The History of the Stasi

East Germany's Secret Police, 1945-1990

Jens Gieseke

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782382553
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

A well-balanced and detailed look at the East German Ministry for State Security, the secret police force more commonly known as the Stasi.

"This is an excellent book, full of careful, balanced judgements and a wealth of concisely-communicated knowledge. It is also well written. Indeed, it is the best book yet published on the MfS."— German History

The Stasi stood for Stalinist oppression and all-encompassing surveillance. The "shield and sword of the party, " it secured the rule of the Communist Party for more than forty years, and by the 1980s it had become the largest secret-police apparatus in the world, per capita.

Jens Gieseke tells the story of the Stasi, a feared secret-police force and a highly professional intelligence service. He inquires into the mechanisms of dictatorship and the day-to-day effects of surveillance and suspicion. Masterful and thorough at once, he takes the reader through this dark chapter of German postwar history, supplying key information on perpetrators, informers, and victims. In an assessment of post-communist memory politics, he critically discusses the consequences of opening the files and the outcomes of the Stasi debate in reunified Germany.

A major guide for research on communist secret-police forces, this book is considered the standard reference work on the Stasi.

Chapter 1

ANTIFASCISM—STALINISM—COLD CIVIL WAR

Origins and Influences, 1945 to 1956

East Berlin, 8 February 1950

On the wintery Wednesday evening of 8 February 1950, the representatives of the Provisional Volkskammer of the GDR convened in East Berlin. It was their tenth session since the founding of the republic the previous October. After more than seven hours, just a few minutes past 9:00 p.m., the minister of the interior, Dr. Carl Steinhoff, took the floor and gave a short speech, introducing a bill to expand the East German government, the Council of Ministers, by adding a fifteenth department. There had been repeated bombings of late, claimed Steinhoff, in national industries and on state farms, in transportation and on newly established private farms (Neubauerngehöfte). Spies, subversives, and saboteurs were becoming ever more active: “The detailed reports, whose basic contents you will have gathered from the press, offer proof of the activities of criminal elements in the employ and under the direct guidance of the Anglo-American imperialists and their henchmen.”¹ The Main Administration for the Protection of the National Economy (Hauptverwaltung zum Schutz der Volkswirtschaft) in the Ministry of the Interior was to be transformed into the “Ministry for State Security” in order to put a stop to these criminal activities.

After the minister of the interior it was the representatives’ turn to speak. They refrained from comments, committee discussions, abstentions, and dissenting votes, thereby allowing one of the most momentous decisions in the history of the GDR to be passed in a matter of minutes, and to “great applause,” as the SED’s official organ, the Party daily Neues Deutschland, reported.²

Indeed, in the preceding week these representatives could have read in the newspapers about the sabotage, subversion, and spying that “American imperialism, the chief enemy of our republic and our people,”³ was using to assail the young republic. On 26 January, the Council of Ministers had received detailed reports from state authorities which it passed on to the press. The director of the Central Commission for State Control, Fritz Lange, bemoaned the immense production losses caused by sabotage and fraud emanating from the gentlemen in the West whose businesses had been expropriated and who wanted to force the new “people’s own” enterprises into submission. The director of the East German criminal police, Chief Inspector August Mayer, described fires, especially in the countryside, seemingly due to negligence, but which he claimed were really caused by wealthy peasants who were out to harm the mayors, functionaries, and above all the beneficiaries of land reform, the “new farmers” (Neubauer). The most strident in tone was the general inspector of the Main Administration for the Protection of the National Economy, Erich Mielke. He denounced the struggle of “gangsters and murderers”⁴ against the GDR. Terror and espionage organizations, steered by the West and often run by old Nazi cadre, were blowing up production sites under the orders of British and American intelligence services, he claimed, agitating for war with incendiary pamphlets, planning for the assassination of East German functionaries, and inciting innocent youths. Mielke had one solution to offer:

Do the facts not force us to take action and put an end to the doings of these hostile elements? The Constitution of the German Democratic Republic says in Article 6: “Incitement to the boycott of democratic institutions and organizations, incitement to the murder of democratic politicians, the propagation of religious, racial, and national hatred, military propaganda and the incitement to war, and all other acts directed against equality of rights are offenses according to the Criminal Code.” To preserve the full effectiveness of our Constitution it is necessary to put this article into practice through the creation of suitable organs for waging a battle against agents, saboteurs, and diversionists, as well as through relevant criminal laws which give the judiciary the possibility to justly punish the perpetrators apprehended and found guilty by these organs.⁵

It was some time before more detailed laws would come into force, but the “incitement to boycott” article cited by Mielke was the blanket clause that would serve in the ensuing years to put real or supposed enemies of the GDR behind bars or even on the scaffold. A day after Mielke’s allusion to an impending intensification of the struggle against “enemies of the state,” the SED’s official newspaper finally announced what the Volkskammer would pass just a few days later: the government of the GDR had resolved to establish a Ministry for State Security to put a stop to the insidious activities of enemies of the republic.⁶

The Provisional Volkskammer passed the law quickly and eagerly. This body, having originated in the German People’s Council (Deutscher Volksrat), which in turn had merely been constituted on the basis of a previously determined, unified list of candidates, was by no means a parliament chosen by free elections, but purely a body of yes-men for the Soviet Union’s Deutschlandpolitik, its policy toward Germany. Nevertheless, the circumstances surrounding the establishment of the MfS were anything but self-evident, even under the prevailing conditions.

The speaker of the Provisional Volkskammer, Johannes Dieckmann (LDPD), expressed doubts about its legality, as the bill, unlike the law on the establishment of the Provisional Government on 7 October 1949, did not mention the new cabinet members by name. Mentioning the names, he argued, was necessary according to the Constitution of the GDR, Article 94, which stipulated that the cabinet and “each of its members require the confidence of the Volkskammer for the conduct of office.”⁷ Yet the legal advisors in the Council of Ministers apparently preferred not to mention any names, deciding that, if need be, a vote of no confidence of the Volkskammer would be sufficient once the government had appointed the minister and state secretary—otherwise there was reason to believe that the confidence required by the Constitution was given.

The actual appointments were made about one week later. On 16 February 1950, Walter Ulbricht, in his capacity as deputy minister-president of the GDR, appointed two veteran Communists, Wilhelm Zaisser and Erich Mielke, to the positions of minister and state secretary, respectively. With that a further, albeit primarily symbolic, focus had been set. The carefully calculated balance of parties in the Democratic Bloc hitherto adhered to in forming the government had suddenly shifted, the majority of cabinet members now coming from the SED. On 24 February, East German President Wilhelm Pieck swore in Zaisser and Mielke. Only on this occasion did the public learn who was to head the new ministry.

The appointments to the new ministry degraded Minister of the Interior Carl Steinhoff to the role of bystander. The real power was now vested in a reliable Communist underground cadre, individuals who had long since determined domestic and police policy in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the GDR anyway: Zaisser as the former minister of the interior of Saxony-Anhalt, then as director of the Main Administration for Training (Hauptverwaltung Ausbildung) in the Ministry of the Interior (MdI), responsible for the building up of protomilitary units; and Mielke as the vice president of the German Administration of the Interior and director of the Main Administration for Protection of the National Economy. Both men had most recently served as deputies to the minister of the interior. Steinhoff, by contrast, as an erstwhile Social Democrat, doctor of jurisprudence, experienced Prussian ministry official, and former minister-president of Brandenburg, was mainly just a figurehead in the new government, despite his loyalty to the SED. He was soon relegated to the sidelines entirely, losing his seat as a candidate member of the Politbüro just a few months later and thus visibly demoted relative to Zaisser, who in being appointed head of the MfS became part of the Party’s highest administrative body and hence occupied a higher position in the SED hierarchy. In 1952, with the Ministry of the Interior being expanded into the umbrella institution for the remilitarization of the GDR, Steinhoff was forced to abandon his ministerial office altogether, being shunted off to a chair of administrative law at Humboldt University in Berlin.

Thus the founding of the Ministry for State Security of the GDR was a highly symbolic act, despite the attempts to play it off as a kind of self-defense against the supposedly relentless attacks and harassment of British and American “imperialism” and its West German minions. It signaled that, for all its borrowings from the practices of German parliamentarism, the aim here was clearly different: the transformation of the GDR into a “people’s democracy” of the Stalinist type and alignment of its political system to the power structures of the Soviet Union.

Though none of the members of the Provisional Volkskammer spoke out against this momentous step, some voted on the new course of the government with their feet—such as former Saxon finance minister and CDU delegate Gerhard Rohner, whose mandate expired on this “great day in the Volkskammer,”⁸ having opted, like so many bourgeois and social-democratic politicians, to leave the GDR. Others resigned themselves to the situation, such as Deputy Minister-President Otto Nuschke, likewise a member of the Eastern CDU. Two years later, on 19 September 1952, when asked by a journalist in Bonn whether the State Security Service was subordinate to the government of the GDR, he answered, as aptly as unconstitutionally: “No, it is an authority in its own right. This is commensurate to its great importance and to the difficult circumstances we have to reckon with.”⁹

The founding of the MfS was not the only sign of a tightening of the reins in domestic politics. In early January, the director of the Party Training Department (Abteilung Parteischulung) in the Executive Committee of the SED, Professor Kurt Hager, declared in Neues Deutschland that “heightened vigilance” was the foremost task of party training. He compared supposed plans of the Japanese to use germ warfare against China with the alleged machinations of former Hungarian foreign minister László Rajk and the second-highest Bulgarian Communist Party functionary, Kostov. Accused of espionage and forming fascist sabotage troops, both men were sentenced to death in show trials then executed—Rajk in October, Traycho Kostov in December 1949. Hager threatened: “Can one assume that the Anglo-American warmongers will be less aggressive and perfidious towards the German Democratic Republic? To assume this would be an unpardonable, even downright criminal folly.”¹⁰ He mentioned high-placed politicians arrested just weeks earlier in Saxony-Anhalt: the minister for economic affairs, Leo Herwegen (CDU), as well as the former Social Democratic ministry official Willi Brundert (SED), who were accused of making off with 100 million marks worth of assets from expropriated enterprises. Just a few months later, in March 1950, they were both sentenced to long prison terms. The parallels drawn by Hager were clear. They indicated that bloc politicians and former Social Democrats would continue to be the targets of political persecution. The high phase of Stalinism had begun in the GDR, in which even the highest Communist functionaries could be the victims of purges on trumped-up charges of being fascist, imperialist, or Titoist agents and spies.

Looking Back: Soviet Persecution in the SBZ

The advent of the Ministry for State Security was not the beginning of political persecution in the GDR and its predecessor, the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ). In the five years after the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich, it was primarily the security organs of the Soviet occupying power itself that—under varied circumstances—engaged in the purges and political persecution that informed the experiences of the people living under it.

As early as 1945, in the course of its military advance, the Soviet Union began “cleansing” the territories it occupied. It agreed in principle with the Western Allies that Nazis and war criminals needed to be identified and punished, and that the roots and foundations of the Nazi regime should be eradicated from German society. There were disagreements from the very start, though, as to how this was to be done. Concrete objectives differed due to varied social and theoretical assumptions about the nature of National Socialism. According to the Marxist-Leninist version, the Nazi regime was a form of fascism, which in turn was just a variety of capitalism. The USSR therefore concentrated their de-Nazification efforts from the very beginning on the economic basis of the Third Reich, whereas the Western Allies focused on the political system in the narrower sense. These different approaches were also due to vastly different experiences of war in a very concrete way. Unlike the war it waged in the West, the Third Reich had conducted a racially motivated war of extermination against the Soviet Union, with devastating effects. The massacre of the civilian population and the systematic starvation of more than half of the nearly 5.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, in blatant disregard of the conventions of war and international law, had a formative influence—beyond mere political differences—on the way Soviet troops and commanders, as opposed to, say, the U.S. Army, dealt with the Germans after the war. Moreover, the Soviet approach visibly and increasingly reflected the Stalinist practice of persecuting all manner of domestic political “enemies,” a practice which had claimed the lives of millions in the Soviet Union ever since the 1930s. Communist ideology, the barbaric experiences of war, and the secret police’s habitualized practices of Stalinist persecution all made for a different starting position in the Soviet-occupied part of Germany as compared to the Western zones.

The widening differences in de-Nazification practices were evident immediately after the war, first and foremost in the different forms of camps set up for captured Germans. Soviet POW camps differed drastically from those of the Western Allies and resembled its system of forced-labor camps, the Gulags. In reaction to the Nazi war of extermination, the Soviet Union made no distinction between Wehrmacht soldiers, SS and SA members, or concentration-camp and prison guards, treating them all as prisoners of war. The majority of them had to work as forced laborers in the Soviet Union until 1948–49, as a kind of reparation. Soviet captivity went beyond the standard framework of international law and served as a kind of punishment against Nazi “ideological warriors” (Weltanschauungskrieger). Moreover, Soviet military tribunals condemned about 15,000 to 20,000 prisoners of war as war criminals, meting out long camp sentences in often arbitrary proceedings. The last 6,500 of these captives returned to Germany only after Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s famous visit to Moscow in 1955. The uncertain fate of POWs, who often had to wait many years before being allowed to give any sign of life to their next of kin, put a strain on relations between the German populace and “the Russians.”

The practices of Soviet security organs in the SBZ made for even more grim experiences, especially in the notorious “special camps” for “active” Nazis and war criminals, as well as increasingly for political opponents. To this day it is still a matter of debate who was interned in these camps and to what extent they were really the perpetrators the Soviets claimed them to be or whether they were merely innocent victims of Soviet despotism locked up behind barbed wire. According to the Soviet basic decree of 18 April 1945, that was instrumental in setting up these camps, internment in the camps was initially intended as a kind of preventive detention for dangerous civilians. Thus the main targets were supposed “forces of diversion [i.e., subversion],” whom the Soviets feared would act as “werewolves” in the hinterland of the Red Army, carrying out acts of terror and reprisal, as well as the mass of low-ranking Nazi functionaries: Ortsgruppenleiter (local party group leaders), Zellenobleute (cell heads) of the NSDAP and their secondary organizations, etc. There were similar camps in the Western zones, albeit with a distinctly different thrust. Whereas severely incriminated SS perpetrators made up the bulk of prisoners in the American camps, such men did not figure prominently in the Soviet camps, being treated as simple prisoners of war and generally not winding up in special camps. For this reason alone the inmates of these special internment camps tended not to be Nazi war criminals. They were mostly “active” Nazi Party members and low-ranking functionaries, usually somewhat advanced in age. About three-quarters of the prisoners in Buchenwald Camp No. 5, for instance, were over forty years old, and 40 to 50 percent were members or functionaries of the NSDAP. The recollection of many former inmates that there were hardly any “real” Nazis there is reflective of this difference. Added to this were adolescents picked up for being “werewolves” or possessing a gun, and not least of all the victims of arbitrary denunciations and arrests. From 1945 to 1950 the Soviet security organs interned about 154,000 Germans and 35,000 foreigners in special camps. By October 1945 alone they had arrested about 82,000 Germans. One in three of them died during internment, whereas the death rates in Western camps were no higher than in the population at large.

Despite detaining different kinds of prisoners, the Soviet Union could rely at first on a kind of inter-Ally consensus. As long as it was instituting ad-hoc measures against the threat of uncontrolled attacks by the presumably ubiquitous system supporters of the Third Reich, it could claim a certain legitimacy for its internment practices, treating them as anti-Nazi protective measures. Allied internment policies went separate ways once and for all in 1946–47, however. Diet and housing in the Western camps were equivalent to the (rather low) levels of the overall population in war-ravaged Germany—in other words, they were relatively ordered and humane for the most part. The occupiers’ obligation to care for their internees sometimes even resulted in a higher standard of living for those in the camps than for those outside. What’s more, during this phase the Western Allies released most of their internees if their Nazi involvement was deemed insignificant, or instituted court proceedings against them in the case of seriously incriminated individuals.

The Soviet leadership, on the other hand, let its malnourished captives vegetate under deplorable living conditions. At the start of the harsh winter of 1946–47, they lowered the daily rations for most foodstuffs to the minimum level of the Soviet Gulags, resulting in a wave of mass deaths due to hunger and disease. Faced with foreseeable consequences, even camp commanders and officers of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) pleaded in the fall of 1946 for releasing 35,000 of the 80,000 detainees, given their minimal complicity in Nazi crimes and the low security risk they posed. But Stalin turned this suggestion down, demanding instead that 27,500 able-bodied prisoners be sent to the USSR as forced laborers to replace debilitated POWs. The fact that camp doctors could not even round up 5,000 able-bodied prisoners speaks volumes about the disastrous conditions.

The Moscow leadership wouldn’t budge, neither allowing the internees to be sentenced for their supposed or actual crimes, indeed not even taking the trouble to launch investigations in most cases, nor setting them free in obvious cases of lesser incrimination. Internment was, in effect, unlimited punishment without trial. Many prisoners perished from starvation and epidemics. To a certain extent this stubborn refusal to put an end to the deaths in special camps seems inexplicable even from Moscow’s perspective, the Soviet occupiers having sent out a deliberate signal in August 1947, in the form of Order 201, that de-Nazification was coming to a close in the civilian sector of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction. Ten Years and Forty-five Days
• Chapter 1. Antifascism—Stalinism—Cold Civil War: Origins and Influences, 1945 to 1956
• Chapter 2. The Safest GDR in the World
• Chapter 3. The Unofficial Collaborator
• Chapter 4. Blanket Surveillance?
• Chapter 5. Resistance—Opposition—Persecution
• Chapter 6. Wolf and Co.: MfS Operations Abroad
• Chapter 7. Final Crisis and Collapse, 1989–90
• Chapter 8. Legacy—Aufarbeitung—Culture of Memory: The Second Life of the Stasi
• Appendices
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index