Meanwhile Werner Fischer has come up with some facts. In his "Security Working Group Report" of the central Round Table in the GDR of March 12, 1990, he points out that "38,750 of the Stasi's 40,409 employees at central level and 28,815 of the 33,121 employees at district level have been made redun-
EAST GERMANY
General, who also opposed the checks sler Zeitung on the parliamentarians. "We have had since the start difficult relations with the Public Ministry.
We have had the experience that the prosecutors assigned to us were ready for anything except collaboration. We have since even had the feeling that they directly were obstructing us".
As inquiries reveal the massacres and graves from the end of the war, where the Stalinist political police killed thousands of former
Nazis and also left oppositionists, a scandal has new erupted at Erfurt — a region where the
CDU got some of their best scores. The Citizens Committee in this town, which brings together all parties and has been controlling the Stasi's offices since December 4 with daily guards, discovered plans for "internment camps" prepared by the Stasi in the final years of the regime. The plan, under preparation since 1980, envisaged the establishment of 24 camps with a total capacity of 15,000 to 20,000 places in which all the opponents were to be held. The largest of these camps was near Gotha. Each of them was to be surrounded with electrified barbed wire and control towers. Holiday camps for young people, offices of the Sport and Technique Society, and holiday villages were to be requisitioned.
Lists of names were drawn up in every town. One of these lists, of 122 names, was uncovered in Leipzig, dated October
9,1989.
Pressures and threats to hinder investigations
But it is less the macabre aspect of this plan, than the aftermath, which has created a scandal. On April 3, the Citizens'
Committee published an open letter to the national parliament backed up by a hunger strike. Those who had uncovered the scandal had to really exert themselves to get a hearing. They demanded that, on the one hand, all the parliamentarians and future local deputies should be checked regarding collaboration with the Stasi, and, on the other, that the pressure and threats against the Erfurt commission of inquiry should be stopped. Furthermore, to prevent the files from disappearing,
12 they have begun to wall up the Stasi offices with concrete.
International Viewpoint #184 • May 7, 1990
STASI
A CDU spokesperson from Thuringia, Wolfgang Hase, explained at the time that he did not agree with the party leadership in Berlin on the blocking of the inquiry into the parliamentary deputies. But above all, the Erfurt committee protested against a circular from the government's commission for dissolving the Stasi instructing enterprises to release five people in each district for five days a week. Since most enterprises are still managed by former Stasi members, who will not want to pay the price, this measure has the effect of depriving the commissions of inquiry of means.
These various forms of obstruction come as no surprise in a regime where the political police were entrenched in every decisive place in the state and economy. The preaching of absolution and pardon, amounts to an effort to save the corrupted former bureaucrats by "laundering" them into new functions in the market economy, parliamentary democracy and tomorrow, a united Germany.
Kohl knows as well as the top functionaries and leaders of the former SED that this osmosis is a guarantee of the smooth integration of the GDR, and limits the ability of the GDR's population to keep an eye on the "big operations" underway.
For them, Rostock has been a bitter pill The inquiry into the mayor there not only uncovered the scheme for turning ex-cops into teachers but also some cosy bits of business with the FRG. The local administration had already made a contract with a Hamburg firm to install public clocks in exchange for getting all the revenue from the public hoardings surrounding them. Other contracts seemed to be in preparation, for luxury hotels and supermarkets.
This is clearly just the tip of the iceberg.
Every company in the FRG now wants to get its hands on the economy, services and real estate of the East.
The biggest West insurance
German
Allianz company, has already taken over all the contracts of the former state insurance firm.
Volkswagen is getting ready to produce the Polo in Zwickau and Opel the Kadett in Eisenach. Krupp is only taking on East emigrants
German on the condition that they go back to work in the east. Dresner-
Bank has got 35 machines money ready to go into operation in the GDR in competition with the
Deutsche Bank whose enterprise advisor,
Roland Berger is already looking after the accounts of the GDR's main enterprises and is going to take over the East Berlin
Kreditbank and its 200 branches.
The energy trusts have a programme prepared for stopping or converting the
GDR's power stations and setting up high tension lines from the FRG. How many functionaries and directors, who were all more or less big shots in the Stasi, have already found their niche in this gigantic reconciliation manoeuvre? Many, without doubt, and above all the most highly placed. And it is this that old and new rulers both in Bonn and Berlin want to keep in the dark.
Six million files ready to explode
In his way, Werner Fischer recognizes this. In the report quoted above, he was very cautious when it came to the question of publishing the Stasi's dossiers.
These six million files seemed to him so explosive that he advised caution when it came to their publication. "It is clear that opening these files would throw light on many things. Everybody would know who had spied or informed on them. But at the same time, I think that such revelations could create a climate of suspicion and individual justice. Nobody should over-estimate human beings." (p.15) He concluded by proposing that the dossiers should be kept locked away, that the new government should decide what to do with them and make an agreement with the former Stasi collaborators on the possibility of some honorable recompense.
Three weeks later, however, Fischer
was feeling a lot more intransigent. He had met with resistance on all sides, while in Rostock and Erfurt for example, the opening of certain files by the commission of inquiry had brought scandals to light without any sign of the lynch-mobs inat Eppelmann was so worried about. that Eppelmann
Fischer concludes: "Contrary to the feeling that we had two weeks ago, when we imagined ourselves controlling the dissolution of the Stasi in some way, I now have the feeling that everything is slipping through our fingers. This impression goes far beyond the question of the dissolution of the Stasi as such. Since this ministry was almost dissolved, a vacuum has appeared. The KGB is at work and, among others the West German security services are trying to jump into the breach. ...It is important that the dissolution is controlled and it is up to the citizens' committees to do this....I want to avoid embittering a climate of suspicion, a pogrom atmosphere. Since the elections and after the multiplying number of items of information we have received, I think that things have developed in a different way from the moment when people, through the elections, assumed their political responsibilities. I think that the population has the right to know about the past of the parliamentarians. Otherwise we leave ourselves open to the accusation of wanting to suppress things. This affair was a turning point for me and I am now in favour of publicizing the files on all the candidates. Should the population be told the truth?
For decades the GDR's citizens were treated - and mistreated - like minors. The State-Party-Stasi told them what to think, what to do and how to behave. But hardly had they assumed their responsibilities as active citizens in the streets last autumn than the governments, both in East and West, decided that they are incapable of knowing the truth about their own society. Not only its past, but also what is happening right now. This is what the pleas for amnesty mean.
But people who have won democratic liberties for themselves will not relinquish them so soon. The demonstrations of the end of March and the actions of the citizens' movements, such as in Rostock and Erfurt, have already borne fruit. Under the pressure of these events, the heads of the parliamentary fractions in the new parliament have agreed to an inquiry into the deputies. Der Spiegel of April 2 remarks: "The parliamentarians had no choice. The battle to get to grips with the political legacy of the SED and its army of spies threatens to divide East German society, which is already very disturbed". The truth it seems still has some future on the other side of the former iron curtain. *
EAST GERMANY AROUND THE WOR