by Douglas Boyd
The senior Stasi man said, ‘Your daughter must undress. She’ll be examined by a doctor and sent to a children’s home.’ But I had given fellow activist Ralf Hirsch a legal power of attorney to act as her guardian in just this situation. Trying to delay the awful moment when I would have to awaken Nadja, I went into the bathroom. The female officer who had searched the house the last time came with me and studied herself in the mirror while I used the toilet. I took my ‘jail clothes’ from the cupboard: a long dress and a pullover of Stephan’s.
Then I could not put off the awful moment any longer and asked the woman to leave me alone with my daughter. She refused. Nadja slowly woke up, could not understand what was going on, and clung to me, crying. I cried too, whispering that she was not going into a home, just to the doctor and then to Ralf, where Grandma would visit her soon – and that I loved her. It was the most wretched hour of my life.
In the Stasi car driving through the morning rush hour, I built a psychological wall around myself. The first trial was getting undressed and letting them peer into my arse-hole [sic]. That humiliation lasted a hundred years. But I refused to change into the prison clothing. The wardress screamed at me but, with the exception of my tights (with which I could have hanged myself), I was allowed to keep my own clothes.
In the Magdalenenstrasse interrogation prison, Dr Schnur, the lawyer who acted for us, brought news from my husband, who was shattered by the arrest. Schnur also told me the Church leaders had suggested I take up a previous offer of study leave in the West. I refused.
My interrogator was a pleasant, intelligent man of my own age, which made me wonder why he had chosen such a hateful job.
Taken back to my cell I was given a copy of Neues Deutschland [the daily newspaper that was the official organ of the SED], in which I was horrified to read that my husband and all the others, including Ralf, had been arrested, allegedly for treason. The letters and names danced in front of my eyes. My brain was spinning. On Sunday I had this terrible dream where they brought Stephan into the exercise yard blindfolded. I screamed and ran down the steps to him but, when I got there, they had already hanged him.
I thought of Nadja all the time, wondering whether the parents of the other pupils at her school had told their children not to have anything to do with her. When I was much younger, I had put up with many months in jail, but now, after only a few days, I thought I was going mad.
On the way to interrogation on 28 January, I saw a female Stasi officer in the corridor carrying a pair of boots and a fur coat, which I recognised as belonging to Vera Lengsfeld. So she too was in the prison…
On 30 January it was Nadja’s birthday – a day blacker than any nightmare. Walking round the exercise yard, I suddenly heard Stephan’s voice, calling my name from a cell. I cupped my hands and called out as loudly as I could towards the barbed wire above the yard, ‘Stephan, I love you!’8
Although Freya and her coreligionists did not wish to be expelled from the GDR, where they felt there was much work still to do, they were divested of their GDR citizenship and delivered to the border, where Nadja was reunited with her mother. Freya described the lawyer Dr Schnur as ‘a good soul’ because he represented many people accused of political crimes. She later learned that he was a Stasi informer, betraying his clients’ confidences.
A similar case that year concerned Renate Persich, a 34-year-old nurse. Because she and her husband were practising Christians, their children were denied any formal education as punishment, which meant they would be unqualified for any profession or trade. Even the children of nominally Christian parents were denied education to Abitur level, and could thus never attend university. The Persich parents therefore requested an exit visa for the whole family, which unleashed a full-scale Stasi operation. Both parents and their two children were subjected to threats, harassment and questioning, to make them withdraw the visa application. After they turned to religious contacts in the West for help, Renate and her husband were accused of ‘repeated treasonable intelligence activities’ and sentenced to three years and seven months’ imprisonment – in her case at Bautzen II. Ten months later, the couple were bought free by the Bundesrepublik and their children were allowed to follow four weeks later. In 1992 the court that had condemned the two adults quashed the conviction.
Does that matter? Strangely, given the numbers of GDR citizens who were falsely accused, or accused under punitive laws of ‘offences’ that would have passed unnoticed in the West, many detainees found after release that they were regarded as in some way criminal, and spent years ostracised by neighbours and workmates. Others were unable to find suitable jobs because most industrial and commercial enterprises in the GDR were volkseigene Betriebe – state-owned factories or companies run by works committees controlled by party members.
It is strange, in the context of twentieth-century Europe, to read of people being bought and sold by legal government agencies. Yet, between 1963 and 1989 human trafficking was openly practised in the two Germanies: the Bundesrepublik purchased the freedom of some 34,000 prisoners and 215,000-plus other GDR citizens, who were deprived of their GDR citizenship and transported to the inner German border. Once in the West, they were helped to find work and accommodation. Payments for these prisoners totalled 3.4 billion Deutschmarks, paid to the GDR in the form of food and other non-strategic materials goods. Full details of this ‘trade’ are still secret, but it was no secret that, at an average price of DM 96,000 per person, this traffic became a vital subsidy for the SED’s ‘planned economy’, which would otherwise have collapsed sooner.9 After many thousands made legal escapes from the GDR in this way, some dissidents deliberately made themselves targets for the Stasi – with all the unpleasantness that involved – in the hope of being bought out once imprisoned.
This traffic in misery made Dr Wolfgang Vogel the richest man in the GDR. He practised law in East Berlin, but was also recognised by the West Berlin legal system because he was a very discreet back-channel for the two German governments, which claimed to have no diplomatic relations. With the confident air of a prosperous businessman, he negotiated high-profile spy swaps, including that of U2 Pilot Francis Gary Powers and US citizen Frederic Pryor, traded for the top-level Soviet spy Vilyam Genrikhovich Fisher, aka Colonel Rudolf Abel. It is estimated that Vogel arranged more than 150 spy swaps, usually with handovers at the Glienicke bridge between Potsdam and West Berlin. He also arranged transfer to the Bundesrepublik of the 34,000 political prisoners and nearly a quarter-million other GDR citizens. The biggest spy swap took place on 11 June 1985, when Vogel arranged for a whole coachload – twenty-nine passengers – of CIA and other imprisoned agents to be handed over in exchange for just four eastern bloc agents. An ARD television documentary about this swap, which includes an interview with Vogel, can be seen on YouTube under the title Tausche Ostagent gegen Westagent (2/2) Endstation Glienicke Brücke.10
After German reunification, evidence from Stasi archives was used to accuse Vogel of extortion and tax evasion. The extortion charge centred on him pressuring would-be emigrants, whose cases he was handling, to sell their houses at knock-down prices to SED-approved purchasers. Convicted after the reunification of Germany in 1996 on five counts and briefly imprisoned, Vogel proved that lawyers always win. On appeal in 1998 the German Supreme Court dismissed two of the charges and the others were withdrawn by the prosecution, leaving Vogel to live out his natural term with his second wife in some luxury in a villa at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in Schliersee in Bavaria, a few metres from the Schlierach river. There, he died aged 82 of a heart attack in September 2008. The funeral service was attended by 150 mourners, still divided by the Cold War polarisation of Germany. On the left of the aisle sat various Western public figures and an American diplomat; on the right sat an equal number of important former VIPs from the Stasi and SED. Only after the service, walking to the cemetery, did the two sides mingle.11
One of the 34,000 prisoners whose liberation enriched Vogel had
a story so heart-rending that a television reconstruction was made of it, under the German title that translates as The Woman at Checkpoint Charlie.12 In the summer of 1982, less than a year after divorcing her husband, Jutta Frick travelled with her two daughters and her new companion, Günter Silvio, from their home in Dresden to Bucharest. There, she visited the West German embassy in the hope of obtaining temporary travel papers under an assumed name that would enable them to cross into Yugoslavia and reach the Bundesrepublik from there. The papers were not accepted by the Romanian Securitate, which took the family into custody and returned them at the beginning of December to Dresden, where they were separated. Jutta was placed in a Stasi interrogation prison and her daughters were sent to spend six months in a children’s home, after which they were given into the care of their father, a law-abiding citizen of the GDR.
Condemned on 4 January 1983 to three and a half years’ imprisonment in Hoheneck – a medieval castle converted into the largest women’s prison in Germany, where thousands were locked away behind the 4m walls topped with razor wire – Jutta was allowed to receive letters from the girls and to reply three times a month. Before the end of her sentence, Jutta and her companion were included in a group of prisoners who were bought out through the intermediary of Dr Vogel, the catch being that she had to sign away her rights to her daughters before leaving the GDR. Their father did not prevent them writing to his ex-wife, but in 1984 she could no longer bear to be separated from them. She went on hunger strike, asked the pope for help on two occasions and once chained herself to some railings outside an international conference, hoping Federal Foreign Minster Hans-Dietrich Genscher would support her plea for the release of her daughters. Among the many organisations she contacted was the Frankfurt-based Internationale Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte (IGM), or International Association for Human Rights.
Starting in October 1984 she repeatedly stood at Checkpoint Charlie with a large piece of cardboard on which was written a plea for help to obtain the release of her daughters and Silvio’s son from the clutches of the Stasi. By 1986 Silvio could no longer stand the separation, and left Jutta to return to the GDR and his child. It took two further years of standing at Checkpoint Charlie on most days, whatever the weather, holding up signs in German or English with messages like Give me back my children or My children are held captive in the DDR [sic] for Jutta to finally embarrass the GDR government into handing over her daughters, then aged 15 and 17 – through Dr Vogel’s office, of course. As their mother said, this release had nothing to do with high-level political contacts, but was brought about exclusively by her unrelenting campaign of vigils at the checkpoint, her hunger strike and petitions she had signed. For once, an individual had publicly faced down the GDR dictatorship – but at what cost!
To say that she was lucky seems incredibly insensitive, yet the fate of many of the women in Hoheneck before her is far worse. In 1946 a 20-year-old woman named Ursula Hoffmann, whose 56-year-old mother had been raped by two Soviet soldiers, was arrested by the NKVD/MVD and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where she fell in love with a Russian guard. How they managed to be alone in such an overcrowded place of misery is impossible to imagine, but Ursula found herself pregnant and, when this could not be hidden, she was put into interrogation. She refused to reveal the name of the father but he confessed to the crime of sexual relations with a German woman in order to save her further suffering. For this, he was sentenced to seven years in the Siberian Gulag.
Ursula gave birth in Torgau prison to a son she named Alexander. The child had no legal existence, no birth certificate, no ration entitlement and there were, of course, no provisions for feminine hygiene in Torgau. Even what children’s clothes existed had to be made by the mothers from rags. But Ursula’s life deteriorated further when a number of mothers with children and babies were transported in nightmare conditions to Hoheneck, where they were soon separated from their children, even those still at the breast. Under an arrangement piloted by Elle Kurtz of the Saxony SED administration and approved by State Secretary of the Interior Ministry Hans Warnke and Käthe Kern of the Ministry of Work and Health, the children were first placed in a hospital, which could not obtain rations nor clothing or shoes for them because they did not legally exist. From there, most were despatched to children’s homes to be brought up as ‘proper SED socialists’ while some were given away to politically reliable couples for the same purpose. No contact was allowed between the mothers and their lost children. It was seven years before Ursula was reunited with her son, but their time together was limited as she died at the age of 41 from the consequences of her imprisonment.13
Notes
1. S. Hattig, S. Klewin, C. Liebold and J. Morré, Stasi-Gefängnis Bautzen II 1956−1989, Dresden, Sandstein 2008, pp. 152−3 (abridged)
2. Ibid, pp. 137–8 (abridged)
3. Schönbohm, Two Armies, p. 162 (author’s italics)
4. Ibid
5. Hattig et al., Stasi-Gefängnis Bautzen II, p. 172 (abridged)
6. Hattig et al., Stasi-Gefängnis Bautzen II, pp. 188−91, 203 (abridged)
7. V. Lengsfeld in Knabe, Gefangen in Hohenschönhausen, pp. 318–19, 324 (abridged)
8. Ibid, pp. 334–46 (abridged)
9. Hattig et al., Stasi-Gefängnis Bautzen II, p. 94
10. See on www.youtube.com under ‘Tausche Ostagent gegen Westagent (2/2) Endstation Glienicker Brücke’
11. Article in Berliner Zeitung, 1 September 2008
12. Die Frau vom Checkpoint Charlie, director M. Alexandre, Arte-TV, 8 October 2007
13. Alexander Latotsky wrote a book about his experiences entitled Kindheit hinter Stacheldraht (A Childhood behind Barbed Wire), Leipzig, Forum. An English-language summary may be found at http://alex.latotsky.de/Emystory.htm
6
THE NEW CLASS ENEMY
Class warfare was a basic strategy of all the communist governments, conducted against the bourgeoisie, landowners, businessmen and -women, intellectuals and even peasants who worked hard and cultivated more ground than others. In 1981 the MfS created a new class enemy to add to the list: teenagers and young adults, both single and married. This was done quite officially at its annual strategy meeting. Because they had only themselves to look after, young GDR citizens were beginning to take liberties and resented their confinement in less than half a country run by grey men wearing grey suits – and a few grey women – with equally grey minds. Having learned something of the freedom available to their coevals in the Bundesrepublik, they wanted some of it for themselves.
There had, naturally, been some students and other young persons who fell foul of the NKVD immediately after the war and of the Stasi after its creation. Particularly at risk were the informal groups of young friends who, after the building of the Berlin Wall, dug tunnels under it and invented other ways of smuggling friends out of the GDR. Hiding a girlfriend in the boot of a sympathetic foreigner’s car and hoping to get her past the guards and sniffer dogs at one of the few remaining checkpoints was a method that failed on more than one occasion, resulting in long years of imprisonment for all concerned. Considering that ‘flight from the republic’ was a statutory crime under the perverted justice system imposed by the SED,1 it is amazing that some young people with many different motivations still took similar risks in the knowledge that they would be sentenced to several years’ imprisonment, if caught.
A different case – even more innocent – is that of Miriam Weber, dug up by Australian writer Anna Funder when researching her book Stasiland.2 Miriam was 16 during the Prague Spring and thought it wrong that the Stasi broke up peaceful demonstrations with fire hoses, beating and arresting people. She and a friend determined to protest. Knowing that all typewriters were identifiable to the Stasi, they bought a child’s printing set of loose letters to be inserted into a frame and then pressed on an inked pad, with which they made leaflets to distribute around Leipzig one night, carefully wearing gloves to ensure they left no fingerprints. A full
-scale investigation was launched, with extensive questioning of hundreds of young people until a search of Miriam’s home revealed a few of the letters they had missed when throwing the ‘evidence’ away. Arrested and placed separately in solitary confinement for a month, the girls were broken by each being told the other had confessed. They were released pending a full trial – and every child’s printing set was withdrawn from sale all over the GDR!
Determined not to go back to jail, Miriam took a train to Berlin and scouted the crossing points before concluding they were too dangerous. On the way home she noticed a stretch of the line running parallel to a West German line, with just the boundary fence in between. She got off the train and walked through some allotments up to the fence. With a ladder taken from an allotment shed she climbed up to see the barrier better: a wire mesh fence topped with barbed wire, a patrol strip, a 20m asphalted roadway for the patrol vehicles and a pathway for the foot patrols.
With the boldness of youth, she climbed the fence, lacerating her hands badly and getting caught for some time until breaking free. Crossing the roadway she saw a wire about one metre from the ground and supposed it was an alarm. On hands and knees, she crawled under it – to find that it had an Alsatian guard dog chained to it, free to run along its length. Crouching on the ground, she did not move. After a while the dog went away, probably because it was trained to chase a running person, or possibly it lost her scent when an ancient locomotive chugged past, drenching them both with steam. With only a low fence between her and freedom, she hit a trip wire – and that was the end of her escape.
