Revolution 1989 (52 page)

Jan Lässig, a New Forum organiser from Leipzig, said that over the last few years he was used to a few dozen people turning up at meetings - familiar faces belonging to various groups. ‘Now, suddenly, so many people were joining our movement that it was not simple. A thousand people would come to a meeting and they wanted to do something. And we didn’t really have a programme, a concept of what do.’
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Monday night demonstrations began again at the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig, after a break for August. East Germany’s second city was choking to death from neglect. The regime was allowing it to rot. It had once been a big industrial centre of more than 700,000 people, but around 20 per cent of Leipzig’s population had deserted the city over the last five years. Most had gone to other towns in the GDR, though recently significant numbers had headed to the West. Outside the city centre, scores of abandoned shops were boarded up, houses were derelict and the roads were full of potholes. It resembled an urban wasteland. There was a small and still-beautiful centre, with many impressive buildings circled by a broad inner ring road. This was where the demonstrators lit candles and marched for an hour or so, invariably in silence, beginning at around 6 p.m. They were a solemn sight, calling for peace and disarmament. Occasionally demonstrators would hold placards protesting about the environment.

Even by East German standards, Leipzig was a filthy place. Millions of tons of sulphur dioxide were spewed into the atmosphere nearby each year. The water in the reservoirs and rivers was massively polluted. An official government report, kept strictly secret, revealed that the city’s water supply contained twenty substances available only on doctor’s prescription, and ten times West German levels of mercury. Journalists and scientists who had investigated the high levels of cancers, respiratory ailments and skin diseases around the city were arrested when they established that the problems were caused by the nearby lignite mines which produced more than two-thirds of East Germany’s electricity.

From September, thousands of people who had never attended the demonstrations before joined them. Leipzig became the focus of opposition throughout the country. The regime had no answer. Honecker’s illness left a power vacuum that was never filled. On 18 September around 15,000 people attended the Monday night march that started from the Nikolaikirche. It was the largest unofficial demonstration in East Germany since the troubles in 1953. As usual it was an entirely peaceful procession by candlelight, though slightly more noisy than before. Police and plain-clothes Stasi men arrested around a hundred demonstrators they had heard shouting anti-regime slogans. The police vans that carried them away drove straight into the crowd, badly injuring around a dozen people. The incident opened a rift within the ruling Party. Most of the leadership was unwilling to begin a violent confrontation with the demonstrators - especially three weeks before the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the East German state. Huge ceremonies had been planned to celebrate the success of ‘actually existing socialism’, in front of distinguished guests from the entire Communist world who would include Mikhail Gorbachev.

The Stasi chief was one of the few who had the stomach for a fight. Mielke continually urged violent measures ‘to deal with a counter-revolution that’s brewing in the GDR’. In a speech he kept secret from his fellow Party chieftains, he told his highest-ranking Stasi officers to take tough measures against protesters: ‘Hostile opposing forces and groups have already achieved a measure of power and are using all methods to effect a change in the balance of power.’ He said East Germany now was in a similar position to that of China two months earlier. ‘The situation here now is comparable and must be countered with all means and methods. The Chinese comrades must be lauded. They were able to smother the protest before the situation got out of hand.’ He told some of his commanders, according to his head of counter-intelligence, Rainer Wiegand, that they should prepare a plan to form special squads to attack the demonstrators, split them into three groups and arrest their leaders.

His officers on the ground were telling him that feelings in Leipzig were running high, not only among the demonstrators, but in offices and factories throughout the city. The Stasi commander in Leipzig, Lieutenant-General Siegfried Gehlert, told Mielke: ‘The situation is lousy, Comrade Minister . . . There are many discussions about all the justified - and unjustified - problems that we have. What is particularly relevant is that these lousy currents exist within the Party organisation. As to the question of power, Comrade Minister, we have the situation in hand, but extraordinarily high vigilance is required. From an accident here or there . . . just a spark would be enough to bring about serious problems.’ When, among other Party chieftains he proposed violent measures against the Leipzig protesters, he was voted down.
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Earlier in the summer Erich Honecker had declared: ‘I will not shed a single tear for those who want to leave the country.’ The opposition shed many. ‘There were always good friends who were leaving, people to whom I had been very close,’ said Ulrike Poppe, one of the founders in the mid-1980s of the Democracy Now human rights group. ‘We missed them. On the other hand we could understand why they left, because there were so many reasons why they couldn’t stand being in the GDR. We always thought about how long we could stay and we set ourselves a limit. I said that if I had to go to prison, that would be the time to leave. Or if they took our property away, as we did have a small property, or if they took away the kindergarten that we had organised for children. All of that happened, but we always decided to stay primarily because we felt there were others who wanted the same things as us and we had to stay to keep trying. Somewhere there was always hope.’ After the Hungarians helped to breach the Wall, the main rallying cry at demonstrations was ‘We Are Staying’ and that gave the opposition groups hope.
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Many East Germans still dreamed of leaving the country, though. After the Hungarians opened their border to GDR citizens, Czechoslovakia closed its frontier with Hungary to GDR citizens, following pressure from Berlin. They regretted it quickly. East Germans stranded in Czechoslovakia headed straight to Prague and besieged the West German Embassy, the baroque Lobkovitz Palace in the Castle District of the city. The Czechs did not want a diplomatic incident with East Germany, and its neo-Stalinist leadership had sympathy with the regime in Berlin. But they did not see that it was their problem to police East German refugees. They had tried to prevent the refugees reaching the Embassy, but quickly gave up the attempt. Scores of Trabants were left abandoned on the streets of Prague as around 3,000 people had crammed into the Palace. It was big and elegantly spacious, but not built for anything like that number. The weather was mild, so large numbers could camp out in the large garden. Soon conditions were becoming unpleasant and unhygienic, though the West Germans refused none of the refugees admission.

The Czechoslovak Party chief, Milo Jake, told Berlin that he did not need this problem. He had troubles of his own. Late the previous month riot police had arrested scores of demonstrators in Wenceslas Square as 4,000 people were marking the twenty-first anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion to crush the Prague Spring. Václav Havel had been released from prison at the end of May, after serving about half his original nine-month sentence. Immediately, he continued where he had been interrupted on the day of his arrest, writing about conditions in the country for the Western media. Within a fortnight he had produced a manifesto for the Czech opposition - ‘A Few Short Sentences’ - calling for talks between the opposition and the regime and the release of all political prisoners. Now Havel and other human rights campaigners were demanding that the East Germans be allowed to leave freely for the West.

Among the refugees inside the Embassy was teacher Birgit Spannaus, who had decided to leave because she did not want her daughter to grow up in East Germany. She told nobody that she was going to Czechoslovakia and she bought a return train ticket at the station. As soon as they arrived in Prague she and her daughter headed for the West German Embassy:

She felt full of hope, but never safe, as they waited for the politicians to find a solution.
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Erich Honecker was back at his desk in the third week of September. Surgeons had discovered another cancerous tumour, in his colon. They removed the growth and declared him well enough to take his place at the helm of the forthcoming fortieth anniversary festivities. He began immediate negotiations with the Czechs about the Embassy refugees. Milo Jake told his East German counterpart that the GDR must reach an agreement with the West Germans ‘that will get us Czechs off the hook and your people out of Prague. This is not our concern. We can help, but it has to be done quickly.’ The third party to the deal was Hans Dietrich Genscher, who was in New York attending the UN General Assembly. Reluctantly, Honecker eventually said he was willing to let the ‘traitors’ in the Embassy leave for the West. They could have gone directly to West Germany on normal passenger trains. But Honecker stubbornly insisted that they had to go through East Germany first, so it would look as though the GDR was throwing them out. He demanded that they must leave on sealed trains. While in transit East German officials would formally take their ID papers and withdraw their GDR citizenship from them. It was designed to humiliate them and make it seem as though the regime was still in control of events. An editorial in
Neues Deutschland
, which the Party’s propaganda chief, Joachim Hermann, said was dictated by Honecker personally, stated that ‘by their behaviour they have trampled on all moral values and excluded themselves from our society’.
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Honecker’s Party colleagues knew nothing of the agreement he had concluded with the Czechs and the West Germans. On the evening of Friday 29 September, most of the senior officials were at the State Opera House on Unter den Linden at a gala performance to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of Communist China. Honecker, still visibly in pain but assuring everyone he was fit, summoned them into the ornate Apollo reception room where the Party Secretary told them of ‘information regarding a matter of the highest urgency’. He outlined the plan as though it was a triumph of diplomacy, whereas most of them could see straight away, said Günter Schabowski, that it was a bad mistake. ‘Many of us saw this exodus, organised by ourselves, as evidence of the country’s helplessness.’ From that point on a group within the top rung of the regime realised that it was imperative that Honecker had to be replaced soon. But they did nothing. ‘It was pointless to prevaricate so long. But we did,’ said Schabowski.
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The next day Genscher flew to Prague to tell the refugees about the deal he had negotiated with Honecker. It was one of the most difficult and emotional duties he had ever had to perform. ‘I must say I arrived . . . with my emotions totally churned up,’ Genscher recalled. ‘How do I put this to the people who on the one hand will be overjoyed at being able to leave. But on the other I have to tell them that the journey will pass for several hours through East Germany. Will they accept my assurances of safe passage?’ They realised that they had little choice. They could not stay at the Embassy indefinitely.
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When, early in the afternoon of Monday 2 October, the first few hundred of the refugees were placed on coaches at the start of their journey, the mood was tense. They were driven to one of the small suburban stations outside Prague and told to wait. ‘We waited for a couple of hours until a train arrived, and then there was some panic,’ Birgit Spannaus recalled. ‘At first some people said “We are not going. This is a betrayal. We’re too scared.” A West German official tried to calm us down. He said he would travel with us and each train leaving from Prague would have one of his colleagues aboard, for security reasons.’ Soon after the convoy reached East Germany ‘the train stopped. Two men opened the doors. “Good day, we are from State Security and we’ll collect your identity cards now.” I will never forget how they had to bend down to collect these documents because the people threw them at their feet. The feeling was “you can’t threaten me any more”.’
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East Germans waved and cheered the refugees along the route until the eight sealed trains reached Dresden, the first major city across the border. A trail of torn-up identity papers, East German passports and worthless East Marks littered the side of the track. People had been told they must not greet the refugee trains. More than 1,500 demonstrators, mainly youngsters, ignored the order, broke through police lines and desperately tried to climb on board. The police could barely contain the crowds, which threw bricks and stones. Practically every window in Dresden station was smashed, much of the concourse was destroyed and dozens of people were injured. One protester fell under a refugee train as it left. Both his legs had to be amputated. The demonstrations grew after all the trains had departed. Ordinary factory workers and older people joined the youngsters. They were ordered by the police to disperse but they refused. There was a stand-off for several hours, but, significantly, the police took no further action. At the candle-lit Leipzig protest later that night around 12,000 demonstrators were allowed to march peacefully around the city’s inner ring road.