Daughters of the KGB (10 page)

11
.  Ibid

12
.  W. Krüger in Knabe,
Gefangen in Hohenschönhausen
, pp. 303−7

13
.  Ibid

5

F
EAR AS A
P
OLITICAL
T
OOL

Many of the Stasi prisoners interrogated in Hohenschönhausen ended up like Fritz Sperling, serving their sentences in one of the two long-term prisons at Bautzen in Saxony. A hundred miles south-east of Berlin, close to the Czech and Polish frontiers, the city now promotes itself as a medieval tourist attraction although, to Germans who lived in the GDR, the name was a synonym for political persecution and inhumane prison conditions. The high-security prison designated Bautzen II had been a political prison under the Nazis, was taken over by the NKVD/MGB after the war and run by the GDR Innenministerium from 1956 to 1989. The guards wore not Stasi uniforms, but the blue uniforms of the Interior Ministry prison service. Most of the prisoners were political victims of the regime, but convicted criminals also served time here. Among the politicals were many former members of the state, party or military systems, sentenced for ‘treason’ or simply for
Nestbeschmutzung
– literally, soiling the nest, i.e. criticising the SED, the GDR, some political or official figure, or simply telling an indiscreet joke. There was also a significant number of foreigners, particularly West Germans and convicted ‘spies and saboteurs’ from the West.

For these to be arrested, it was not necessary even to set foot in the GDR. By 1950 approximately 700 people had been drugged and/or kidnapped in the West like Karl Fricke, and then driven across the border in the boot of a car driven by Stasi thugs – as in a novel by Len Deighton or John Le Carré. Both methods ended in the same way, with the victim delivered to a Stasi interrogation prison, forced into a real or false confession and sentenced to long periods of imprisonment. Particularly targeted were members of Western intelligence services, print and media journalists who had been critical of the SED, and anyone involved in helping refugees escape to the West. These political prisoners were subject to especially severe detention. The work they were allotted was unpleasant and/or hard; they had fewer privileges than convicted criminals; they were more likely to be given additional punishments and were generally harassed and spied on in various ways throughout their detention.

Extra punishments were regularly meted out to political prisoners. These included
Arrest
, which took the form of up to twenty-one days in a small, barred cell – which the victims called ‘the tiger cage’ – on reduced rations and with no bedding. When Werner König was sentenced to this, he was shackled by one foot and one hand to the bars and thus unable to reach the toilet. This obliged him to wet and soil himself, for which he was abused as a ‘filthy pig’ by the guards.
¹

Because everyone in the GDR was spied on, at Bautzen II this applied also to the guards. Documentary proof exists that regular reports on what they did and said were supplied to the Stasi and were used against them in some instances. In the ubiquitous paranoia of the GDR, even the informers who compiled these reports were themselves spied on.
²

Even the word ‘paranoia’ is insufficient to describe the all-pervading fear. As late as August 1987, when it must have been obvious to many people that the SED regime was economically unsustainable and would soon collapse, the GDR Defence Ministry issued a formal order to all service personnel that their television sets must be ‘sealed up to block the transmissions of the enemy on Channel 25’ – i.e. West German television.
³
Personnel who chose to ignore this ran the risk of their children reporting them in school. Even colleagues who were childless took to hanging lights on the outside of their houses to blot out the give-away glow from the television screen, so that neighbours would not see it after the GDR television transmissions ended early in the evening.
⁴

For those in prison, of course, there was only one state channel of television to watch. In an echo of the duplicitous slogan over the main gate at Auschwitz,
Arbeit macht frei
– work will make you free – every prisoner in the GDR long-term prisons was obliged to work as ‘rehabilitation’. Some prisoners worked with others in workshops, assembling transformers and electric motors; those in solitary confinement were obliged to work alone. Female prisoners in isolation were put to sewing hand towels or sticking together the two halves of pencils – an activity that had been performed by machines in the West for 100 years and more. Others worked in groups, cleaning and polishing floors and fittings, or in the kitchen. Theoretically, there was a minimum wage, paid in Wertscheine, or prison currency, but because 82 per cent of earnings was deducted for ‘food and board’, and some of the remainder was kept back as savings, little was left to spend in the prison shop. Failure to keep up with work norms led to loss of earnings.
⁵

An otherwise unknown man called Dieter Hötger was the only prisoner ever to escape from Bautzen II. Sentenced to solitary confinement, he was locked alone into work cell No. 19 at the corner of the main building between 5 a.m. and 3 p.m. each day. There, he succeeded in slowly removing twenty-three bricks from the external wall, where it was hidden behind a cupboard. Each evening, he replaced the loose bricks and the cupboard, and flushed the cement dust down a toilet. When he finally broke through his 50cm-wide hole in the 65cm-thick external wall, he found that it was 5m above the ground. He climbed through anyway and dropped down, to scramble over the outer wall and get away. There was little outside security since it was believed that Bautzen II was escape-proof.

Although in prison clothes with high-visibility yellow stripes on the sleeves, Hötger set out to walk the 100-plus miles to the frontier in Berlin. His escape triggered a nationwide manhunt, with hastily printed posters offering 1,000 Marks – the equivalent of two months’ average wages – for his recapture. Yet, for nine days Hötger managed to evade all the forces mobilised against him, until he was tracked down only 17km away from the prison. Here again, the paranoia that ruled the GDR came into play. Oddly, there was no laid-down penalty for his escape, if it really was a solo effort. So, all the weight of the Stasi system went into trying to prove that he had had accomplices, because a conspiracy was punishable. When this failed, in March 1969 he was accused of ‘espionage, collection of information, systematic hostile agitation, attempted illegal border-crossing and damage to socialist property’ – i.e. the hole in the wall. For this idiotic collection of trumped-up charges, with only the last having any semblance of reality, he was sentenced to eight
additional
years’ imprisonment. In September 1972 Hötger was freed after he was ‘bought’ by the Bundesrepublik.
⁶

The Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit (KgU) or ‘combat group against inhumanity’ was regarded in the GDR as a terrorist organisation and any members who fell into the hands of the Stasi were treated as violent criminals. When the author was serving at RAF Gatow, an off-duty pleasure was sailing boats of the British Berlin Yacht Club on Lake Havel, but club members were warned not to stray too near the line of buoys at the southern end of the lake, which marked the border with the GDR. On one Sunday afternoon, a West Berlin lawyer who was a member of the KgU was sailing his yacht on the Havel well inside the British sector boundary when a Stasi high-speed launch crossed the boundary. The lawyer was dragged aboard it, next stop interrogation in Potsdam.

The inhumanity which the KgU was fighting is exemplified by what happened to a 22-year-old West Berlin girl named Sigrid Grünewald. In 1977, while visiting relatives in Thuringia, where she had been born, she fell in love. After her boyfriend’s request for an exit visa was predictably turned down by the MfS, Sigrid paid a
Fluchthilfeorganisation
– professional people smugglers – to bring him out of the GDR, but the attempt failed. Aware of the risks, if caught, the boyfriend made another request for an exit visa. Meanwhile, the Stasi had been interrogating one of the people smugglers and learned of the failed rescue attempt. The next time Sigrid visited her boyfriend, both of them were arrested. In March 1982 she was sentenced to five and a half years’ imprisonment in Bautzen II for ‘attempted treasonous human trafficking’; her boyfriend was sent to serve his sentence in another prison. In this case, love triumphed after all. In September 1982 their liberty was purchased by the Bundesrepublik and they married in West Berlin a year later. The same court that had condemned Sigrid quashed her conviction in 1991.

It must have taken exceptional courage to be a civil rights activist in the GDR, but there were some, all closely watched by the Stasi. Vera Lengsfeld was 36 when arrested and treated more delicately than most of her co-detainees:

I was thrust into a metal cell near the door of the blue prison bus. A female officer clapped handcuffs on me. They were the sort that tightened if you put any pressure on them. Then a male officer removed the cuffs. The bus set off and stopped after being backed up very close to a brightly lit garage – all lights and uniforms. A young, attractive woman with a nice face in the uniform of a wardress took me into a cell, where I had to undress, so she could check my mouth and ears and other bodily orifices. As I was crouching with legs apart for this, I noticed someone looking through the spy-hole in the door. When I protested, the nice girl took no notice. Given some horrible jail clothes, I was so relieved to have clean underwear that I made no complaint, and was escorted to a cell measuring five metres by three.

My interrogator demonstrated how much the Stasi knew about me by playing my favourite piece of music by Mendelssohn during our first session. It was interrupted by the arrival of the judge, who was accompanied by a young and pretty secretary with long hair, whom I should never have suspected of working for the Stasi. The accusation was that I had ‘participated in a forbidden meeting’. Before he could start taking down my statement, I informed him that before I had even been charged someone had spied on me while I was naked, which I considered an insult to my feminine dignity. The secretary looked at the judge, uncertain whether she should write this down. He said the conduct of prison staff was not his concern, but I insisted until he gave way. I then refuted his charges.

After a week, I was moved to another cell, with a 19-year-old East German girl who had been arrested trying to get on a plane at Budapest airport and locked up in a filthy Hungarian jail for two weeks, during which she had to take her shower watched by the all-male guards. She was now facing three years’ imprisonment.
⁷

Vera Lengsfeld had been arrested as a warning, and was released after two months’ interrogation. Since several other civil rights activists connected with the Evangelical Church were imprisoned for exactly the same period, it is safe to assume that the Stasi was sending a warning to all civil rights workers. Arrested in her own home, Freya Klier, a 38-year-old mother, managed to compile a rough diary after her release:

The senior Stasi man said, ‘Your daughter must undress. She’ll be examined by a doctor and sent to a children’s home.’ But I had given fellow activist Ralf Hirsch a legal power of attorney to act as her guardian in just this situation. Trying to delay the awful moment when I would have to awaken Nadja, I went into the bathroom. The female officer who had searched the house the last time came with me and studied herself in the mirror while I used the toilet. I took my ‘jail clothes’ from the cupboard: a long dress and a pullover of Stephan’s.

Then I could not put off the awful moment any longer and asked the woman to leave me alone with my daughter. She refused. Nadja slowly woke up, could not understand what was going on, and clung to me, crying. I cried too, whispering that she was not going into a home, just to the doctor and then to Ralf, where Grandma would visit her soon – and that I loved her. It was the most wretched hour of my life.

In the Stasi car driving through the morning rush hour, I built a psychological wall around myself. The first trial was getting undressed and letting them peer into my arse-hole [
sic
]. That humiliation lasted a hundred years. But I refused to change into the prison clothing. The wardress screamed at me but, with the exception of my tights (with which I could have hanged myself), I was allowed to keep my own clothes.

In the Magdalenenstrasse interrogation prison, Dr Schnur, the lawyer who acted for us, brought news from my husband, who was shattered by the arrest. Schnur also told me the Church leaders had suggested I take up a previous offer of study leave in the West. I refused.

My interrogator was a pleasant, intelligent man of my own age, which made me wonder why he had chosen such a hateful job.

Taken back to my cell I was given a copy of
Neues Deutschland
[the daily newspaper that was the official organ of the SED], in which I was horrified to read that my husband and all the others, including Ralf, had been arrested, allegedly for treason. The letters and names danced in front of my eyes. My brain was spinning. On Sunday I had this terrible dream where they brought Stephan into the exercise yard blindfolded. I screamed and ran down the steps to him but, when I got there, they had already hanged him.