Suppressed Terror by Greiner Bettina

Author:Greiner, Bettina. [Greiner, Bettina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2014-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

Detention Memories

Die Erinnerung schreibt Romane, keine dokumentarischen Wahrheiten.

Memory writes novels, not documentary truths.

—Gerhard Roth, Das Alphabet der Zeit, 2007

Freedom

The Closure of the Special Camps, 1950

“We believe it is expedient to dissolve the penal camps that exist in the Eastern Zone,” Wilhelm Pieck noted in a discussion memorandum sent to Stalin on 19 September 1949. Four days after Konrad Adenauer was elected Federal Chancellor of the West German state, the chairman of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands–SED) traveled to Moscow to discuss final details of the imminent creation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In the same memorandum Pieck proposed “to deport criminals convicted by the Soviet authorities to the Soviet Union and . . . to turn over the rest”—the internees—“to the German authorities.”1

This submission was “expedient” in view of the years of public pressure brought to bear on the SED to justify the incarcerations, pressure that it continued to find difficult to cope with, in particular since the (generally quite sudden) disappearance of spouses, children or neighbors was causing popular unrest. Countless petitions and queries sent to the SED about the whereabouts of missing persons met either with evasive replies or no response at all;2 the party had committed itself to the taboo on public acknowledgement of Soviet detention practices. The SED had considered staging show trials to justify the existence of the special camps and had presented the idea in Moscow.3 However, with the exception of the 1947 “Norwegian Trial”4 and the “Berlin Trial” in the same year, which was subsequently shown in cinema newsreels,5 Moscow did not take up the proposal. Perhaps there was not enough incriminatory evidence for further show trials.

What made Pieck’s September 1949 proposal particularly “expedient” was the fact that the camps continued to exist, despite the formal declaration in February 1948 that denazification had come to an end. Equally difficult to explain to the public was why arrests were still being made. The authorities had hoped for a respite following the release of 28,000 internees in the summer of 1948,6 but it soon became apparent that the expected propaganda effect did not materialize. On their release, the prisoners were told—like those sent home later when the camps were closed—that they were forbidden to talk about their imprisonment under threat of re-arrest. Only a few were discouraged by these warnings from conveying information about former fellow inmates to their relatives, in most cases news of their death. As a result, the SED was “flooded” with petitions and queries.7 What further exacerbated the situation for the SED were internees who had either been released directly into the Western zones in 1948 or had moved there after leaving the camps. These former internees found eager listeners in the Western media and in organizations such as the Combat Group against Inhumanity (Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit–KgU), which supplied a public forum—as will be shown in greater detail below—for their detention experiences. This was the background of a scandal that broke on the occasion of Thomas Mann’s trip to Weimar in 1949, the year of Goethe’s three hundredth birthday.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.