Then he adds: "Control over the dissolution of the old security ministry is meeting big problems
AT THE END of March, tens of thousands of demonstrators
(50,000 in East Berlin) came back into the streets of the cities of East Germany to demand "no Stasi (secret police) in the parliament!" Werner Schulz of New Forum called on the demonstrators to "carry through what we started in the autumn". Wolfgang Templin from the Initiative for Peace and
Human Rights added: "What this conflict is really about Is: wlll we have democracy or not?"
In the following article, which first appeared in the April 13,
1990, Issue of La Brèche, the paper of the Swiss Socialist
Workers Party (Swiss section of the Fourth International),
Michel Thévenaz takes up the story.
MICHEL THÉVENAZ
Berlin CDU warns against checks going beyond the limits of parliament. "Will we soon be checking up on the 27,000 elected representatives in the communes and districts? The people will come to blows."
Pastor Eppelmann predicts lynch mobs
The same note was struck by Pastor
Rainer Eppelmann, a publicly known figure from the November demonstrations and latterly the leader of "Democratic
Awakening",
", a small formation (0.9% of the vote) allied to the CDU, who is looking for a government post. Eppelmann predicts a "lynch-mob atmosphere" and a settling of accounts. While he has not opposed the checks on the parliamentarians, he wants the inquiries to stop and a compromise to be found:
"I see only one way forward. The new parliament must be as clean as possible, and then, should give a general pardon."
(Der Spiegel, April 2, 1990).
Why hide the truth in this way? Sebastian Pflugbeil, minister without portfolio in the Modrow government and a member of New Forum, expressed the feelings of
"There can tens of thousands of citizens.
be no question of limiting the inquiry to the 400 deputies. The municipal elections are coming up and I do not want to vote for a mayor who worked for the Stasi. It is the same with the judges, the prosecutors and teachers. I do not want my children educated by former Stasi members. The situation is somewhat similar to 1945 -and the solution then was not very satisfactory. I believe that we can resolve this in a more intelligent fashion this time. This requires a certain effort, but this is not a reason for not going through with it." (Tageszeitung, March 28, 1990)
The argument about "settling accounts" is a good piece of camouflage for what is going on. The danger is not that of mass lynchings, but that of the reconversion of the Stasi into the state and industrial apparatuses. On March 26, after an inquiry undertaken by citizens' movements in Rostock, backed up by a street demonstration, the city's mayor, Henning Schleiff and his advisor on school affairs, Gustav Bendlin, both members of the former ruling party, the SED, and the Stasi, resigned. They were recycling former party and Stasi members into the schools. After their resignation the town hall was occupied by members of the Round Table and the new mayor is a member of New Forum.
Cutbacks in the state security sector
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 redunfoundation of enterprises using Stasi funds. An example of this is the Enterprise of Engineers for the Construction of Scientific Equipment, which was hastily set up on January 13, 1990 [two days before the popular occupations of Stasi offices] by a ministerial decision taken without sufficient information being given to the public, and which fuses several sections of the former Stasi and its off-
"The enterprise currently has three main workshops, in Berlin-Köpenick, Leipzig Beucha and Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, each equipped with a highly developed technical infrastructure and a multitude of small production workshops and depots. There are also 16 rest centres with some 4000 places, a kindergarten with 544 places and an unknown amount of land. As the Ministry of Science and Technology put it on January 13, 1990, this is an "Enterprise of Engineers for the Construction of Scientific Equipment employing, as previously, more than 1,500 former members of the Ministry of Security who, above all, are continuing to work in the old structure of their enterprise"." (p.11)
The Stasi's technicians are even planning to market their services. Interviewed by the West German leftist daily Tageszeitung on March 4, Werner Fischer noted: "I see a danger that former highranking collaborators will establish themselves in the economy thanks to their connections and acquaintances." Business contacts in the best society
Alexander Schalk-Goldokowski, Stasi colonel and its big purveyor of hard currency via the arms trade (notably in Iran and Iraq), was the prototype. He was sufficiently high up to take to his heels before disaster struck. An international warrant is out for his arrest. But, as he explained to West Germany's Die Welt, his business affairs had brought him into contact with the best society and he was "firmly determined to seize the new and massive opportunities that are arising today."
In his interview with Tageszeitung Werner Fischer also points to the resistance solving the Stasi farmine are of dis- 11 solving the Stasi from the Prosecutor May 7, 1990 • #184 International Viewpoint
EAST GERMANY General, who also opposed the checks Kler Leituns 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 were directly obstructing us".
As inquiries reveal the massacres and graves from the end of the war, where the Stalinist political police killed thousands of former erupted at Erfurt — 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
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, they have begun to wall up the Stasi offic • es with concrete. International Viewpoint #184 • May 7, 1990
STASI
A CDU spokesperson from Thuringia,
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
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.
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 the economy, servic es and real estate of The biggest West already taken over all the contracts of the former state Volkswagen is ting ready to produce the Polo in Zwickau and Opel the Kadett in Eisenach. Krupp is 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 pos sibility of some honorable recompense.
Three weeks later, however, Fischer