Daughters of the KGB (12 page)

There had, naturally, been some students and other young persons who fell foul of the NKVD immediately after the war and of the Stasi after its creation. Particularly at risk were the informal groups of young friends who, after the building of the Berlin Wall, dug tunnels under it and invented other ways of smuggling friends out of the GDR. Hiding a girlfriend in the boot of a sympathetic foreigner’s car and hoping to get her past the guards and sniffer dogs at one of the few remaining checkpoints was a method that failed on more than one occasion, resulting in long years of imprisonment for all concerned. Considering that ‘flight from the republic’ was a statutory crime under the perverted justice system imposed by the SED,
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it is amazing that some young people with many different motivations still took similar risks in the knowledge that they would be sentenced to several years’ imprisonment, if caught.

A different case – even more innocent – is that of Miriam Weber, dug up by Australian writer Anna Funder when researching her book
Stasiland.
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Miriam was 16 during the Prague Spring and thought it wrong that the Stasi broke up peaceful demonstrations with fire hoses, beating and arresting people. She and a friend determined to protest. Knowing that all typewriters were identifiable to the Stasi, they bought a child’s printing set of loose letters to be inserted into a frame and then pressed on an inked pad, with which they made leaflets to distribute around Leipzig one night, carefully wearing gloves to ensure they left no fingerprints. A full-scale investigation was launched, with extensive questioning of hundreds of young people until a search of Miriam’s home revealed a few of the letters they had missed when throwing the ‘evidence’ away. Arrested and placed separately in solitary confinement for a month, the girls were broken by each being told the other had confessed. They were released pending a full trial – and every child’s printing set was withdrawn from sale all over the GDR!

Determined not to go back to jail, Miriam took a train to Berlin and scouted the crossing points before concluding they were too dangerous. On the way home she noticed a stretch of the line running parallel to a West German line, with just the boundary fence in between. She got off the train and walked through some allotments up to the fence. With a ladder taken from an allotment shed she climbed up to see the barrier better: a wire mesh fence topped with barbed wire, a patrol strip, a 20m asphalted roadway for the patrol vehicles and a pathway for the foot patrols.

With the boldness of youth, she climbed the fence, lacerating her hands badly and getting caught for some time until breaking free. Crossing the roadway she saw a wire about one metre from the ground and supposed it was an alarm. On hands and knees, she crawled under it – to find that it had an Alsatian guard dog chained to it, free to run along its length. Crouching on the ground, she did not move. After a while the dog went away, probably because it was trained to chase a running person, or possibly it lost her scent when an ancient locomotive chugged past, drenching them both with steam. With only a low fence between her and freedom, she hit a trip wire – and that was the end of her escape.

The Stasi interrogator Major Fleischer did not believe that a girl of 16, alone, could have so nearly crossed the GDR’s ‘anti-fascist protective measure’. Each night Miriam had two hours’ sleep before questioning from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m., with no sleeping allowed during the daytime. Realising they wanted to know her accomplices, she invented them and a meeting in a beer cellar – only to get into more trouble for wasting Stasi time when they staked out the beer cellar fruitlessly on several consecutive nights. Her sentence was eighteen months in the women’s prison at Hoheneck. On entry, she was ordered to undress and half-drowned several times in a bath of cold water by two wardresses before becoming Juvenile Prisoner No. 725 and having no other name for a year and a half. Apart from basic food, everything in the prison had to be bought or bartered for, including sanitary towels. The political prisoners were controlled by hardened criminals. When she was released, she was, in her words, ‘not really human any more’.

The reader might think that Miriam’s story could get no worse, but it did.
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Once the war on youth began,
all
young people constituted a target group, to be perpetually under surveillance – using especially IMs, who included their teachers, classmates, flatmates, youth workers and sometimes their parents and siblings. Fortunately Gabriele Schnell, a Potsdam resident, compiled a record of detainees’ experiences in the Potsdam interrogation prisons,
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where more than 60 per cent of inmates were younger than 30, and also made a special study of youthful victims of the Stasi.
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Like many young people, 20-year-old Potsdam swimming instructor Jens Baumann yearned to travel abroad, partly because he had relatives living in several European countries. For ordinary GDR citizens below retirement age, the only possible foreign destinations were other Warsaw Pact countries. In August 1982 Jens travelled to Bulgaria on holiday with the intention of walking across the south-eastern border into Turkey through wild country – until he found out that more young East Germans had been shot there by border guards than all along the inner German frontier. They were swiftly buried in unmarked graves in what is now the Grandzhda National Park – then dubbed the Death Triangle – still dotted with concrete bunkers to be used in the event of a Turkish invasion.
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Instead, Jens returned home and, filled with the lust for travel, filed a formal request to leave the GDR two days later. Innocently, he quoted Article 13 of the United Nations Charter of Human Rights:

Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to it.

He also quoted Article 15:

Nobody shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality, nor be denied the right to change his nationality.

Because the GDR had signed the Charter, of which he had found a copy in the Potsdam library, he thought this was safe. In an effort to speed up treatment of his application, he also requested support three days later in a letter to the IGM in Frankfurt, having heard about the organisation on a West German television programme. The IGM being on the list of ‘enemy organisations’ held by the Stasi’s mail censors, it was stamped
Not to be forwarded
and sent instead to the MfS district office in Potsdam, whose staff had, within the week, conducted a preliminary investigation of Baumann. Although an IM also working in the swimming pool knew nothing against him, his name did figure on a Stasi list of persons who had attended a pop concert – which the MfS termed ‘a negative-decadent youth rally’ – in the previous year. This and the fact that he had written to the IGM were enough to make his application to leave the GDR technically ‘unlawful’.

As though this was a military operation, on 1 September 1982 the Stasi district office drew up a five-page plan of operations, which was put into action the following day, the charge being that Baumann had attempted to contact ‘a state-hostile organisation’, for which the penalty was one to five years in prison. The full might of the Stasi and Volkspolizei were now brought into play, plus two IMs, who made enquiries of his colleagues and neighbours. Their report revealed nothing; on the contrary, it noted that the swimming instructor was ‘friendly, helpful and decently dressed’, and that his family put flags in their window on socialist holidays. Furthermore, far from making a secret of it, his divorced mother had openly told neighbours that he was applying to leave the GDR.

On 7 September he was summoned to the MfS office in the town hall, where he learned that his application had been turned down. Although disappointed, he still had no idea what lay ahead. Two days later, during a staff meeting at the swimming pool, Jens was arrested in front of his colleagues and driven away by two Stasi men. Although a medium-size town of less than 140,000 inhabitants, Potsdam had at least three interrogation prisons, to cope with the numbers of people arrested and interrogated. Forced to hand over his clothing and other property, Jens was given a grey tracksuit and locked in a cell without the right to inform his mother or anyone else. By chance a friend of his had witnessed the arrest and hurried to tell her, which gave her time to remove a letter and the Charter of Human Rights from his room just before a Stasi search team arrived to give it a thorough going-over.

Interrogations began the next day, the first lasting eight hours without interruption. The interrogators noted that their prisoner did not seem frightened, but he had no way of knowing that his father, who worked as a conductor on trains travelling between the GDR and the Bundesrepublik, had volunteered several years before to act as a Stasi IM with the code name ‘Schorsch’, reporting principally on passengers’ suspicious behaviour aboard the trains
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On 10 September, ‘Schorsch’ reported to his case officer that he had had little contact with his son since divorcing his wife the previous year and only learned about the exit visa application from a neighbour on 2 September. Further, he reported that a friend of his son had also made an application, the two young men intending to stay with the friend’s father in West Berlin.

The paranoia intensified. On 23 September, with Baumann Junior still under interrogation, his father was ordered to report to a safe house, where he made a statement, confirmed in a written report, that he had distanced himself from his son since the divorce, and declared that his ex-wife was wholly to blame for the deviant behaviour. The mood of ‘Schorsch’ at the meeting was noted by his case officer as ‘disturbed’. A further meeting between the two men took place in October, at which ‘Schorsch’ furnished further information. His son was then still undergoing interrogation. The trial opened on 12 November after two months’ solitary confinement. The defending lawyer had never met his client before arriving in court, had no knowledge of the ‘case’ against him and was not allowed to see the record of interrogation. After an adjournment of two days, the presiding judge sentenced ‘the accused for traitorous activity to imprisonment for one year and eight months’. As a concession, which was not always granted in the GDR, the time spent under interrogation was to count towards the sentence. Conditions in the hard-regime long-term prison at Cottbus, where Jens was to serve his time, were extremely unpleasant, but this did not deter him from writing to the MfS district office in Potsdam to reinstate his exit visa application. As reason, he cited his total lack of prospects in the GDR after this imprisonment.

In the spring of 1983 a young man, just released from Cottbus prison, knocked on Frau Baumann’s door with a letter from her son, from which she learned that Jens intended doing everything in his power to leave the GDR and settle in the Bundesrepublik after his release. Not knowing that her ex-husband was an informer, she passed this news on to him, which enabled ‘Schorsch’ to update his case officer and give a full description of the young man who had brought the illicit letter.

With a father like that, young Baumann needed no enemies. Fortunately his name was included in a list of detainees bought by the Bundesrepublik and transferred there on 24 August 1983, to begin life anew as a swimming instructor in Berlin-Tempelhof with a start-up award of DM 2,000 from the West Berlin Senate. His father continued to report what he learned of his son through his ex-wife, making a total of eight clandestine meetings with his case officer that year and twenty-two other reports. He was, however, about to get his comeuppance. With a son now living in West Berlin, ‘Schorsch’ was forbidden to work on railway trains that crossed the frontier and visits to his own elderly father in Heidelberg were also forbidden. Yet as late as 15 November 1989 – six days after the flood of people just walking through the Wall checkpoints in Berlin, IM ‘Schorsch’ met a new case officer and declared his willingness to continue spying for the Stasi.
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In 1983 Markus Riemann was twenty-two years old. As the son of a pastor, he and his four sisters had grown up in a loving and intellectually stimulating home, the only oddity being that Church policy required Pastor Riemann to move to a new parish every few years. Because of the discrimination against religious households, Markus was not able to attend university and had to earn a living as a gardener in Havelstadt, a suburb of Potsdam. Sharing a run-down flat in Potsdam with his girlfriend, he decided to form a circle of similarly environmentally conscious friends, who were worried at the nationwide pollution and damage to the environment caused by the GDR’s mining and burning of lignite.

The British tradition of using fir trees as Christmas decoration is due to Prince Albert importing the idea when married to Queen Victoria. In Germany, it was normal for every church to have a fir tree on display at Christmas. One of Markus’s friends suggested that a way of making other people aware of the damage to the GDR’s forests from acid rain would be to collect some conifers from near the Czech border, where whole swathes of forest had been poisoned by industrial pollution. Five of the group set off to collect some dead spruces from there after arranging to spend the night in the house of a local pastor in the region. The pastor’s telephone line was routinely tapped by the Stasi, with the result that, when they stepped off the train in Potsdam on their return, each holding a brown fir tree 1.5m high, they were arrested and interrogated all night long on the grounds that exposing environmental damage was ‘hostile to government policy’.

The whole impressive might of the MfS swung into action, including search warrants and house searches. In Markus’s flat, important evidence was seized: his record collection, an empty loose-leaf binder, an address list, photographs, letters and even empty envelopes and his copy of the New Testament. Meanwhile several pastors went together to the Town Hall to protest against the arrest of the five youngsters, informing the official in charge of ‘Church affairs’ there that at the Midnight Mass the congregations would be told, not just the familiar Christmas story, but also about the arrests. The Potsdam Five were then released, but the dead spruces were confiscated as ‘evidence’. The story did not end there, however, because fines were imposed on Markus and two of the other boys totalling 2,000 Marks for ‘failing to respect public order in that on 17 December with intent to disturb people they conspired to bring five environmentally damaged trees [to Potsdam] and display them with refuse in Potsdam churches’.
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