The Berlin Wall (31 page)

The area was one of mixed residential and light-industrial use in the Hohenschönhausen sub-district of Lichtenberg. This was a busy outer district of East Berlin, yet a substantial part of it appeared on no city guide. Nearby streets were marked, but, on maps printed in East Berlin throughout the GDR’s existence, they simply stopped and a blank area was shown. Even on Western maps, there were only vague outlines of buildings, plus a small goods station that had been there since before the war.

On the ground, had our traveller persisted in trying to find his or her way north from the Gensler Strasse tram stop, they would have reached a high wall festooned with warning signs. Had they turned into the Freienwalder Strasse, they would have seen a ‘stop’ sign, a checkpoint manned by armed guards in the uniform of the East German Ministry of State Security, and a set of high, panelled-steel barriers, blocking further progress along the street. This was the main entrance to the forbidden area.

A section of this industrial area, covering half a square kilometre, had been Jewish-owned before 1933 and was expropriated under the Nazis.
This benefited the expansion of one local ‘Aryan’ business, a large-scale button factory that flourished on contracts for the
Webrmacht
. Other favoured companies included the Heikle plant, which manufactured meat-processing machinery, and Asid, a pharmaceutical factory producing vaccination materials. The Nazi welfare organisation, the NSV, built a modern canteen kitchen (
Grossküche
) on the site, capable of providing thousands of meals for the local population under the aegis of the ‘Winter Aid Fund’.

These facilities were extensively damaged by Allied air raids. Also affected by bombing were a small punishment camp run by the Gestapo on the Gensler Strasse, where Jews and conscripted workers from Eastern Europe were sent if they failed to fulfil their norms, and a
Webrmacht
-owned warehouse used to store looted goods from occupied Europe.

On 22 April, the 5th Army of the White Russian Front, under the command of General Berzarin, overran Hohenschönhausen. Huge amounts of warehoused materials, plus most of the equipment from the canteen kitchen, went missing. So far, an average fate for a typical suburban industrial development of that time and place.

The peculiarity of this district, however, was that the Soviet ‘People’s Commissariat for Interior Affairs’ (NKVD), predecessor of the notorious KGB, chose to set up its headquarters precisely here. With the aid of local Communists and other variously motivated informers, the Soviets began to round up those in the locality who had been guilty of supporting Hitler. Especially the bourgeoisie.

On 23 April 1945, eighty-year-old Richard Heikle, owner of the meat-processing machinery factory, was identified to a Soviet patrol and shot dead on the spot, on the corner of Freienwalder Strasse and Gensler Strasse, along with his housekeeper and a family friend.
¹⁶
It was the kind of impromptu revenge killing common all over Eastern Germany in those tumultuous weeks, but soon such casual executions would be succeeded by a systematic purge. Richard Heikle junior, son of the dead meat-processing magnate, was arrested and disappeared for ever to a labour camp in the Soviet Union. Several other managers were imprisoned. Soon the NKVD requisitioned what remained of the Gestapo camp and the canteen kitchen. This area was in mid-May 1945 officially designated ‘Special Camp No. 3’. One Major Smaroda of the NKVD was made its commandant.

Many thousands, prominent and obscure, suffered similar fates to Heikle junior. The most famous was the actor, Heinrich George. Star of the 1920s film classics
Metropolis
and
Berlin Alexanderplatz
, he had once been an opponent of the Nazis, but had allowed himself to be seduced by Goebbels and became a leading figure in the Third Reich’s film culture. George was imprisoned here in June/July 1945 before being transferred to the former Nazi concentration camp at Sachsenhausen just outside Berlin. There he died a year later.

In the spring of 1951, ‘Special Camp No.3’, now expanded to include almost all the half-square-kilometre industrial area, was handed over by the Soviets to the new East German Ministry of State Security. The area of the canteen kitchen and the former Gestapo punishment camp became the
Stasi
’s main interrogation prison.

The area was peculiarly suited to this use. It was relatively isolated and easily closed off, the buildings were conveniently configured, and (last but not least) into the midst of the location ran a branch railway line. The ‘goods’ transported could just as well be human beings as machines or consumer durables.

On Thursday 17 August 1961, scooped up off the street by
Stasi
operatives, Klaus Schulz-Ladegast came to Hohenschönhausen by car. He had been blindfolded shortly after his journey began, so all he experienced of his arrival was the end of the cobbled street and the sound of a gate opening. Then he heard the car cross a flagstoned area, and pass through another metal gate. Schulz-Ladegast now realised from the echo that they were inside a contained space. The gate clanged shut.

The blindfold was removed. The lights were dazzling. As Schulz-Ladegast was dragged out of the car a terrifying chorus of shouting came from unseen voices. He was hauled through this din towards a door. The calculated psychological nightmare of
Stasi
‘interrogation-custody’ had begun.
¹⁷

The interrogation prison at Hohenschönhausen, as it existed in 1961, was part of a wider complex. It was not just a prison but also a
Stasi
administrative centre and a specialist labour camp. Elsewhere within the complex, long-term prisoners made false Western number plates that were used by
Stasi
employees operating in the ‘capitalist abroad’, plus there was a print shop for documents, forms and ID papers, legitimate
and otherwise. In the 1950s, tools of the spying trade such as miniature cameras and recorders had also been manufactured here, but the department (‘special camp X’) had been closed down after information was leaked to the Western press.
¹⁸

The interrogation prison was different. It concentrated solely on getting out of suspects what the state needed to justify the usually pre-ordained verdicts that secret courts would inflict on them. Klaus was one among many hundreds, and the way he was dealt with by his jailers—Department XIV of the
Stasi
, responsible for the running of political prisons—was fairly typical.

On arrival, after the routine ordeal of reception, he was stripped and put into rough prison fatigues. Then he was marched to an isolation cell. Moving around the interrogation prison was a strict, carefully monitored procedure. Especially in the early stages of incarceration, no prisoner was permitted to converse or even see another. A system of ‘traffic lights’ at corners in the maze of gloomy corridors warned if another detainee and his escort were approaching. If this was the case, the original prisoner would be pushed into a man-sized niche specially dug into the wall, where he would have to stand, face pressed against the dark brickwork, until the other prisoner and his escort had safely passed.

The cell itself, when the prisoner reached it, consisted of just a bed and a latrine. A frosted glass window let in a little natural light, but allowed no view of the outside. The entire place was desperately lonely, eerily silent. The prisoner, especially one, like Klaus, who had just arrived from the freedom and fresh air of the outside world, would soon feel as if he was being slowly buried alive.

Klaus’s experiences at Hohenschönhausen, and later at the notorious ‘Yellow Misery’, as the Bautzen prison in Saxony was known—four years in all—would mark him for life. He was sentenced for knowingly having introduced to his father a man from West German intelligence who wanted to discuss the affairs of the Brandenburg Church Community. His father had resisted at first, then agreed.

The West German agent had been very firm. Neither father or son should ever mention their meetings with him to anyone, anyone at all. Klaus’s father thought this could not apply in the case of his best friend and colleague at the Church Council, with whom—certain that they
shared similar political sympathies—he discussed the meetings. However, this apparent soulmate was in fact a
Stasi
agent, specifically assigned to him as a ‘minder’. Hence the arrest of Klaus and, unknown to him, also his father on that Thursday five days after the Wall went up.

Both father and son underwent the same torment of isolation and interrogation. The methods used on each were similar. A mild threat of violence at times, though none actually used.
Stasi
methods in the 1950s had frequently been brutally similar to those of the NKVD and KGB, but paradoxically, after the outrage of ‘Barbed-Wire Sunday’, East Germany began to seek international respectability, which encouraged the
Stasi
to switch mostly to psychological methods.

The classic scenario was the ‘corner-to-corner’ interrogation room. The room was on the second floor and overlooked the edge of the prison, allowing a tantalising glimpse of the outside world. The interrogator’s chair and desk were situated at an angle to this window corner, facing into the room. When the prisoner was brought in, he was placed on an uncomfortable small stool in the far, interior corner of the room, so that he crouched there facing the interrogator, who was a good ten feet away. The psychological effect, which had been thoroughly researched, was to make the prisoner instantly uncomfortable and apprehensive, subject to an animal unease, which the interrogator could increase by simply staring at him, and saying things like ‘I have plenty of time. I have nothing but time’. It was clear to the prisoner that, just out of his line of vision, a window revealed the world he had left weeks or months previously for a lonely, silent cell. Often the prisoner felt an overwhelming sense to talk, to make something happen that would get him off that stool and out of there. Many gave in to this compulsion.

Klaus talked. But he did not tell his interrogators what they wanted. He instinctively denied everything about the West German spies, though he fed his jailers a lot about his life as a gadfly in the East Berlin social scene and his regular visits to places like the fashionable ‘Press Café’ in the Friedrichstrasse. Luckily, he had never taken money from the West Germans, so they could prove nothing in that regard.

This game of drip-feeding important-sounding but actually trivial information helped keep Klaus sane. Two other things also helped. First, within a month of arriving, he found himself afflicted with violent
stomach pains and had to be taken into hospital. There, though kept in an enclosed wing, he got two weeks of better food, relatively normal treatment, including the attentions of pleasant young nurses, and a breathing space.

Schulz-Ladegast returned to the prison, after recovering from the (probably psychosomatic) illness, much strengthened. Then he was moved into a cell with another prisoner, an older man who had served in the
Wehrmacht
. His cellmate taught him a few survival tricks. How to handle interrogators, and above all how to keep that vital element of self-respect while remaining within the rules. He told Klaus never to obey a guard’s order immediately. They discussed how to judge that split-second pause when ordered to do something by a guard; the split-second pause that allowed the prisoner to make the guard wait, while at the same time avoiding punishment for disobedience. On such fine behavioural detail depended a prisoner’s sense of his own dignity and therefore his emotional survival.

The original sentence intended for Klaus had been eight years, as he later found out from viewing his
Stasi
file. Through his skill at the interrogation game, he had managed, Klaus noted with grim satisfaction, to get that down to four.

Klaus survived Hohenschönhausen. He survived a further three years at Bautzen. It would be almost ten years before he once more set foot on Western soil, a changed man and in a different country. While the Wall existed, he never again set eyes on the woman he had fallen in love with that summer.

Ironically, his father had had his freedom ‘purchased’ by West German benefactors years earlier. He was one of the first East German political prisoners released by this route. It was a sign that the East German gulag would, unique among the prison systems of the Eastern Bloc, become a trading organisation, exchanging human beings for hard currency.

The sealing of the border had been a sudden coup, crude but effective in execution. Once the wire and the guards were in place, the fortifications would be intensified and the more durable structure that would be known as the Wall put into place.

Meanwhile, the dissidents and the amateur spies such as Klaus could
be scooped up and dealt with. And, behind the new barrier, other inconvenient details could be tidied up.

In the Bernauer Strasse and the neighbouring streets, as autumn 1961 turned into winter, the regime finished removing residents from the houses and apartment blocks adjoining the new border, especially in the Mitte district. Of the total of 497 households that made up the Bernauer Strasse, reckoned to total 826 individuals, in the five weeks until 19 September 143 families (276 individuals) were removed to other accommodation; it was planned that by 21 October the other 354 families (530) would also be gone. This would leave the area safe from escape attempts on the part of its residents, by dint of the simple fact that there would no longer be any residents.
¹⁹

The same went for border areas in Treptow. On 13 August Till Meyer had seen East Berliners waving and shouting from their apartments in the Harzer Strasse to their Western friends and relatives on the other side of the barbed wire. This was no longer possible after 15 October. By then, 42 families (108 persons) were removed from those very same apartment blocks in the Harzer Strasse. Elsewhere in that small complex of streets adjoining the West Berlin borough of Kreuzberg, a further 134 households were also due for deportation.