Iron Curtain (18 page)

Garasin’s attempt to form a partisan unit progressed rather slowly, Hungary and Hungarian partisans not being the Red Army’s priority in the summer of 1944. The volunteers found it difficult to get to Ukraine, just behind the front line, where their training was supposed to begin. The unit’s train was late getting started, there were mix-ups about clothing and equipment, and local commanders in Ukraine weren’t prepared for their arrival. Eventually they began training, however, learning to use explosives and competing against one another in mock battles.

Occasionally the team received notice that someone higher up was interested in their progress. One day they saw a Soviet plane circling overhead, trying to land, and they chased away some cows so that it would have a clear runway. As the plane’s engine’s roared, one of the better-known Hungarian communist ideologists, Zoltán Vas, stepped out of the cockpit, immediately losing his glasses in the melee. Vas gave a highly detailed and longish lecture anyway, describing the promising situation at the front and encouraging the men to fight hard. As he prepared to fly back to Moscow, Garasin joked that Vas should, in the future, let the group know in advance when he planned to come, “so we could practice shooting at the airplane!” This was presumably what passed for humor on the Ukrainian front.

The partisans shifted camp several times as the front moved, and various adventures ensued. In his unpublished memoir, Garasin confessed that he had an affair with a woman named Anna. He remembered constant difficulties with food supplies, resolved when the unit simply took over a local mill and confiscated its products, to the intense displeasure of the local peasants. Another low point came during a meeting with Rákosi, who attacked Garasin for having formed a “purely Jewish company.” Garasin was “so shocked I just stood there, I couldn’t believe it.” He mulled over this strange outburst and made a point later on of telling Rákosi—who, as noted, was
Jewish—that he had been much mistaken. When he counted them up, there were only six Jews in the unit.

Finally the moment of liberation arrived. At the beginning of February 1945, Garasin and his troops crossed the Carpathian Mountains and he entered Hungary for the first time in thirty years. By February 12 they had reached
Debrecen, the eastern city that had become the temporary capital. And that was the end of the adventure. Garasin, a
Soviet citizen, was immediately assigned to work with the Allied Control Council. He lost touch with his partisans, drifted into propaganda and printing work, and, according to the official version of events, returned to the Soviet Union.
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Unintentionally, Garasin’s account of his life paints a witty and truthful picture of the Hungarian communist partisans. Later they would be lauded by future communist leaders as war heroes, but at the time the Red Army clearly treated them as an afterthought. Garasin’s story is also important for what it leaves out. In fact we don’t really know what he was doing in the 1920s and 1930s or where he was in the years immediately following the war, and many have long suspected that he was working as a senior officer of the Soviet NKVD.
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Later, Garasin would become known as the man who had “imported” the techniques of the Soviet Gulag to Hungary.

Garasin’s life story also illustrates the important role played in Eastern Europe in general, and Hungary in particular, by secret police officials who were not merely local collaborators or recruits, as the Kuibyshev gang mostly had been, but by people who were Soviet citizens, and probably Soviet secret policemen, from the very start. Garasin was a Hungarian by birth, but by his own account he was totally integrated into Soviet life. He had a Russian wife, a Russian education, and between 1915 and 1945 he lived in Russia. Garasin was not merely favorably inclined toward the Soviet Union, he was Soviet himself. It is hardly surprising that when he took charge of Hungary’s labor camps in the early 1950s, he organized them very deliberately on Soviet lines.
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As we have seen, the NKVD had already organized reliable cadres among the German communists even before they entered Berlin. They had already selected their most experienced officer to lead them too. In April 1945, General Serov bade farewell to Warsaw and traveled to Germany, where he immediately divided Berlin and the other cities of the Soviet zone into “operative
sectors.” But he did not immediately give
German policemen any real power. The
Soviet officers considered Germans—even German communists—in need of far more tutelage than other Eastern Europeans. Ordinary German policemen were not allowed to carry weapons until January 1946. Even after German authorities took control of the civilian police, all personnel decisions still had to be approved by the
Soviet Military Administration.
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Only in March 1948 did the
Soviet Interior Ministry boss in the eastern zone even agree to inform the German communist party leadership about whom it intended to arrest.

Cautiously, and at first only on a small scale, the Soviet administrators did begin to set up a German political police force in 1947. Even then, not everybody approved of the idea. In Moscow, the Soviet interior minister,
Viktor Abakumov, argued that a new police force would become a target of Western propaganda, and risked being seen as a “new Gestapo.” More importantly, he still distrusted the Germans, complaining that there “were not enough German cadres who have been thoroughly checked.” Recruitment began despite these objections, perhaps, as
Norman Naimark suspects, because the NKVD had finally realized that its officers’ poor understanding of German and
Germany was creating massive resentment. Even so, it took some time for this new department—known as “K5,” or sometimes Department K—to gain real power. Originally set up to keep tabs on the police force itself, the employees of K5 took direct orders from Soviet Interior Ministry officials, bypassing the nascent regional and central government structures.
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One of the few documents from that era to survive (most were removed by the KGB, or perhaps destroyed, in 1989 or before) mentions a departmental training meeting and includes a list of attendees. Topping the list is a group of Soviet advisers.
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In this sense, K5 did resemble the political police in the rest of Eastern Europe: as in Hungary, Poland, and the USSR itself, this new political police force was initially extra-governmental, operating outside the ordinary rule of law. Only in 1950 did the new East German government pass a full-fledged “Law on the Formation of a Ministry for State
Security” that created the Ministry for State Security.
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Even then the Stasi’s Soviet masters were cautious. They dropped
Erich Mielke, the organization’s first boss—he had some suspicious holes in his biography, having spent part of the war in France—and put their own candidate,
Wilhelm Zaisser, in charge of the new agency.
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Like the Polish UB or the Hungarian ÁVO, the Stasi was modeled
closely on the NKVD (which also renamed itself after the war and eventually became known as the KGB), and the departmental structures of all three imitated those of the KGB. But the Stasi mimicked the KGB to an extraordinary degree. German secret policemen used Soviet methods of encoding and ciphering until 1954, and they even learned to sew police files together with thread, as Russian KGB clerks did in Moscow.
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Soviet comrades were consulted on matters such as secret ink and microphotography.
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More importantly, Stasi officers referred to themselves as “Chekists,” after the very first Bolshevik secret police organization, founded in 1918. They also used a symbol very similar to the KGB’s symbol, the sword and shield, and made frequent obesiance to the Soviet “friends” in their own literature.
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An internal Stasi history manual explained that “the Soviet Chekists under the leadership of Lenin and the Soviet communist party created the basic model of socialist state
security organs.” All East Germans, the manual continued, knew that “to learn from the Soviet Union means to learn how to win.” Members of the security services knew, in addition, that “to learn from the Soviet Chekists means to learn to disarm even the most sophisticated enemy.”
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Initially the Stasi recruited only from the existing staff of K5 and from communist party cadres. Even so, 88 percent of the initial job candidates were rejected for having relatives in the West, for having spent time abroad, or for having unacceptable political biographies of one kind or another. As elsewhere in the bloc, the recruiters, acting under Soviet advice, favored the young, the uneducated, and the inexperienced over older communists with prewar experience.
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Some were “graduates” of the training and indoctrination programs set up in Soviet POW camps, but many of the first recruits had been teenagers at the end of the war and had no experience at all. One early Stasi recruit describes his colleagues—“our generation”—as “people who had not been involved in the Third Reich, but who had been formed by the war.”
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Many came from underprivileged or “proletarian” backgrounds, and if they had any training at all it was heavily ideological. In 1953, 92 percent were members of the East German communist party. In practice, they would need Soviet instructors and managers for many years.
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Wolfgang Schwanitz, a young law student who came to work for the Stasi in 1951, was, in this sense, a typical recruit. More than fifty years later, he remembered that he “didn’t know anything at all about the security organs, hadn’t heard or read anything about them, and I was curious what
was expected from me … I was like a virgin before she committed a sin.” Convinced that it was “necessary to protect the GDR,” he agreed to take the job.
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Over the next few months, Schwanitz underwent intensive training. Almost without exception his trainers were Soviet secret policemen: “They really took us by the hand, the adviser would go through what I had to do during the day, and then in the evening would listen to what I’d done. He would tell me what had gone wrong or sometimes right.” They were taught practical skills—how to recruit an informer, how to set up a safe apartment, how to observe a suspect, how to conduct an investigation—as well as Marxist-Leninist theory and communist party history. Others had less training: another early recruit remembers having been “thrown into the job.” Put in a room with two or three other people—with one motorcycle to share between fifteen men—he was told to go out and organize Stasi cells in various cities. Afterward, the cells were meant to “clone themselves.”
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Schwanitz was flattered by all of this intense attention, as were many others. Günter Tschirschwitz, a young policeman whose family had left
Silesia at the end of the war, was only twenty-one when he was told simply to “come to Berlin” for an interview in 1951. There he discovered that he was meeting with officers of the Stasi. His recruiters were older men, prewar communists. “They told me stories from their antifascist past,” he told me. He was equally flattered to be recommended by his local party cell, whose letter of approval he kept for decades. The young man it describes certainly sounds promising: “He has political knowledge above average. He tries hard to extend his knowledge by studying in his spare time. He industriously studies the German communist party, he is a class-conscious person. His attitude to the Soviet Union and the GDR is always positive. He is a member of the board of the fifth party cell, contributes actively to party work, and writes for the wall newsletter.”
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The recommendation went on to describe him as “reliable” and “comradely,” and in the end he was accepted. According to his account, he was at one point considered for the job of interrogator but wound up becoming a bodyguard, perhaps the most benign job in the secret police. This pleased him, he says, “because I wouldn’t have wanted to work indoors.”

Years later, Tschirschwitz’s understanding of the role the Stasi had played in creating East Germany hadn’t grown much deeper, and his positive feelings about his Soviet training had not changed. In a long conversation about his years in the security service, he mostly reminisced about the trips he had
taken. In Prague there had been wonderful bohemian food, in Vienna he was given 200 schillings to spend, and in Budapest the Hungarian security guards were hospitable. He told fond stories about the time he rode on the train to Moscow with
Otto Grotewohl, East Germany’s prime minister after 1949, and
Wilhelm Pieck, and about the excellent cooperation he enjoyed with West German security guards during a trip to Bonn in the 1970s. His career in the Stasi had brought him social advance, a degree of material comfort, and education—all thanks to the fraternal comrades from the Soviet Union.
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The new recruits to the Eastern European secret police services learned espionage techniques, fighting skills, and surveillance methods from the NKVD and later from the KGB. From their Russian mentors, they also learned how to think like Soviet secret policemen. They learned to identify enemies even where none seemed to exist, because Soviet secret policemen knew the methods enemies used to conceal themselves. They learned to question the independence of any person or group that called itself politically neutral, because Soviet secret policemen did not believe in neutrality.

They were also trained to think in the long term and to identify potential enemies as well as actual opponents of the regime. This was a profoundly Bolshevik obsession. In March 1922, Lenin himself had declared that the “greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing … the better. We must teach these people a lesson right now, so that they will not dare even to think of any resistance for several decades.”
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In an essay written for the benefit of future cadres, one of the Stasi’s own historians explained that the organization “from the beginning could not be restricted to defending the attacks of the enemy. It was and is an organ that has to use all means in the
offensive fight
against the opponents of socialism.”
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