I start to look about the atrium. An arrow points towards a library, another up the stairs to an exhibition room. It smells of dust and old air.
Then I hear the guide say something about a ‘biological solution’. The westerners are silent. She says instead of waiting for a revolution she and her friends had pinned their hopes on the old ‘Marxisten-Senilisten’ in power dying off. After all, she says wrinkling her nose, the GDR had the oldest leadership in the world, ‘We have got to have broken some kind of a record there.’ But unlike in China, where the leaders were wheeled out virtually dead for display, the old men here showed remarkably little sign of physical decay. ‘They were up to it all,’ she explains, ‘injecting sheep cells, ultra-high doses of oxygen, you name it. Those blokes wanted to live forever.’ She starts to talk about the beginning of the end.
Mielke and Honecker grew up fighting the real evil of Nazism. And they kept on fighting the west, which they saw as Nazism’s successor, for forty-five years after the war ended. They had to, as a Soviet satellite state, and the Eastern Bloc’s bulwark against the west. But in East Germany they did so more thoroughly and with more pedantic enthusiasm than the Poles, the Hungarians, the Czechs, or the Russians themselves. They never wanted to stop.
When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union in 1985 he implemented the policies of perestroika (economic reform) and glasnost (‘openness’ of speech). In June 1988 he declared a principle of freedom of choice for governments within the Eastern Bloc and renounced the use of Soviet military force to prop them up. Without Soviet backup to quash popular dissent, as there had been at the workers’ uprising in Berlin in 1953, in Hungary in 1956, and in Prague in 1968, the GDR regime could not survive. The options were change, or civil war.
By comparison with other Eastern Bloc countries, East Germany never had much of a culture of opposition. Perhaps this was in part due to the better standard of living, perhaps to the thoroughness of the Stasi—or, as some put it, to the willingness of Germans to subject themselves to authority. But mostly it was because, alone of all Eastern Bloc countries, East Germany had somewhere to dump people who spoke out: West Germany. It imprisoned them and then sold them to the west for hard currency. The numbers of dissidents could not reach a critical mass until 1989 when the changes in the Soviet Union gave ordinary people courage and they took to the streets.
But the men running the GDR were ossified. They were not interested in reform. As late as 1988, they disallowed Soviet films and magazines in an attempt to stop the people being infected with new ideas. And they cracked down, exiling waves of ‘negative-enemy’ elements to West Germany. Miriam’s summary expulsion in May 1989 was one of the last of these purges.
They couldn’t, however, all be thrown out. That would be impractical, and, worse, might amount to giving the people the freedom they craved. ‘So,’ the guide says, ‘the old men had another scheme: they would contain the dissenters at home.’
Documents found after the Wall fell reveal meticulous plans, current throughout the 1980s, for the surveillance, arrest and incarceration of 85,939 East Germans, listed by name. On ‘Day X’ (the day a crisis, any crisis, was declared), Stasi officers in the 211 local branches were to open sealed envelopes containing the lists of the people in their area to be arrested.
The arrests were to be carried out quickly—840 people every two hours. The plans contained exact provisions for the use of all available prisons and camps, and when those were full for the conversion of other buildings: former Nazi detention centres, schools, hospitals and factory holiday hostels. Every detail was foreseen, from where the doorbell was located on the house of each person to be arrested to the adequate supply of barbed wire and the rules of dress and etiquette in the camps: armbands, ‘green, 2cm wide’ for the oldest in the room, ‘green, three stripes 2cm wide’ for the oldest in the camp, yellow with the letters ‘SL’ in black for the Shift Leader to be worn on the left upper arm. And there were written instructions for packing to be given upon arrest to each prisoner:
2 p. socks
2 towels
2 handkerchiefs
2 × underwear
1 × woollens
1 × toothbrush & paste
1 × shoe cleaning gear
Women:
In addition, sanitary supplies
They would be locked up indefinitely and for no reason at all, but they would have clean shoes, teeth and underwear.
By mid-1989 the demonstrations after Monday prayer meetings at Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche were spreading all over the country to Erfurt, Halle, Dresden, Rostock. People were protesting against travel restrictions, shortages of basic goods and the falsification of election results. Their protests took them to the offices of most obvious representatives of the regime: not the Party, but the Stasi. They cried, ‘Democracy, Now or Never!’, ‘Stasi Out!’ and ‘SED. You’re hurting me!’
In August, the Hungarians cut the barbed wire at their border with Austria, creating the first hole in the Eastern Bloc. Thousands of East Germans flocked there and ran, crying with relief and anger, across the border. Thousands more travelled to the West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw and set up camp, creating a diplomatic nightmare in German–German relations. Finally, the regime agreed to let them out, on condition that the trains taking them to West Germany travel through the GDR. Honecker hoped to humiliate the ‘expellees’ by confiscating their identity papers. And he wanted them to fear (as they did) that he would stop the trains and arrest the passengers.
Honecker’s plans backfired. The people on the trains ripped up their identity papers with tears of joy. Thousands flocked to the stations to see if they could climb aboard, and to cheer on their compatriots.
In early October, Leipzig was at a flashpoint. Petrol-station attendants were refusing to refill police vehicles; the children of servicemen were being barred from creches. Those who worked in the centre of town near the Nikolaikirche were sent home early. Hospitals called for more blood. People made their wills and said things they wanted their children to remember, before going out to demonstrations. There were rumours of tanks and helicopters and water cannon coming, but then so were the postcards from friends who had already reached the west. The people went on to the streets.
Honecker ordered that the ‘counter-revolutionaries’ in Leipzig were to be ‘nipped in the bud’. ‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘can hinder the progress of socialism.’ On 8 October Mielke began to activate the plans for ‘Day X’, sending out orders to the local Stasi branches to open their envelopes. But things were already too far gone. Instead of incarcerating the people, the Stasi, hiding in their buildings, locked themselves up. In the regional offices they had 60,000 pistols, more than 30,000 machine guns, hand grenades, sharpshooter’s rifles, anti-tank guns, and tear gas. Fears of lynching ran high. Leipzig police were shown photographs of a Chinese policeman immolated by the mob at Tiananmen Square and told, ‘It’s you or it’s them.’ But they were also ordered not to shoot or use violence unless it was used against them.
On 7 October 1989 the GDR celebrated its forty years of existence with lavish parades in Berlin. There was a sea of red flags, a torchlight procession, and tanks. The old men on the podium wore light-grey suits studded with medals. Mikhail Gorbachev stood next to Honecker, but he looked uncomfortable among the much older Germans. He had come to tell them it was over, to convince the leadership to adopt his reformist policies. He had spoken openly about the dangers of not ‘responding to reality’. He pointedly told the Politbüro that ‘life punishes those who come too late’. Honecker and Mielke ignored him, just as they ignored the crowds when they chanted, ‘Gorby, help us! Gorby, help us!’
In Leipzig the extraordinary courage of the people didn’t waver, and it didn’t break out into anything else. On 9 October 70,000 protesters went out in the dark, in big coats and carrying candles. They stood outside the Runden Ecke with their demands. ‘Reveal the Stasi informers!’ ‘We are not Rowdies—We are the Peo
ple!’ and the constant, constant call of ‘No Violence!’ From that night on the demonstrations grew, footage of them was smuggled to the west and Leipzig came to be known as ‘the City of Heroes’.
There were now protests outside Stasi offices all over the country. But even in the smallest towns, the Stasi men in them continued their meticulous work, faithfully sending back to Berlin reports of the demands of the crowds outside: ‘Stasi to the factories!’ (heard at Zeulenroda), ‘We earn your money!’ (from Schmalkalden) and the prescient ‘Your days are numbered!’ (Bad Salzungen). In Leipzig the demonstrators had started to shout, ‘Occupy the Stasi Building Now!’ and ‘We’re staying here!’
The Party belatedly tried to change its image. On 17 October Honecker was ousted by his deputy Egon Krenz, who, although younger, was just as disliked. Proceedings were started against Honecker on 8 November for abuse of office and corruption.
On 9 November, thinking to deal with the crisis, the Politbüro met and decided to relax travel restrictions. People would be allowed to travel freely and be prohibited from leaving the country only in ‘special exceptional circumstances’. The session went into the night. At this stage the regime had taken to holding a regular press conference with the international media. That evening, Politbüro member Günter Schabowski needed to get to it. He hadn’t been at the session, but was hastily given a note of its decision to read out at the press conference.
When he finished, there was no visible reaction among the journalists in the room; all pens were poised, the boom mikes floated in the air. Then a question came from the floor: ‘When will this new provision come into force?’ Schabowski has baggy eyes and a face like a bloodhound. Embarrassed, he looked at the paper. He turned it over but found no answer. ‘It will come into force…to my knowledge, immediately,’ he said.
The decision was to have become operable the next day, after the border guards had been instructed on its implementation. But as soon as Schabowski had spoken it was too late. Within hours of his blunder 10,000 people were at the Bornholmer Bridge checkpoint on foot and in their Trabant cars, thronging the Wall. The light from the death strip showed up breath, exhaust. There was a symphony of horns. The guards stood at trigger point, but no orders came. Eventually, the supervisor decided to let the people through, on one condition. The guards were to place the exit stamp to the left of the passport photographs of ‘the most importunate’ (those at the front of the queue), so that they could later be identified, and refused re-entry.
The people didn’t know and they didn’t care. They streamed through into West Berlin. When the first few came back with cans of western beer to show where they’d been, the guards tried to stop them coming home but it was too late, it was all over, and people from east and west were climbing, crying, and dancing on the Wall.
7
The Smell of Old Men
Here, at the Normannenstrasse headquarters, there was panic. Stasi officers were instructed to destroy files, starting with the most incriminating—those naming westerners who spied for them, and those that concerned deaths. They shredded the files until the shredders collapsed. Among other shortages in the east, there was a shredder shortage, so they had to send agents out under cover to West Berlin to buy more. In Building 8 alone, members of the citizens’ movement found over one hundred burnt-out shredders. When the Stasi couldn’t get any more machines, they started destroying the files by hand, ripping up documents and putting them into sacks. But this was done in such an orderly fashion—whole drawers of documents put into the same bag—that now, in Nuremberg, it is possible for the puzzle women to piece them back together.
On 13 November, Mielke, aged eighty-one, became desperate about the waning of his world. He made his first and only address to the parliament. It was broadcast live. ‘Dear Comrades,’ he opened, and the booing began. Cries of ‘We are not your comrades!’ came from the newly independent minor parties. Then, as if he simply could not understand why he might be disliked, Mielke stammered into the microphone. ‘I love,’ he said, ‘—but I love all people. I put myself out for you…’ When they think of Mielke, East Germans like to think of this. Perhaps there is something healing about ridicule. It is a relief, anyway, from terror and anger.
On 3 December, along with Mielke, Krenz was expelled from the Party. Hans Modrow, a politician from Dresden, became leader. Modrow decided to change the name of the ‘Ministry for State Security’ to the ‘Office of National Security’ (Amt für Nationale Sicherheit) a cosmetic reform resulting in the deeply unfortunate acronym, ‘Nasi’. Nobody was fooled.
The group of West Germans touring the building has become tighter. The quiet jokes among the men have stopped, the looks between the wives. The guide asks whether they would like to see upstairs, but they shuffle and shake their heads, and say they probably don’t have time, today.
‘Well then,’ she says, ‘we come now to the end of our story.’ With her bossy manner and her twitching nose, she is not going to let these westerners go until she has told them how the people took this building.
She says that in January 1990 when the Berliners saw the smoke coming out of the chimneys they came here to protest. They brought bricks and rocks and built a symbolic wall around the building, to get the Stasi to stop burning the files. She says it is extraordinary that, with all those stones, not one was thrown and that, conversely, not one shot was fired from this building. ‘There were a lot of Stasi agents mingled in among the demonstrators,’ she sniffs, ‘and maybe that’s why they didn’t fire—fear of hitting a colleague.’ Eventually, after the Stasi had done all they could to remove or destroy the files, they opened the doors to the demonstrators.
The denunciations against Mielke began as soon as he lost power—and how could they not, his people being trained to the highest level in denunciation. The Berlin prosecutor’s office received a note accusing Mielke of using public funds to build his hunting estate. In January 1990 more counts were added to the indictment: suspicion of high treason; collaboration to subvert the constitution in that he, along with Erich Honecker had instituted a ‘nationwide system of post and telecommunications surveillance’; and having ‘contrary to the law’ denied people their freedom by locking them up in ‘protective custody’ on the occasion of the GDR’s fortieth birthday.
Mielke was taken into remand. Through 1990 and 1991 he was in and out of custody in various Berlin prisons including Hohenschönhausen, where he had sent most of his political detainees. Further counts were added, including the charge of murdering the police officers in 1931. Mielke’s trial began in 1992 but by the time it ended the only accusations remaining concerned the Bülowplatz murders. For his part in those, he was sentenced to six years in prison. The guide says to her flock, ‘It was ridiculous to get him for those old murders.’ Many people felt though, at least it was something. He was released on health grounds in August 1995, and lives now not far from this building.
Honecker fared worse. In early 1990 he was arrested on suspicion of corruption and high treason, but released from remand. In November of that year he was accused of responsibility for killings at the Wall but fled to Moscow, from where he told the press he had no regrets, and protested the arrest of former colleagues. In July 1992 he was extradited to Berlin to face trial, which was suspended the following January due to his terminal liver cancer. Honecker and his wife left for Chile, where he died in May 1994.
As the Party was losing its grip on the country, it started negotiating with the Runden Tisch, the consortium of East German citizens’ rights activists and church groups. But even these were riddled with Stasi informers. Nevertheless, when the Runden Tisch passed a resolution at its first meeting on 7 December 1989 demanding that free elections be held, and that the Stasi be dissolved under civilian control, most of the informers voted in favour. It seems they felt compelled, in order to maintain their cover, to vote for measures to destroy the regime that employed them.
From 1989 to October 1990 debate raged hot in Germ
any as to what to do with the Stasi files. Should they be opened or burnt? Should they be locked away for fifty years and then opened, when the people in them would be dead or, possibly, forgiven? What were the dangers of knowing? Or the dangers of ignoring the past and doing it all again, with different coloured flags or neckerchiefs or helmets?
In the end, some files were destroyed, some locked away, and some opened. The Runden Tisch decided the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (the overseas arm of the Stasi) could disband itself. Too many files concerning too many foreign countries, not least the West German administration which had been infiltrated by Stasi spies, were in this trove, and they were too dangerous.
That left the files the Stasi kept on the people inside the GDR. Many East Germans, particularly those who had been in power, or were informers, argued against making them available. The West German government argued this too. Did it fear embarassment from what the files might reveal—its own dealings which supported the regime? Or would there be indiscriminate bloodletting, as people took revenge on informers?
In August 1990 the first and only elected parliament of the GDR passed a law granting the right for people to see their own files. But the West German government, in its draft Unification Treaty for the two countries, prescribed that the files would all be delivered to the Federal Archives in Koblenz, West Germany, where, most likely, they would be locked away.