was also political. They saw Honecker’s illusions, and they saw the contradiction between opening up to the West and trying to preserve the communist system. He, Kratsch, was the man who got the angry telephone calls from Mielke when people took refuge in Western embassies or some new revelation appeared in Der Spiegel. And he would tell the minister: How can you expect me to prevent it, when we’ve signed all these international agreements for improved relations with the West, working conditions for journalists, freedom of movement, respect for human rights? A powerful tribute, I feel, to the subversive side of détente.

  In those last years he was weary of his work. He would have retired at sixty anyway—in October 1990. But on October 3, 1990, Germany was united, and his services were no longer required.

  Kratsch’s own story told, I ask why they had me down for a spy.

  Well, it’s very simple, says Kratsch. As he has told me already, from their first days at spy school they had been taught to respect and fear the legendary British secret service. But then, from about the mid-1960s, they could not find any more British spies. The officers in department II/9 were desperate. Of course they knew who were the career SIS officers at the British embassy, kept them under observation, photographed all their meetings with dissidents and so on. But where were their agents?

  So whenever an even halfway suspicious-looking Englishman came along, they immediately started investigating to see if he was a spy. They lived in hope, but were usually disappointed.

  Was this because the British secret service was so clever that the Stasi never found its agents, or because it didn’t have any?

  Rather the latter, thinks Kratsch.

  I tell Kratsch that the way he talks one could almost forget that the Stasi was an organization of which ordinary people were terrified. Had he never been frightened himself?

  “Fear!” he exclaims, lifting both hands in the air, his huge belly shaking with indignation. Of course not! Not at all. People weren’t afraid, they were grateful for the security! “They thanked us from above and from below.” And he’ll tell me another thing: the very
first people to come and congratulate them on the ministry’s annual anniversary day were the representatives of the CDU, the old Christian Democratic puppet party now incorporated into Helmut Kohl’s all-German CDU. Yet now it’s the Christian Democrats who are the first to blame everything on the Stasi! Actually, the Stasi was always subordinated to the ruling communist party. Mielke was scrupulous about this. Everything was checked with Honecker, all important decisions were approved by the Party leader.

  I ask if there is anything about which he personally feels guilty. “No,” he says, “I did my job.” The familiar defense: I was only doing my job, my duty, obeying orders. No, he does not feel guilty about anything, except that he had not been more critical of the way things were going in the 1980s, of Honecker’s hubris and the lack of reforms.

  “But that’s the same everywhere, in your country too, if one can believe what one reads in the papers. There’s criticism of the royal family but you don’t have the courage to act!”

  GERHARD KAULFUSS, I READ IN THE PERSONNEL FILE, was born February 23, 1933, in the Sudetenland. His father left for the war when he was six, and returned from a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp only in 1947, when young Gerhard was fourteen. Eight formative years without a father. School in the German-occupied Sudetenland during the war: Nazi school. Then the defeat and flight into the Soviet Occupied Zone. He originally wanted to be a shop assistant but came, via the Free German Youth, to the ministry. In time, he worked his way up to be a colonel and the head of department II/9.