Coming to Terms: Dealing with the Communist Past in United Germany

92 Pages·2011·11.26 MB·English

by  Bernd Schaefer

Coming to Terms:
Dealing with the Communist Past
in United Germany
Bundesunmittelbare Stiftung
des öffentlichen Rechts
Preface 5

I. The Post-Communist German Experience: Special Features 14
1. Securing and Opening the Files 15
2. Records and Lustrations 20
3. Elite Changes 24
4. Communist Injustice before the Courts 32
5. Restitution, Rehabilitation, Compensation 40
II. Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED-Dictatorship 44
1. Origins: Parliamentary Inquiry Commissions and Initiatives 45
2. Structure of the Foundation 48
3. Mandate and Scope: Services and Activities 52

III. Other German and International Institutions: A Brief Overview 56
1. Federal Institutions 58
2. Civic archives 72
3. Other Institutions, museums and memorial sites 74
4. Victims Associations 86
Coming to Terms: Dealing with the
Communist Past in United Germany
This brochure is commissioned and published by the Federal Foundation for the
Reappraisal of the SED-Dictatorship (Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur).
Written in collaboration with the Foundation by Bernd Schaefer, Senior Research
Scholar with the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson
International Center in Washington D.C., it provides an overview of salient features
and important institutions pertaining to processes of coming to terms with the
communist past in Germany since 1990.
Berlin, October 2011
Dr. Anna Kaminsky

COmInG TO TERmS: DEAlInG wITh ThE
COmmUnIST PAST In UnITED GERmAny
During the course of the 20th century Germany experienced two different
dictatorships, the twelve years of fascist Nazi Germany’s “Third Reich”
between 1933 and 1945 and the 40 years of communist rule in East
Germany between 1949 and 1989 (the latter preceded by Soviet military
occupation of Eastern Germany and East Berlin since 1945 when German
communists were guided in building up dictatorial structures).
6 Coming to t erms:
Dealing with the Communist Past in u niteD g ermany
Both periods of dictatorships had some structural How Germans came to terms with those two dictatorships
elements in common while they also displayed obvious existing on their soil varied significantly, given the major
contrasts. Both dictatorships started and ended very differently, differences in both international and national environments
with Nazi Germany resorting to a global war of aggression after 1945 and from 1989. Meanwhile both experiences in
resulting in millions of war dead and the genocide of European redressing injustices of the past have begun to reference
Jewry. Respective crimes committed by the two German each other in public German discourse. They have led to a
dictatorships differed vastly in scope and geographical range. convergence in the sense that obligations exist to face
dictatorial pasts from the perspectives of victims rather than
After the demise of Nazi Germany and the Second World those held by perpetrators. The process of how to come to
War’s ending in Europe, Soviet military authorities used certain terms with various injustices and crimes committed during
Nazi concentration camp sites in Eastern Germany between dictatorships also facilitated a scrutiny of the latter’s legacies.
1945 and 1950 for their ten “special internment camps” to They warrant a search for lessons applicable to post-dictatorial
detain some real, and many alleged, national-socialists. democratic systems and corresponding societal structures.
About 43,000 of them, i.e. 35 percent of individuals interned,
perished during confinement. The German population in areas that became the communist
German Democratic Republic (GDR) experienced the
differences and similarities of two succeeding dictatorships
from 1933 to 1945 and 1945 to 1989. The GDR was established
on 7 October 1949 and imposed on the population by German
communists organized in the Socialist Unity Party (SED) with
the vital assistance of the Soviet Union and without popular
legitimization. A façade of “democratic” institutions was set
up with the SED actually pulling all the strings by virtue of its
There were about 250,000 political prisoners
in the GDR over the course of 40 years
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Coming to t erms:
Dealing with the Communist Past in u niteD g ermany
self-assigned absolute unfettered power. Over the course of
years, people living in this socialist state had to experience
multiple features of repression. Opponents of the regime, or
members of rival political parties during the early postwar
years, were at any time subject to various forms of
administrative repression or arbitrary arrests based on
partisan definitions of criminal law. The judicial system was
entirely subordinated to the SED’s respective political interests.
Overall 250,000 people were arrested between 1945 and
1989 for political reasons (between 1961 and 1989 about
30,000 of them were released to the West after ransom was
paid to GDR authorities by the West German government).
Thousands were deported to Siberian camps by Soviet
authorities after 1945 and during the 1950s. Until August 1961
alone, more than three million people fled the GDR through
the still open borders with West Germany: Such constituted
soviet tanks terminate the massive east
german popular revolt in June 1953
9
the largest refugee movement in Europe after the end of
World War II. Traumatic experiences were created, for
instance, by the violent Soviet crackdown on the massive
East German popular revolt in June 1953, the 1956 defeat of
the Hungarian uprising and subsequent repressive measures
in the GDR, the August 1961 construction of the intra-Berlin
border and the walling-in and fencing-in of 17 million people
in the GDR now separated from their kin in West Germany,
the 1968 Warsaw Pact military intervention in Czechoslovakia,
or the 1981 martial law crackdown on the Solidarnosc labor
and peasant union movement in neighboring Poland. All those
events had in common that attempts by people in the GDR
and Eastern Europe to attain democratic rights and freedoms
were met by dictatorial regimes with a full force of repressive
measures.
the Berlin wall in the 1970s
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Coming to t erms:
Dealing with the Communist Past in u niteD g ermany
The communist regime in the GDR remained in power as process of self-democratization began. Free elections on
long as Moscow had a vested interest in and the power to 18 March 1990 resulted in an overwhelming majority for East
maintain a division of Germany and the existence of a separate German political parties advocating rapid unification with the
socialist German state. By 1989 at the latest, the USSR had Western Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). By then the
implicitly withdrawn its warranty of armed intervention to slogan from the beginning of the revolution had changed to
maintain the survival of a socialist East Germany. In parallel “We are one people”. Ensuing negotiations between government
developments, a refugee wave exiting the GDR to West representatives from both German states then culminated in
Germany through Hungary and Czechoslovakia ultimately a currency, economic, and social union on 1 July 1990 and in
toppled the SED regime in conjunction with unrest inside the a comprehensive Unification Treaty signed on 31 August 1990.
GDR. There massive and After extensive multilateral and bilateral deliberations, the four
persistent peaceful demonstrations victorious allied powers of World War II (USSR, USA, Great
The slogan from
held countrywide in small and big Britain, France) ratified on 12 September 1990 in Moscow with
the beginning of
cities took place. All this was both German states in a so-called “2+4 Treaty” upcoming
the revolution had
inspired by the huge path-breaking German unification and the status of united Germany as a
changed to
demonstration in the city of Leipzig member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
“We are one people”
on 9 October 1989, which military alliance. Soviet armed forces in the GDR, which that
ultimately forced the opening of at height of the Cold War in Europe had amounted to 400,000
the Berlin Wall and of the country’s sealed borders with the men, were to leave the Eastern part of united Germany by 1994.
West by 9 November 1989. A “peaceful revolution” featuring
the slogan “We are the people” gradually dismantled Back in 1945, Soviet military occupation authorities had
communist state structures and established foundations for established on East German territory the five states of
the emergence of a multi-party democracy. After the self- Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony, Saxony-
liberation of East Germans through a political revolution, a Anhalt and Thuringia. The city of Berlin was divided into four