The Stasi

Myth and Reality

Mike Dennis, Norman Laporte

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138142633
• eBook ISBN: 9781317876557
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The East German Ministry of State Security, popularly known as the Stasi, was one of the largest and most intrusive secret police systems in world history. So extensive was the system of surveillance and control that in any given year throughout the 1970s and 1980s, about one in fifty of the 13 million East German adults were working for the Stasi either as an officer or as an informer.

Drawing on original sources from the Stasi archives and the recollections of contemporary witnesses, The Stasi: Myth and Reality reveals the intricacies of the relationship between the Stasi enforcers, its agents and its targets/victims, and demonstrates how far the Stasi octopus extended its tentacles into people's lives and all spheres of society.

The origins and developments of this vast system of repression are examined, as well as the motivation of the informers and the ways in which they penetrated the niches of East German society. The final chapters assess the ministry's failure to help overcome the GDR's inherent structural defects and demonstrate how the Stasi's bureaucratic procedures contributed to the implosion of the Communist system at the end of the 1980's.

Part I
The Origins and Development of the East German Security Service, 1945–71

Chapter 1
From Weimar Republic to GDR

The KPD Crucible

The role model of the Stasi was the Cheka, the Soviet secret police founded by Felix Dzerzhinsky in 1917. However, the Stasi also saw itself as the heir to the secret apparatus of the German Communist Party (KPD), whose development before 1945 sheds light on some of the traditions which helped to shape the security doctrine and the working methods of the Stasi. The construction of a secret party apparatus was a compulsory condition of membership of the Communist International (Comintern), as set out in the '21 Conditions' of entry adopted by its Second World Congress in 1920. The secret underground structures were originally justified by the expectation that the period of legality enjoyed by foreign communist parties would end as the revolution in the developed western world approached. They also derived from the communists' belief that they belonged to a conspiratorial confraternity, an attitude which would be reinforced by their experiences in the Nazi period. The secret apparatus was initially subdivided into two sections, the Nachrichtendienst (Intelligence Service or N-Group) and the Militärdienst (Military Service or M-Group). The former was responsible for 'special political tasks' and the latter for the organisation of the movement's armed uprising.¹ Although formally subordinate to the KPD's German leadership, in practice they were financed and run by the Moscow-based Executive Committee of the Comintern (ECCI). The domination of Moscow's instructors is illustrated by their role in the preparations for the abortive revolution in October 1923. Soviet military advisers, who were present in force since the occupation of the Ruhr by French and Belgian troops in January 1923, took control of the crucial stages of preparations for the uprising.

¹ Fricke Κ. W. 1984: 17-18.

The failure to ignite a revolution in Germany to overthrow the hated Weimar Republic had a direct impact on the policies of the Comintern, to which the KPD, as a national section, was subordinated. The Comintern, which had always paid close attention to the interests of the Soviet Union, increasingly placed the decisive emphasis on the foreign policy objective of breaking Russian 'encirclement' by the 'imperialist' powers. Germany, which since the Rapallo Treaty (1922) had opened diplomatic and trade relations with Moscow, was central to the Bolsheviks' geopolitical strategy. These developments also had an impact on the function of the KPD's secret apparatus. As the expectation of revolution receded, the M-Group was downscaled; perhaps symbolically, it was renamed the AM (Anti-Military) Group in 1928. The head of the M-Group during these years, Erich Wollenberg, described how the secret apparatus had changed from the military spearhead of a German revolution into a foreign adjunct of department four of the Red Army.² However, with the reorientation in communist policy, the functions of the N-Group were constantly expanded from the mid-1920s to suit the new demands made of the secret apparatus. Above all, these involved spying for the Soviets and eliminating Stalin's opponents in the KPD's factional struggles. For these ends, the N-Group was organisationally divided into two main departments, internal party counterintelligence (Abwehr) and subversion or decomposition (Zersetzung).

² Wollenberg E. 1951: 14; Weber H. 1969: 347-8.

Walter Krivitsky, a senior KGB officer, wrote in his memoir-cum-exposé of Soviet secret service practices that: Out of the ruins of the Communist revolution we built in Germany a brilliant Intelligence Service, the envy of every other nation'.³ Whatever the substance of this claim, the success of the Nazis would demonstrate the limitations of a secret service in achieving a party's broader political goals. Under Hans Kippenberger, the head of the KPD's intelligence service, an extensive spy network extended through the army, police, the government and the political parties. Kippenberger himself was appointed to the Reichstag's defence committee in 1927, furnishing Moscow with insider information.⁴ So-called 'worker correspondents', who officially wrote for the KPD press, also unofficially provided reports on the situation in their factories and industrial branches and on technical developments, from which edited extracts were forwarded to Moscow. By the later 1920s, the communist movement had a large and diverse group of Soviet secret agents, facilitating the penetration of all areas of German society. The suitability and loyalty of prospective agents in the service of Soviet intelligence was put to the test in a series of minor assignments.⁵

³ Krivitsky W. G. 1992: 59-60.

⁴ Fischer R. 1948: 510-11.

⁵ Ibid., 512-14; Dallin D. J. 1956: 95-9.

During the second half of the 1920s, the N-Group played an important part in the party's all-consuming factional struggles, in which Stalin's opponents were purged from the party parallel to developments in the CPSU. During this process, the installation of a tightly centralised structure on the model of the Bolsheviks' 'democratic centralism' played a crucial role. For this purpose, the creation of a new highly disciplined group of functionaries trained in the methods of party organisation was an essential prerequisite. Stalin's German expert, Manuilsky, identified a group of loyal functionaries who were then trained in the Comintern's Lenin School. Among this group who served the Comintern as well as the Soviet secret police, GPU, was Walter Ulbricht, the KPD's new head of organisation. Ulbricht attended the Lenin School in 1924-25 before returning to Germany to resume his work with the all-important Organisational Department of the KPD's Central Committee. An early biographer of Ulbricht writes: 'During the Weimar Republic, Ulbricht unfailingly represented Moscow's interests in the KPD. And just as unfailingly, he helped to eliminate those who had other ideas'.⁶ Other functionaries trained in Moscow who later attained prominent positions in the SED and Stasi were Erich Mielke, Markus Wolf, Wilhelm Zaisser and Ernst Wollweber.

⁶ Stem C. 1963: 47.

The Stabilisation of the KPD, that is the imposition of a centralistic, bureaucratic organisation and ideological conformity, received a decisive impulse with the acceptance of the principle of Leninist democratic centralism at the 1925 Party Congress. This fundamentally eroded the confederal structures and the original ideological diversity of the party by strengthening the central organs, such as the Small Secretariat. The disciplining of the party culminated, in the later 1920s, in the fusion of the Stalin faction, headed by Ernst Thälmann, and the party apparatus functionaries who constituted the party's nerve centre. Thälmann, from a working-class background, became chairman in 1925, bound the KPD ever closer to Moscow and fostered the personality cult of Stalin.

Throughout the history of the KPD, the party leadership had to tolerate the presence of senior Comintern officials, who reported directly to Moscow. However, what changed after 1926 was the GPU's penetration of the wider German party structures through the conduit installed by the secret apparatus. According to Ruth Fischer, the KPD leader in 1924—35, N-Group functionaries pursued opposition activists by raiding their meetings, searching their flats and conducting interrogations.⁷ Her claim has broadly been substantiated by new documentary evidence. In Saxony, the mood in the party turned sour as dissident functionaries were placed under surveillance and their flats searched for literature.⁸

⁷ Fischer R. 1948: 507.

⁸ SAPMO 1 3/8/25, 'Protokoll', 1928, pp. 357-8, 390.

After promoting the Stalinisation of the KPD during the Weimar Republic, the N-Group fell victim to a factional struggle in the leadership-in-exile during the mid-1930s. Many of the apparatus functionaries died during the Great Purges and in 1937, Kippenberger was executed as an alleged spy and saboteur. Against this background, Ulbricht and the ECCI's cadre department replaced the existing N-Group with a new cadre organisation, which was entrusted with the security of the small leadership group around Pieck and Ulbricht. These changes were accompanied by a purge of Political Bureau members and candidates who had taken the 'wrong side' in the policy debate, thus transferring the locus of power to a Small Secretariat (see below).

The KPD Between Hitler and Stalin

Soon after the establishment of the Nazi regime in 1933, the Gestapo destroyed the KPD's legal party organisation as well as the illegal, secret apparatus which had, ironically, been created for such an eventuality. The Communists were the first major target of Nazi repression. The KPD fell like a pack of cards. As many as 60,000 to 100,000 Communists were interned by the end of 1933. At a KPD conference in Moscow in October 1935, Pieck reported that of 422 leading functionaries in Germany, 24 had been murdered, 219 had been arrested and 125 had founci exile in the Soviet Union.⁹ The party's highly centralised organisational structure, which had been used to eliminate dissent during the Weimar Republic, proved to be counterproductive as it undermined the efforts of grassroots activists to coordinate any political initiative from below. Under these conditions, the KPD was reduced to little more than a party in exile, even though many thousands of Communists, both at home and abroad, engaged in a variety of resistance activities.

⁹ Weber H. 1990: 18.

Nor did it help Communist resistance activities in Germany that the party was subordinated to Moscow's interests and its policy prescriptions. Stalin was not interested in rebuilding the KPD and the exile leaders were obliged to fall into line behind the 1935 shift in Comintern policy towards cooperation with social democracy, hitherto regarded as communism's main enemy. At its World Congress in 1935, the Communist movement was instructed to form an anti-fascist, united front not only with Social Democrats but also with bourgeois opponents of fascism. The Popular Front had to be abandoned, however, following the conclusion of the non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union in the summer of 1939. The KPD leadership in exile was obliged to sanction the dramatic change in policy on the basis that it was a 'success' for the Soviet Union's peace policy. Having been abandoned by the West, Moscow was presented as merely acting to break the 'encirclement' by hostile powers. Until the launching of Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the Comintern returned to the ultra-left policy that social democracy was the main enemy of communism.

Shifts in Stalin's policy also had significant - and sometimes fatal — consequences for the KPD leadership. Dissenters from the 1935 line on the Popular Front were purged. At the KPD's 'Brussels' conference in October 1935 the main dissidents, Hermann Schubert and Fritz Schulte, were removed from the party hierarchy and the Pieck-Ulbricht axis strengthened; Ackermann and Wehner became candidates of the Political Bureau.¹⁰ The purge of dissenters in the KPD leadership - as was also the case with the other parties in the Comintern - flowed into the Great Terror of the mid-1930s. Some 70 per cent of the KPD émigré functionaries and members were arrested between 1936 and 1938.¹¹ And more leading functionaries died in the Soviet Union than in Nazi Germany. Of the 43 members and candidates who belonged to the Political Bureau between 1920 and 1933, five members were murdered by the Nazis and five members and two candidates in the Stalinist purges, including Hugo Eberlein and Fritz Schulte. Eberlein's son, Werner, would become a member of the SED Politbüro in 1983. If one looks at the ent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• LIST OF TABLES
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION
• Part I THE ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE EAST GERMAN SECURITY SERVICE, 1945-71
• Part II THE SWORD AND THE COMPASS
• Part III THE FIRM ΑND ITS SERVANTS
• Part IV HUNTING FOR THE ENEMY
• Part V CREATING AN ENEMY
• Part VI WOLF'S ESPIONAGE EMPIRE
• Part VII THE OCTOPUS LOSES ITS TENTACLES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX