Daughters of the KGB (8 page)

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

C
REATING A
N
EW
C
LASS
OF
C
RIMINALS

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: