Stasi

Shield and Sword of the Party

John Christian Schmeidel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134213740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

This book is afascinating new examination of one of the most feared and efficient secret services the world has ever known, the Stasi.

The East German Stasi was a jewel among the communist secret services, the most trusted by its Russian mother organization the KGB, and even more efficient. In its attempt at 'total coverage' of civil society, the Ministry for State Security came close to realizing the totalitarian ideal of a political police force. Based on research in archival files unlocked just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and available to few German and Western readers, this volume details the Communist Party's attempt to control all aspects of East German civil society, and sets out what is known of the regime's support for international terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s.

STASI will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, German politics and international relations.

1 Origins and development of the East German secret police

Oderint dum metuant.

Lucius Accius, c.90 BC (‘Let them hate, so long as they fear.’)¹

The newsreel footage of the fall of Berlin in the spring of 1945 is familiar: the roar of Katyusha rocket launchers, the street fighting amid the rubble, the exhausted faces of the defenders and civilians, the triumphant red banner waving from the gutted Reichstag parliament. A ‘zero hour’ of devastation had come to Nazi Germany. The shock troops of the Red Army arrived as victors in Berlin to impose their will upon a beaten population.

Prelude: from Stunde Null of 1945 to the Prague Spring

The Russian transports landing amidst the ruins of Schönefeld airport in April did not bring veterans scarred by fighting their way across Pomerania, Poland and Saxony. The German communists traveling in them were fresh from the relative safety of Moscow, if fatigued from nocturnal conferences with Stalin and his lieutenants, and full of plans for what the new Soviet occupied zone of Germany should be. What it should be, in their eyes and those of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany, was a loyal satellite of the USSR. The land the Red Army conquered would eventually become the German Democratic Republic, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), most faithful of satellites, a red Prussia where German organizational skills almost made communism look viable.

These men were proven veterans of the Weimar-era Communist Party of Germany, the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD, and its instructor, the Soviet Comintern. This meant having been a long-serving field agent utterly loyal to Russia and not to one’s passport country. Other exiled German communists who weathered World War II in Allied or neutral countries, some engaging in resistance work a step ahead of the Gestapo, trickled in at war’s end to help build the New Jerusalem. After a show of good fellowship and a welcome parade, the DDR first isolated, and then purged them. The glittering prizes of the highest posts in the Party and the secret police went to the Russian faction pledged to Stalin.²

These Moscow-schooled founding fathers embodied a long tradition of underground Party work. From 1919 and 1920, the Comintern and the two Soviet intelligence agencies of the civilian KGB and military GRU helped the German communists build up a logistics superstructure, communications network, clandestine press, paramilitary wing, and intelligence section. The KPD’s ranks had specialists in espionage, counter-intelligence spy hunting and sabotage. As a native German movement, all the KPD had to show was two badly bungled uprisings in 1921 and 1923. When the USSR abandoned its hope for generalized European revolution in the shadow of Lenin’s approaching death and the rise of Stalin, the German apparatus became a specialized annex of the Soviets, very good at aiding its masters in espionage and rarefied tactics like harbor attacks and labor subversion.³ A later chief of the Ministry for State Security, or Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (hereafter MfS, usually abbreviated to Stasi) was Ernst Wollweber, who cut his teeth blowing up ships.

A professional revolutionary since leaving school for merchant sailing and the Navy, Wollweber built his own apparatus across Europe devoted to seeding networks amongst the merchant marine of Western nations and to maritime sabotage. From the modern perspective in the air travel age, it might seem odd that so many scarce KPD resources flowed to ships. The answer might lie in the importance of sea transport for keeping up courier lines in the interwar years and in the known militancy of sailors and harbor workers. Films about their strikes – other than the Kronstadt naval uprising against the Bolsheviks in 1921 – were a propaganda favorite in Moscow studios.⁴ Moreover, travel from Moscow to Germany’s main port of Hamburg was a good deal less trouble by ship than by train, avoiding multiple frontier crossings and customs inspections. An agent could make the trip in forty-eight hours from the Kremlin. In what was a virtual shuttle running from Moscow through Leningrad, Helsinki, and Hamburg (later Copenhagen, when the Comintern exited Germany after 1933), travelers and contraband met only friendly customs officials. Goods were unloaded by communist longshoremen and stored in communist warehouses.⁵ As an international courier system for revolution, this looked imposing, at least on paper.

From NKVD prisons back to the Gestapo

An irony oft pointed out by historians is that the conspiracies of the KPD did not hinder the Nazi rise to power in 1933. The German Communist Party’s centralized discipline laid down by the Comintern collective leadership from 1923 and personally by Stalin from 1927 enabled the Nazi Gestapo and SS Sicherheitsdienst (SD) to scythe through the KPD with a decapitation strategy from which the underground party very nearly did not recover. The KPD’s Moscow patron was less than helpful in its hour of need. Stalin did not really intend that it should recover on German soil at all until a moment of his choosing. Through the Hitler years, the communists in Germany did next to nothing in terms of resistance. Activists who managed to flee into exile bided their time in neutral countries or busied themselves for the Comintern in Europe, where their mission was to help the Russian (and only the Russian) war effort. A number fought in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939. This service spared a few of them the firing squad when Stalin embarked on a purge rampage in 1936.

With the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939, German KPD members were never really trusted by Stalin but caught in Russian exile. Some were already confined in Siberia. Many found themselves shipped right back to torture and execution in Germany by the Gestapo, in a deal with Hitler. The Nazis in return handed over Russian White émigrés and Ukrainian nationalists to the USSR.⁶ The Germans who endured life on the run between the wars and the Stalinist 1936–1938 purges in Moscow were nothing if not survivors, when they stepped off the planes at Schönefeld. Their ruthlessness had not been mellowed by the infighting and mutual denunciation among them that was the only way to survive.⁷

Right behind the politicians and intelligence officers, and sometimes one and the same, were the Soviet cultural officers. As part of a recipe for creeping takeovers perfected across Eastern Europe from 1945 through 1949 and the formal onset of the Cold War, the occupying Russian forces immediately joined battle for the hearts and minds of the intellectuals. The usual vehicle was the cultural wing of the Antifa, or anti-fascist popular fronts. These were in reality communist stalking horses with an appealing name. The Russians repaired the Nazi film studio UFA in Berlin without delay, rechristened it DEFA, and set to work Konrad Wolf, the brother of the future head of the Stasi’s foreign branch, Markus Wolf.

West Berlin’s RIAS (Radio in the American Sector) later became so pro- Western that student leftist militants stoned it in 1968. In the first years after the war until 1948, the cultural scene in Berlin was an intricate tapestry, many of its threads red. Ernst Reuter, an early mayor of West Berlin, angrily called it ‘the second communist broadcaster in Berlin’, much as McCarthy would later nickname America’s CBS the ‘communist broadcasting system’. Despite the roubles spent upon Soviet Houses of Culture in the major cities and an infusion of films and exhibitions, neither the German intelligentsia nor the common people were falling over with enthusiasm for Russian art, at least in its post-1917 forms. The colorful posters of the early years of the revolution had a short vogue. Overall, the Germans much preferred such light entertainment as the government DEFA studio was allowed to make.⁸

The Russian occupying army installed a security and intelligence machine of its own just as soon as it smoked out the last Nazi defenders in Berlin and the eastern provinces. The mood of the Soviet victors was unforgiving on all German territory the Red Army had crossed, due to the savagery on both sides of the campaigns on the eastern front. Well aware that they could expect no quarter, no German units surrendered en masse, as in Italy. Regular Wehrmacht as well as SS detachments continued until May 1945 to execute resistance fighters and deserters, to follow the hallucinatory orders from Hitler’s bunker to the best of their ability, and generally contest every inch of scorched land down to the final redoubts in central Berlin’s railway station, the gutted zoo, and the Reichstag.

Postwar Germany in the Soviet occupied zone was a crime-ridden hell for the unarmed civilians. Its brutality recalled the original state of nature of Thomas Hobbes. Only the Russians had the guns. In the first months of the occupation, ordinary policing was an irrelevant luxury. The Kriminalpolizei was a shadow. The Russians refused to issue even symbolic side arms to German constables until 1946. The law of the jungle prevailed among the starving survivors, mainly destitute women, old men, and the very few returning veterans. What law enforcement there was came from the Russian military occupiers. They themselves were often the worst offenders, in terms of plunder and rape.⁹

The Russian NKVD and flying squads of military counter-intelligence called Smersh at first concentrated on finding fleeing Nazis or rooting out supposed staybehind commandos. Effective German disinformation had led the Americans as well as the Russians to hold troops in reserve for a last stand by Hitler in the Harz mountains that never occurred, and to brace for combat with Nazi Werewolf partisans intending kamikaze attacks. There were next to none of these, save a few Hitler Youth bands who occasionally ran barricades.¹⁰ By the end of 1945, Smersh and the other NKVD investigators of the Russian military Kommandatura in Potsdam south of Berlin were more concerned with identifying anyone who might object to the planned monopoly of power by the German communists.

The Russian occupiers and their picked men of the German KPD dropped the façade of multi-party pluralism when they stopped caring about Western opinion between 1947 and 1949. In June 1945, the Russians had laid out a Potemkin village of diversity, licensing not only the KPD, but eastern representatives of the conservative West German CDU, the social Democratic SPD, the even more conservative and Catholic CSU, and the free market, agricultural LDP. The communists remained unpopular and still a numerical minority.

Stalin and the Russian Kommandatura in Potsdam were not going to stand still for this. In Byzantine maneuverings, they used false promises and pressure to achieve an unwilling fusion with the Social Democrats in 1946, the competitors they most feared. Even as the broad-front SED, the communists with the former SPD in forced partnership only scored a 48 percent showing in 1946 elections. More pressure and intimidation of smaller parties, plus the creation of nominally voting front organizations to stack internal debates, finally achieved the forcible ‘unity’ of all political parties under the SED in 1949. The time for diversity had ended. Confrontation with the West and the crafting of a Soviet command economy had begun.¹¹

Learning by doing: Russian Chekists train German apprentices

Within a year of the end of hostilities, the Russians began to train up German political security policemen. The entry card at the outset was more a proletarian background without middle class connections than a high IQ. The ideal passed down from the Russian mother service was a sentimental mélange about the heroism of the Cheka, the first incarnation of the KGB.¹² Stasi officers ritually referred to themselves as Tschekisten. Next to none of the early leaders, including Mielke and Wollweber, had even secondary school diplomas, let alone university qualifications. Unswerving commitment to rooting out enemies of the people, no shyness about bloodshed and not too much book learning was the ticket. This ongoing tradition of rise through the ranks anti-intellectualism would not do the Stasi any favors later, when its targets were the educated artists and bohemians of the 1970s (see Chapter 4).¹³

Files of the Ministry from the 1950s contain a striking number of grammatical errors. A notable exception was the eventual chief of the foreign intelligence arm of the Stasi, Markus Wolf, the intellectual son of the communist physician and playwright Friedrich Wolf and brother of DDR film director Konrad Wolf. Some defectors reported that Wolf’s education and the polished nature of the people he recruited for foreign service led Mielke to detest him and his department. More cynical observers suspect this was smoke to induce the West Germans to waste energy analyzing non-existent rivalries within the Stasi, or a recent afterthought by Wolf to distance himself from his past. One can imagine the fun the cerebral Wolf would have had crafting himself a persona as a misunderstood poète maudit, alienated from the thugs of his own service.

From 1945 to 1950, the infant overseas intelligence collection departments and internal security operations in East Germany were split between entities that operated independently. This might have represented different factions acting as bureaucratic entrepreneurs, or a unified effort seeking camouflage in apparent diversity. The extent to which they competed is still unclear. Several minor ones came and went, including two similarly named ‘Committees for the Protection of People’s Property’, so-called ‘press offices’ in the provinces to gauge the mood of the people, and the West German representative offices of the SED, which functioned as a very crude agent of influence and collection operation.¹⁴ In an administrative island out on its own, Wollweber kept his private maritime sabotage empire alive until the 1950s, a testimony to his clout with the Russians. This ‘thousand flowers’ springtime is the only instance where the Stasi conformed to a paradigm familiar to all dictatorships back to Augustan Rome, where competing intelligence services are given overlapping responsibilities, to concentrate their minds. Their aim is to ‘scoop’ the others by reporting first to the politicians, and not incidentally keep an eye on their sister services to warn their political masters if one becomes overmighty.¹⁵

In the postwar years, all the German internal security organizations customarily used other government agencies as interlocking cover. It was a shell game designed to confuse a hostile observer. The starting point was the creation of the Volkspolizei (People’s Police) under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior in 1946. The ‘German Ministry of the Interior’ was a creature of the Soviet occupation government, and it was the vehicle for a federalizing end run around the traditionally regional police authorities and mini-interior ministries of each Land (state) that had been the norm even through the Prussian and Nazi eras. An unseen controlling level was a staff within the People’s Police that had nothing to do with conventional crime fighting, known as Kommissariat 5 (K-5).

Communiqués of the military government carried the force of law. The famous 1947 ‘Order 201’ of the Soviet military government prescribed in hortatory tones the intensification of the search for Nazi party members, broadly defined.¹⁶ As this had been going on for two years very thoroughly already, one can surmise more was on the agenda. What Nazis there were to find had been thrown into the camps, and the hunt now was for political opponents of communism. A DDR standard law textbook approvingly remarked that the People’s Police threw themselves into this task with such energy as to finally overcome the lingering bourgeois tradition that the police should be mere auxiliaries of the prosecutor, instead of zealous hunters in their own right. Police subordination to the civil prosecutor is a central point of Western legal thinking. Communism reversed the order.¹⁷

Political investigation was nominally placed in the hands of the criminal police, and in fact done in its entirety by K-5. Under pretext of ferreting out Nazis, the agents cast their net to include any and all potential opponents of the communist regime, including those of the still-legal western parties like the SPD, who were in an uneasy alliance of absorption with the pro-Russian Socialist Unity Party. The Social Democrats should have been on warning. Stalin had regarded them since the 1930s as as much of an enemy to authentic German communism as capitalism itself. ‘Social fascism’ was the customary term of abuse. Former SPD politicians were the chief victims, after Nazis real and supposed, of the 1945–1949 sentences to the Soviet military government prison camps.

The Russians and the SED dusted off the German concentration camps that had barely been cleared of Hitler’s political prisoners and Jews. Roughly 150,000 German citizens were interned after trials, where the verdict was a foregone conclusion. Anyone associated with the Nazi regime was a prima facie case for jail. The more immediate concern for the Russians and their German protegés was to eliminate any resistance to a full communist takeover from any of the more conventional Western-style parties. Not only the SPD members that were scooped up in the first wave of arrests, but members of any other more conservative parties were likely to hear the early morning knock at the door.

When the SED had cleared for itself the political landscape by taking over the SPD in April 1946, it began a campaign of persecution in earnest. The conditions of imprisonment of those undesirables not deemed amenable to ‘unification’ mirrored those of the Soviet Gulag or the harsher POW camps of World War II in Europe. The mortality rate was 30 percent, more if one considers the eventual deaths from the later medical consequences of confinement attributable to the harsh conditions and inadequate diet.¹⁸ These figures do not count those sent to Soviet labor camps in the Russian Arctic, where chances of emerging were even slimmer.

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