Daughters of the KGB (6 page)

Yet, the satisfaction of revenge is so much greater when suffering is inflicted on sentient people, rather than inanimate things. Long after the initial killings and rape had ended, human victims continued to be hunted down in all four occupation zones. High on the list were Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS personnel who had gone to ground, members of the Allgemeine-SS, civilians who had held office in the administration of occupied territory, members of the Nationalistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei
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(NSDAP) – although this had been compulsory for many people – and grandfathers of 60 years and older who had been forcibly conscripted into the Volkssturm
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under threat of execution for foot-draggers. Sent into the front lines often without uniforms or weapons, the gallows humour of the last weeks of the war portrayed them as Germany’s most precious resource because they had ‘silver in their hair, gold in their teeth and lead in their legs’. Hitlerjugend youths of 16 and younger, accused of being ‘werewolf’ stay-behinds, were sentenced to between ten and twenty-five years in prison.
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German friends of the author in Wedding, a working-class and traditionally Communist
Stadtviertel
of Berlin, recounted how two terrified unarmed boys aged 15 had been chased by Russian soldiers up five flights of stairs in their apartment building and onto the roof before being flung to their deaths in the street below during the fighting of May 1945.

In any war, these things happen in the heat of battle. What was different about the Soviet occupation of Germany was that, following at a safe distance behind the combat troops were detachments of Laventi Beria’s NKVD troops, whose function was to arrest, imprison, torture and/or execute
any
German persons who might resist Stalin’s plan to assume total power in the Soviet Zone. Perhaps surprisingly to readers unfamiliar with Kremlin paranoia, this included members of the KPD – the German Communist Party – who had endured years in Nazi hard-labour concentration camps as punishment for their political sympathies. The ‘crime’ for which they now had to be punished again was their suffering under the Nazis for membership of the KPD, which might enable them to return to political life, usurping positions of authority which Stalin reserved for his puppets who had spent the war years under strict control inside Russia.

After spending more than a decade in the USSR, where he survived Stalin’s purges that claimed the majority of KPD refugees, the veteran communist Erich Mielke returned to Berlin in 1945 with NKVD General Ivan Serov, based in the Soviet occupation forces’ HQ at the south-eastern Berlin suburb of Karlshorst. The chaos of the country to which he returned cannot now be imagined. In addition to all the men locked away in POW camps, some 13 million German-speaking people, mainly the elderly, women and children who had been expelled from East Prussia, Poland and Czechoslovakia were homeless refugees in what remained of the Reich.

Neither then nor later was much divulged about the way Mielke had spent the war years. It seems that this is because he was a much-decorated NKVD commissar attached to Soviet partisan bands, whose function was the interrogation and execution of captured German personnel – a story that would not win any votes in eastern Germany. Although initially given the comparatively lowly rank of police inspector, Mielke was ordered by Serov in 1947 to set up a secret police force closely modelled on the NKVD, which he knew so well. Called Kommissariat 5, it tracked down and arrested so many thousands of people with no Nazi connections, yet who
might
resist the implantation of a Stalinist state, that it was necessary to reopen eleven of the Nazi concentration and death camps, including Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, less than three months after the Allgemeine-SS guards had left. According to Soviet records the 122,000 Germans incarcerated there included many members of the anti-Nazi German political parties, over a third of whom died of starvation or disease during confinement.
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But where could all these people be ‘investigated’ and forced to confess at show trials, to terrify the rest of the population? Totalitarian states like to centralise everything but, after the carpet bombing by British and American air forces, the centre of Berlin was a wasteland of shattered buildings and piles of rubble – the rubble had gone but it was still a wasteland when the author was posted there during his military service thirteen years later. However, a couple of miles north-east of the devastated city centre at Hohenschönhausen a large complex of buildings was still standing, more or less intact. It had been used by the NSDAP Volkswohlfahrt welfare organisation as a canteen where thousands of bombed-out families were supplied with a hot meal every day.

Requisitioned by the NKVD and swiftly surrounded by a 3m-high palisade erected using forced labour, and with this topped by barbed wire and punctuated by searchlights and watch-towers, the site was designated Special Camp No. 3. At various times it held over 4,000 inmates, crammed into inadequate facilities with insufficient food or even blankets in the unheated buildings. The living conditions, the violence of the interrogations and the prisoners’ knowledge that a painful and unpleasant fate awaited them combined to kill off an estimated 3,000 people.
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Cartloads of bodies were dumped daily into bomb craters with no identification. Survivors were put to hard labour constructing a partly underground detention facility, known as ‘the U-boat’, where suspects could be held in extremely stressful solitary confinement whilst being ‘investigated’ under torture. The unheated cells had no windows and some were bare of any fittings except a high threshold so that they could be flooded with cold water, in which the prisoners had to sit or lie when no longer able to keep on their feet. Around the perimeter, bilingual notices in German and Russian warned passers-by that this was a forbidden zone, near which they should not linger.

Since all authority in the Soviet Zone was vested in Stalin’s occupying forces, these measures did not need to be sanctioned by any German law. Instead, NKVD proclamation 00315 dated 18 April 1945, required Soviet-occupied German territory to be ‘cleansed of spies, dissidents, terrorists, Nazi party members, police and secret service operatives, officials and other hostile elements’.
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The Russian zone of occupation that became the German Democratic Republic.

Hohenschönhausen was the ideal place to extract false confessions from people who had committed no crime, but were considered ‘hostile elements’ by the NKVD, after which military tribunals sentenced them to from ten to twenty-five years’ hard labour – or death in some cases. The victims included some ex-Nazis, but also activists of German political parties including KPD – and also Soviet personnel accused by their own commissars of failing to toe the party line. Most were cleared of any crime after the German reunification in 1989. A fresh wave of arrests took place when the Soviet occupation authorities decided to eliminate the most popular left-wing party, the Socialist Democratic Party of Germany (SDP), by merging it on 21 April 1946 with the KPD in a new party called the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) or Socialist Unity Party. It was thought that the relabelling would avoid the embarrassment of Moscow being seen by the world as imposing a Communist government on its German satellite. In the ensuing elections, closely overseen by the Soviets in a very undemocratic manner, the SED claimed a massive majority, leaving a few seats in the new parliament for other parties, in a pretence of democracy. However, in Berlin, which was under Four-Power occupation after France was also allocated a sector of the capital and a zone of occupation carved out of the American and British sectors and zones, this manipulation was not possible. There, in free and secret votes, the SED polled less than half as many as the SDP.

The three western zones of occupied Germany became the Bundesrepublik or Federal Republic on 23 May 1949, prompting Moscow on 7 October 1949 to change its zone of occupation into ‘the German Democratic Republic’ (GDR), to which entity authority over eastern Germany was gradually transferred. The GDR was officially an independent state although transparently controlled by the USSR, which kept its armies of occupation there for more than four decades, facing off the NATO
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forces in the West. On 8 February 1950 responsibility for internal security was vested in the newly created Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS) headed by another Moscow appointee, Wilhelm Zaisser, with Erich Mielke as his deputy. Their massive headquarters building on the Normannenstrasse in Berlin-Lichtenberg is now a museum to the Stasi’s reign of terror that lasted until the fall of the Wall in 1989. In 1951 the MfS took over from the NKVD its interrogation and imprisonment premises including Hohenschönhausen and ‘the Lindenhotel’ prison in Potsdam.

What sort of person chose to work for the MfS? Hans-Joachim Geyer was a former NSDAP member employed by the West German intelligence agency Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) as a courier when arrested in East Berlin. Instead of resisting interrogation, he volunteered to become a double agent for the Stasi and betray all his contacts. Released, he was well remunerated by his new masters in addition to his BND salary for betraying more than 100 BND agents in the GDR from December 1952 for twelve months until the scale of his betrayals blew his cover. He continued to draw his Stasi salary in consideration of past services. After his death, the MfS paid his wife a pension and put his two sons through extended education, including medical school. Geyer was summed up as a family man with no political beliefs, no drink problem and no other vices, either. Exactly the sort of man of whom the Stasi management approved.
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In the Soviet Zone, the predilection for show trials shared by the Nazi and Soviet regimes during the 1930s was taken to new heights. A typical example was in June 1952, when a group of students who had been helping refugees escape from the GDR were put on trial and labelled ‘cold-blooded terrorists and border provocateurs’ in
Neues Deutschland
, the official newspaper of the SED.
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The intention of the show trials was to demonstrate to the population and the world that the SED had total control of the GDR and could punish any resistance to its regime.

The SED Central Committee – which was effectively the government of the GDR – decided to tackle the severe economic problems caused by the crippling reparations to the USSR and the SED’s rigid planned-economy approach to reindustrialisation of the GDR. Higher taxes were imposed, many state-controlled prices rose abruptly and a 10 per cent increase of work norms was announced, without extra pay. By June 1953 even the Soviet government was so alarmed at reports of unrest in the GDR that its president Walter Ulbricht was summoned to Moscow and ordered by the new chairman of the Council of Ministers, Georgi Malenkov, to release the pressure on the suffering population of the GDR before it exploded in open unrest.

Malenkov’s
Diktat
came too late. On 16 June eighty building workers downed tools in protest on the Stalinallee – one of East Berlin’s main thoroughfares, where the impressive facades of buildings had been erected to make a background for filmed and televised parades, but with no premises behind them – rather like the main street of a western town in a cowboy film. Strikes were forbidden in the GDR, where they were labelled ‘sabotage’. The downing of tools was reported immediately on the American-financed radio stations RIAS Berlin and Radio Free Europe, which beamed Western news across the Iron Curtain. What part these broadcasts played in the escalation is open to debate, although a number of Western sources list some very high-ranking US politicians and military ‘coincidentally visiting’ the divided city at the time. The fact is that by the following morning, nearly a half-million striking workers were in the streets of Berlin and 150 other towns and cities,
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waving banners and chanting demands for the government to resign. They believed their safety was guaranteed by the US, British and French garrisons in the Allied sectors of Berlin and the presence there of Western reporters and camera crews. Hundreds actually crossed into the western sectors to plead for armed support that was not forthcoming, despite recommendations of a number of Allied officials that arms be supplied.

Soviet High Commissioner Vladimir Semyonov and Marshal Andrei Grechko, who commanded the occupation forces, despatched middle-rank SED functionaries to several cities in an attempt to calm things down while Ulbricht and the other SED top brass spent 17 and 18 June cowering under Russian protection in the Red Army HQ at Berlin-Karlshorst. Some 20,000 Soviet occupation troops with T-34 tanks and armoured personnel carriers, plus 8,000 men of the GDR’s Volkspolizei-Bereitschaften or paramilitary riot police, were deployed to suppress the demonstrations with water cannons, rifle butts and bullets. In Karlshorst, Russian intelligence operations now lay with the Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (MGB) or Soviet Ministry of State Security. The senior MGB officer commented, ‘[The unrest in the GDR] was the reaction of people to the blunders of the country’s leadership. Moreover, it was inadmissible to use tanks in such a situation.’
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In fact, tanks were in the streets to fight the demonstrators but the gunners usually fired over their heads. Semyonov also picked up a broadcast from RIAS to the effect that there was no longer a viable government in the GDR, and commented to Ulbricht and the other nervous leaders of the SED that this was almost true. The background to this is that Stalin’s death three months earlier had left Beria, Malenkov and other Party heavyweights arguing that they should solve one problem by abandoning the GDR. When Khrushchev gained control of the Praesidium, that was one of the charges levelled against Malenkov.
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