Daughters of the KGB (40 page)

P
LATES

The
streng geheim
telex from Potsdam to Stasi Centre announcing the detention of the author.

The author in the exercise courtyard indicating the window of the solitary confinement cell he occupied.

Facade of the Lindenstrasse interrogation prison in Potsdam, now a memorial to all who suffered there. Only the bars on ground floor windows still hint at the suffering that went on there.

When the Red Army marched into Berlin in 1945, this is what it looked like after months of carpet bombing.

The Fuhrer of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler had committed suicide in the bunker, saying that the German people deserved to be wiped out because they had not been strong enough to beat the Allies in the war.

Sitting safely in the Kremlin was Josef Stalin who planned to use the survivors as pawns in his geopolitical chess game for world domination. During the war, several thousand German Communists had been trained in the USSR to turn the Soviet Zone of Occupation into a prison state.

It was a world of the very old, children and women, most of whom had been raped, like these refugees trudging across the Potsdammer Platz. All healthy men were in Allied POW camps, so there was no one to protect them.

At Yalta in February 1945 Stalin got everything his own way. US President Roosevelt was convinced Stalin was a gentleman who wanted nothing but victory. Prime Minister Winston Churchill knew Stalin’s game but Roosevelt would not listen to him.

At Potsdam in July-August 1945 (left), Roosevelt was dead, replaced by Harry Truman, unprepared to handle US–USSR relations. Churchill was in despair. Before the Conference ended, he was voted out of office and replaced by Clement Atlee. Stalin had won game, set and match.

Despite undertaking at Yalta to allow the populations of the Soviet-occupied states to hold free elections after the end of the war, Stalin had ‘educated’ thousands of their nationals as Communists in the USSR. Their job was to return home with the Red Army and impose Communist governments and secret police forces modelled on the NKVD in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania. This gave him a vast buffer zone between the western democracies and the USSR.

In June 1948 Stalin attempted to drive the Western Allies out of their agreed sectors of Berlin by blocking all access by road, rail and canal – and cutting off electricity supplies. To avoid a third world war, the Allies created the airlift, ferrying into the airfields of the three western sectors of the divided city everything from toilet rolls to toffees and children’s shoes to coal. Seaplanes even brought cargo to Berlin’s lakes. In May 1949, Stalin capitulated and access was restored.