Daughters of the KGB: Moscow's Secret Spies, Sleepers and Assassins of the Cold War

by Douglas Boyd

  12. Visitor’s guide to Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenhausen

  13. Knabe, Gefangen in Hohenschönhausen, p. 9

  14. Formed in April 1949

  15. Applebaum, Iron Curtain, pp. 414−15

  16. Neues Deutschland, 29 June 1962

  17. Stasi figures quoted in F. Taylor, The Berlin Wall, London, Bloomsbury 2007, p. 129

  18. D.E. Murphy, S.A. Kondrashev and G. Bailey, Battleground Berlin, New Haven and London, Yale University Press 1997, p. 163

  19. P. Brogan, Eastern Europe 1939–1989, London, Bloomsbury 1990, pp. 27–8

  20. Leaflet picked up in the street

  21. Murphy et al., Battleground Berlin, p. 149

  22. C. Dobson and R. Payne, The Dictionary of Espionage, London, Grafton 1986, pp. 334–5

  23. Knabe, Gefangen in Hohenschönhausen, p. 13

  24. Ibid, p. 14

  25. Article by C. Neef in Der Spiegel, No. 43, 2003

  4

  CREATING A NEW CLASS

  OF CRIMINALS

  At some point, the reader has the right to ask why the GDR was the most repressive state in the communist bloc during the Cold War – more so than even the Soviet Union itself. A West German general named Jörg Schönbohm had the task of unifying the GDR’s Nazionale Volksarmee and the West German Bundeswehr after the fall of the Wall in 1989. Since these two armies with a common tongue had been trained for half a century specifically for war against each other, it was not a job one would wish on a best friend. Schönbohm reasoned that, while Poles still lived in Poland, Hungarians in Hungary and so on – all having their own languages, culture and history – the GDR ‘could explain its identity as a second state on German territory only through Communist or Socialist ideology – there could be no GDR without [the justification of] Communism.’1

  The political philosophy clumsily labelled Marxism–Leninism was therefore effectively a state religion in the GDR, whose hierarchy was as blindly savage in its retribution against non-believers as the Catholic Inquisition had been in its time. In addition, in 1945, when Communist rule was first imposed on the 18 million Germans living in the Soviet Zone, they were for the most part bewildered people who had been regularly assured by Josef Goebbels, the high priest of Nazism, right up to the last week of hostilities, that they were bound to win the war. For twelve years, from the Nazi takeover in 1933, any overt dissent from Goebbels’ state religion had been punishable by harsh internment, family disgrace and death sentences. With the top Nazis all dead and their creed of racial superiority totally discredited by people their followers had been taught to describe as Sklaven und Untermenschen – slaves and sub-humans – it was relatively easy for the Moscow-imposed hierarchy of the victorious new state religion to keep the conquered population in continuing fearful obedience to its new rulers.

  British author George Orwell,2 a sincere left-winger appalled at what he saw as the perversion of communism under Stalin, spent the winter of 1943–4 writing Animal Farm, a brilliant satire on the Soviet Union. Because the far-from-avuncular ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin was a wartime ally at the time, Orwell’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, and several other British and US publishers rejected the book, and continued to do so until its truths were accepted and the phrase ‘Cold War’ was on every tongue.3 In 1948 Orwell produced another satire on totalitarian rule entitled 1984. In it, all citizens of the fictitious society which he described were spied on each minute of their lives by the Thought Police. When Stalin created the GDR in 1949 the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit was the incarnation of Orwell’s Thought Police. Its main function was to root out and punish any deviant actions or thoughts in the population of the GDR.

  It is one thing to read statistics, but figures of so many spies, so many refugees and so many prisoners are unsatisfying. The mind wants to know what happened to the individuals caught in the Stasi’s net. How exactly did they suffer? Were men treated differently from women? What happened if they were, for example, single mothers with small children? How many lives were ruined? How many families destroyed?

  Hubertus Knabe is the director of Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. The former Stasi interrogation prison is now a memorial to those who suffered there, visited by 170,000 people a year. Knabe has published many personal stories of prisoners interrogated there after the prison was taken over from the NKVD by the Stasi.4 What follows is a small sample.

  Fritz Sperling was the 40-year-old deputy president of the KPD, elected to the executive committee of the SED on the merging of the two parties in the Soviet zone. Leaving a hospital in the Soviet sector of Berlin on 26 February 1951 after treatment for his heart condition, he was tricked by a friend into getting into a car with three Stasi operatives and driven to Hohenschönhausen. As a Moscow-trained Communist who had been imprisoned by the Nazis pre-war and interned in Switzerland throughout the Second World War, he was not at first alarmed, having no idea that he would be held under interrogation for the next two years and eight months:

  Arriving at the prison, I was forced to strip to my underclothes and shown into a cell containing only a rough wooden plank on which to sleep and a latrine bucket. The guard explained that in daytime I could sit on the plank bed, but not lean against the wall on either side. It was forbidden to lie down during the day and at night I must lie with face and arms visible through the spy-hole, which meant being unable to cover my chest despite my severe heart trouble. During my illegal activities [for the KPD before the Second World War], when I was both imprisoned and sent to labour camps, I had had a heart attack. After the war, my condition worsened.

  Erich Mielke came in person to warn me that I had been arrested for anti-Party activities, which he advised me to confess and ‘sacrifice myself for the good of the Party’. My protests that I had never betrayed the Party were unavailing. From February 1951 until December 1952 I was interrogated by Soviet intelligence officers, ‘helping the German comrades’. They repeatedly punched me on the ribs over my heart while my hands were cuffed behind my back. Sometimes, senior officials of the GDR were present.

  [After my long interrogation in Hohenschönhausen], for nine months in Bautzen II, I was not permitted to lie down in the day, although suffering from severe sleep deprivation. My cell was unheated, with no daylight or fresh air.5

  The NKVD men in Bautzen frequently beat prisoners for no apparent reason and prisoners were not allowed toilet paper or sanitary towels as a form of humiliation. Sperling’s health deteriorated rapidly until he had a further heart attack in September 1952. Denied medical help for five weeks, he was sentenced to seven years in prison as a war criminal, fascist and ‘agent for crimes against peace’. In the political thaw that followed the 20th Conference of the CP of the USSR, in which Nikita Khrushchev denounced a selection of Stalin’s crimes – excluding those in which he had himself participated – Sperling was pardoned but not rehabilitated, and died two years later at the age of 46 from the aggravation of his heart condition during detention.

  Karl Fricke was a 27-year-old journalist working in West Berlin. On 1 April 1955 he received a telephone call from a man called Rittwagen, who had been imprisoned in the Soviet Union for five years pre-war and handed back as a known Communist to the Nazis – as were many others – under the German–Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty of 1938. He was immediately sent to a Nazi concentration camp.

  Fricke had no suspicions that Rittwagen had subsequently become an undercover agent of the Stasi, despite all this. Although the journalist had written articles critical of the SED, he considered himself of far too little importance to be at risk when invited to visit Rittwagen’s apartment, to borrow a book otherwise unobtainable in the West. There, he was drugged by a knock-out cocktail of Atropin and Scopolamine that Frau Rittwagen put into his glass of brandy. Fricke recovered consciousness seven hours later in a brightly lit room, surrounded by four or five Stasi officers, who proceeded to insult and swear at him. After being twice beaten up, he was thrown into a cell and left to recover.

>   Although he had no idea where he was imprisoned, Fricke was to spend 455 days and nights in Hohenschönhausen. For fourteen days, nothing happened to relieve the boredom and fear. Interrogations for the next seven days, every afternoon and from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., with sleep in the daytime forbidden, left him weak and confused. His interrogators offered him rewards for cooperating and warned him that he was liable to a sentence of a dozen years’ imprisonment if he did not. To reduce his resistance, the interrogations were suspended from August to October. What the Stasi called ‘leaving the prisoner to stew’6 was one of the most effective ways of wearing down a prisoner’s resistance. Much later, Fricke described this:

  We were ‘shaved’ every three or four weeks with a hair trimmer and had a shower every twenty days, when we also got fresh underwear. I began to stink because I could not wash my pants regularly. Generally, we were given one piece of toilet paper per day. It was a problem if you needed to go twice and I developed a severe infection in that area after six weeks. When I told the medical orderly at shower time, all he said was, ‘Hurry up. In thirty seconds I turn the water off.’ And that’s how it was. We had hardly got wet when the tap was turned off.

  No prisoner was allowed to see another when being taken to interrogation. At every corner of the corridors was a traffic light. If it was red, I had to stand in an alcove with face to the wall until another prisoner had been escorted past by his guard. When the light was green, and the way was clear, I was led on. In the interrogation room were two Stasi officers in civilian suits. I had to sit in the corner on a stool with hands visible on my knees.

  Every week or so, I had ‘open-air exercise’ in a yard five metres by six with walls five metres high, on which stood a guard with machine pistol, as though I could jump that high.

  After giving an unsatisfactory answer in one interrogation, I was locked into a mini-cell no more than fifty centimetres square. For four hours, I could not sit or change position to relieve the discomfort. This happened again when a guard saw through the Judas-hole that I had prised a splinter off my wooden bunk, with which to try and mend my shoe that was losing its sole. I was charged with ‘damage to the people’s property’ and placed in the ‘standing-only cell’ for several long and painful hours.7

  Many detainees were required to spend their initial interrogation sessions seated on a special chair, with hands beneath their thighs, an unnatural position which swiftly becomes uncomfortable. They were unaware that the chair had a false seat cover, under which was a special pad to absorb the odour of the nervous perspiration in their crotch. Immediately after the interrogation, the pad was placed in a hermetically sealed glass jar, to be sniffed by tracker dogs in the event that the prisoner was ever the object of a manhunt – as Dieter Hötger was to find out in 1967.8

  Walter Janke was the 32-year-old head of the East Berlin publisher Aufbau, who was arrested in December 1956 and questioned in Hohenschönhausen until July 1957:

  I was made to strip naked in this brightly lit room before a huge portrait of Stalin – this was three years after Khrushchev had denounced him at the 20th Party Congress. Someone took my clothes and watch into another room, leaving me bollock-naked in front of Stalin. Another officer with an inspection lamp ordered me to open my mouth and checked it and my throat. Both arms had to be lifted high while he inspected my armpits with a magnifying glass. The officer with the lamp ordered, ‘Bend over! Lower! Now pull your buttocks apart with both hands.’ He inspected also my arse with the lamp.

  At my first interrogation, I was taken to an office where I found four men and Erich Mielke. He informed me that I was guilty of counter-revolutionary activities, which I denied. He screamed that the Stasi had broken stronger men than me and came so close that his spittle landed on my face. I asked him to step back because I didn’t like being spat on. He and two of the other men left after the screaming, and the interrogation continued until seven o’clock next morning, when I was confronted with an indictment seven pages long.9

  After the rapid erection of the Berlin Wall on 13–14 August 1961, many people were cut off from their families and loved ones. One such was 27-year-old Sigrid Paul, mother of a baby son she had been visiting daily in a West Berlin clinic where, for the past five months, he had been receiving medical treatment not available in ‘democratic’ East Berlin. It took nine weeks of form-filling and rejected requests for her to be allowed to visit him again and hold him in her arms – at which point she had to decide whether to stay with her baby in the West or return home to her husband. Believing that her child would soon be better and able to come home too, she returned to East Berlin but was not allowed to visit her child again. After eighteen months of anguish about the baby’s progress, she and her husband were invited by some students in February 1962 to escape via a tunnel being dug by them underneath the Wall. Unfortunately the Stasi had infiltrated the student group and was already aware of the plan:

  On 28 February 1963 I was on the way to work when two men grabbed me and forced me to get into a black car. I was so shocked that I fought back and a bus driver stopped his vehicle and opened the door so that I could get away, but the men were too strong. I was virtually kidnapped and delivered to the Stasi interrogation facility at Berlin-Lichtenberg. After my watch, handbag, belt and shoelaces had been taken away, I was questioned by several men at the same time about the students. I had not been told anything about their arrangements, but they did not believe this. It was very frightening and lasted all day and the whole night. The interrogators were changed every four hours or so, but I had no rest for twenty-two hours.

  I was then placed in an unlit cell inside a closed prison van. After a long drive, it stopped and I was let out in a garage, so brightly lit that it hurt my eyes. I was taken into a room, made to strip naked and bend over in a crouch so that a grinning guard could check that I had not hidden anything in any bodily orifice. The humiliation continued when I was given men’s underclothes, coarse socks and felt slippers, and taken into an unheated cell where I was told my name was now 93/2 – 93 for the cell and 2 for the number of my plank bed.

  The cell window had been replaced by a double thickness of glass bricks, through which nothing could be seen: no clouds, no birds. Every ten minutes I was spied on through the Judas-hole. The cell light was kept on night and day. I had no idea where I was being held. Even my toilet things were kept outside the cell. With little or no sleep, after two weeks I was so weak, exhausted, lonely and desperate for news of my family that I signed everything that was put in front of me.

  From time to time I heard knocking and realised that this was some kind of code. Letter A was one knock; B was two knocks and so on. I took the chance to join in, although this was totally forbidden, and punished by worse conditions. In May of 1964 I had to clean away the blood and excrement in a ‘rubber cell’, where they locked up prisoners who had gone out of their minds. Down there, there was no plank bed nor toilet can.

  In July 1963 I was transferred to the Stasi prison in Rostock. Informed that I was at last about to be tried, I asked for a defence lawyer, to be told by my interrogator, ‘You could have three defence lawyers, but it wouldn’t make any difference.’ Before the trial, at which I was sentenced to four years in prison for ‘conspiracy to flee the Republic’, I was not allowed to see the indictment, nor meet a lawyer.

  Once sentenced, life was easier. I was allowed a quarterly visit from my mother and a monthly 30-minute meeting with my husband, who was serving time in a male working party at the same prison. Working alone in my cell, I still had a terrible yearning for my son. Day and night, I tried to imagine how he looked now. How big was he? Could he talk yet? What did his voice sound like? Had his teeth grown? What did he know about his parents? Did he even understand what a father and mother were? I could open the ventilation flap in the blocked-up cell window just a little, to let in some fresh air. Sometimes, I heard men’s voices outside and, just now and again, my husband’s unmistakable laugh.10

  Sig
rid was interned from March to August 1963 and from October 1963 to October 1964. Then:

  One day I was taken out of my cell very early and escorted into a prison van. I took courage in both hands to ask the guard where I was going, but he did not reply. I was taken to a prison in Berlin-Rummelsburg and put into a filthy, cold cell without plank bed or stool, where I was kept waiting for about twelve hours. In the evening, I was conducted to the gate office, given back my things that had been taken away when I was arrested – and found myself outside on the street.

  I don’t know for how long I stood there, trying to think clearly as the sun went down in a wonderful orange sky. Very, very slowly I realised that I was free again. After all the privations and worry about my son, it was indescribably beautiful. Tears ran down my face.11

  By an administrative oversight in the BStU after the end of the GDR, Sigrid eventually learned the name of her main interrogator. Many years later, she tracked him down, but he refused to talk to her.

  By the 1980s even asking for a legal permit to leave the GDR could result in imprisonment. Waltraud Krüger was forcibly confined in a Stasi psychiatric hospital, on the logic that a communist state was as near heaven as one could get, therefore anyone wanting to leave it was clinically insane. Shown into a cell, she was brought a nightdress and some supper by a nurse, but was not hungry. Then came a psychiatrist in a white coat, who ordered her to eat, threatening her otherwise with forced feeding, which would be very painful. He told the 38-year-old detainee that she was in the medical wing of a Stasi interrogation prison. Since she still refused to eat, he called the nurse and ordered an injection. She asked what it was for, since her medical record indicated allergy to some medicines: