CHAPTER FOUR

The (Former) Lives of Others

It is said that former politicians have to learn to drive all over again after the loss of their staff cars and chauffeurs. If that was the case with Hans-Dietrich Genscher, then he did a good job. The former Free Democratic Party minister for home affairs and long-term minister for foreign affairs had his 250 PS Audi firmly in hand as we sped towards Bad Godesberg on a journey back into the past: to the Friedrich-Nietzsche School in Halle, where in 1942, at 15 years of age, he was struggling with an essay on the Austrian poet Grillparzer.

Genscher still knows some of Grillparzer’s verse off by heart. ‘Just one thing is happiness here on Earth, one alone: a heart peaceful and unburdened, a chest free of guilt,’ he proclaimed as he accelerated. ‘Greatness is a peril, glory an empty game; what it gives, nothing but shadows, but so much more it takes away.’

He told me that he had always carried the leitmotif of Grillparzer’s words with him, especially once he became a politician. But for a teenager in the Third Reich, it was a dangerous topic. If internal values are really the most important, asked the young Genscher in his essay, then why is everyone in Germany running around in uniforms?

Genscher was lucky — that’s how he tells it today. When the written test was handed back, the teacher explained to him that he threw the essay away after his inkpot ran out. Laying his hands on Genscher’s shoulders, he said: ‘So you see, my boy, now there are only two people in the whole world who know why it was for the best that I threw your work away.’

The 15-year-old learned an important lesson back then: knowledge is power. It was the first time Genscher recognised the importance of secrets — and the power they give you over others. It was a tremendously useful lesson for life in the young, forward-looking Federal Republic, where looking back would have reminded the majority of Germans of their own secrets, whether they were small or large.

Even in the early post-war era in Germany, there was an urgent desire to bury the past as much as possible. In 1964, the Free Democratic Party (FDP) chairman Thomas Dehler announced at a party conference that anyone who was shocked by someone having been a formal member of the NSDAP ‘denies a generation of young people who had to live under very particular circumstances from being able to live their lives, and in particular from being able to have any impact politically’. By then, Genscher was already on the podium as national secretary of the FDP, having been brought into the Bonn FDP fraction by Dehler in 1956. And there was a secret in his past, too, a number: 10123636. That is the number 17-year-old Genscher was given when he was accepted as a member of the NSDAP in 1944 — without his knowledge, as he assured me: ‘I didn’t sign any enrolment form.’

It is true, the Federal Archives where the NSDAP card index is now stored contain no such enrolment form — although there is an index card in Genscher’s name that shows the application date as being 18 May 1944 and records his enrolment as taking retroactive effect from 20 April 1944, Adolf Hitler’s 55th birthday. But Genscher’s name also appears again: in a ‘name-checked list’ of the enrolment notes that were sent from the Gauleitung in Halle on 23 August 1944 to the NSDAP Reich leadership in Munich.

Genscher claims that he only found out about the existence of his membership card in the early 1970s. By that time, he was already minister for home affairs in the social-liberal coalition under Willy Brandt. A colleague gave him the tip-off that there was a ‘certain document’. ‘After that, I had it looked into by the Home Affairs Ministry, and then they sent it to me,’ he said.

Genscher kept the information to himself. His membership card was removed from the main card index of the Berlin Document Center, and then disappeared — along with those of other top German politicians — into the safe of the American director.

‘Keep your enemies close, but your party comrades closer’ is the old piece of political wisdom. But Genscher’s ‘comrade’ didn’t betray him. Not in West Germany, at least.

In East Berlin, however, a senior lieutenant of the Ministry for State Security (MfS) sat down at his desk on 4 September 1970 and composed a memorandum for Aktuelle Fragen, the in-house task group dealing with current political questions: ‘It has become apparent from information provided by the Central Evaluation and Information Group Nr. E 8125/70, that according to files from the Document Center of the USA in West Berlin, Home Affairs Minister Genscher was transferred from the Hitler Youth into the NSDAP on the 20.4.1944.’1

The Ministry for State Security’s Central Evaluation and Information Group (Zentrale Auswertungs und Informationsgruppe, or ZAIG), was brought into being after the 17 June 1953 People’s Uprising in order to keep the SED (Socialist Unity Party) leadership up to date on the political situation. From the 1970s, if not before, it was the ‘central hub in the state security apparatus’.2 The information that ZAIG collected from operative processes — or, in common parlance, espionage — was also used by the MfS’s ‘agitation department’ for propaganda campaigns against West German politicians.

Dieter Skiba, a former MfS officer whom I interviewed in 2012, acknowledged that, politically speaking, membership in the NSDAP or SS could certainly have been relevant ‘for those individuals who may have been undesirable’. And also for intelligence, of course — ‘So that one could say: Listen, we’ll keep our mouths shut.’

The secrecy surrounding the NS past of many East Germans served the party leadership and State Security service (Stasi) as more than just a useful means of exerting pressure. When young Günter Guillaume’s party membership was discovered by his superior at the Volk und Wissen publishing house after he told a fib, the Stasi pressed him into collaborating with them. Guillaume had been accepted into the NSDAP on 20 April 1944, the same date as Genscher. Three decades later, Stasi spy Guillaume was a close adviser of Willy Brandt, Home Affairs Minister Genscher, and Günther Nollau, also a former NSDAP member from East Germany and the president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

But not even the Stasi revealed Genscher’s NSDAP membership. ‘This is a common ploy in the secret service,’ Dieter Skiba explained. ‘To want to know everything, then pull something out of the bag now and then when necessary. We stockpiled a lot of information.’

It would be another two decades before the NSDAP membership cards were passed into the hands of the German Federal Archives, in the summer of 1994. A few weeks later, the public found out about Genscher’s card. ‘Beforehand, the FRG [West Germany] didn’t want to know,’ Skiba asserted, ‘and as we always said: If I don’t actually possess the information, I don’t need to know about it. If I don’t have the files, then I’m not responsible for making them public or dealing with them. For the FRG, that was an easy way of saying: Us? No, sorry, we don’t know anything about that. The Americans are dealing with it.’

Of operative importance: when the Stasi tried to spy on the BDC

Clearly, West German academics weren’t the only ones interested in the Document Center’s files and NSDAP card index — East Berlin’s Ministry for State Security was, too. Long-standing BDC director David Marwell believes that the Stasi were repeatedly able to access information from the Berlin archive.3

Thanks to a source in the Document Center, the MfS acquired detailed information about the building, employees, and organisation of the secret US department as early as 1960. The ‘IMs’ (unofficial collaborators) ‘IM Bolz’ and ‘IM Alexander’, who were ‘directly active in the enemy object’ supplied the MfS not only with the telephone numbers of BDC director James Beddie and various departments, but also the names and personal information of about half a dozen German workers, including the later acting director, Egon Burchartz.4

Until 1952, German Democratic Republic (GDR) authorities occasionally received information about material on fascist organisations and former members of the Nazi Party that was being stored in the BDC. But once the Cold War intensified, the Americans battened down the hatches. The reason was obvious: it was hardly in the US’s interest to give the East German government authorities access to still red-hot Nazi files, the contents of which could be used in East Berlin for propaganda campaigns against the Americans.

From the 1960s onwards, the Stasi endeavoured to systematically collect information about the pre-1945 career paths of prominent FRG citizens using the files on hand in the East German archives. In 1967, the central MfS department IX/11 was founded with the aim of finding incriminating evidence, evaluating it, and putting it at the disposal of other departments in the ministry. The processed information was published from 1965 onwards in the ‘Brown Book’, which was subtitled ‘War and Nazi Criminals in the Federal Republic’. At the height of the student uprisings in West Germany in 1968, the third edition of the ‘Brown Book’ was released, in which the GDR propaganda machine named and shamed former National Socialists in the FRG’s political, economic, administrative, military, legal, and academic fields.

On 3 July 1965, Neues Deutschland reported on a press conference with Politburo member Albert Norden in East Berlin:

Twenty-one ministers and State secretaries from the Federal Republic, 100 generals and admirals of the Bundeswehr [armed forces], 828 high-ranking judicial officers, lawyers and judges, 245 leading officials of the Auswärtiges Amt, Bonn ambassadors and consulates as well as 297 mid- and high-ranking officials from the police force and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution were influential pillars of the Hitler dictatorship.

MfS operatives, meanwhile, were patting themselves on the back for their successful investigative research. In a memo sent from the ‘agitation department’ to State Security Minister Mielke, they politely listed their points of achievement:

The ‘Brown Book’ came into being with considerable support from the MfS agitation department. Materials and information were supplied by the MfS agitation department for all sections of the article, and the sections ‘SS murderers from A to Z’ (page 75), and ‘Members of the Gestapo, the SD and the SS in the West Berlin police force’ (page 91) were compiled almost exclusively from our materials.5

The substantial propaganda effort conducted under the leadership of Albert Norden to uncover the Nazi pasts of prominent West Germans cannot be allowed to detract from the fact that, 99 per cent of the time, these sensationally presented allegations corresponded to the truth. The manipulation of documents about West German Federal President Heinrich Lübke did, admittedly, contribute to the fact that the ‘Brown Book’ was quickly written off in West Germany as deceitful propaganda and even impounded at the Frankfurt Book Fair. But on the whole, the facts presented in it are now regarded as verified and dependable.6

The Document Center was seen as the Holy Grail for Nazi hunters in both East and West Germany. But while the Stasi’s researchers were struggling to collect from the GDR’s archives the remaining files on East Germans who had fled to the FRG, the Americans had much quicker access to the information, which had been arranged alphabetically by name immediately after the takeover in 1945. The NSDAP membership index and other files held in the BDC were also much more comprehensive — almost complete, in fact.

From the beginning, the Americans made an effort not only to safeguard their knowledge about their alliance partners, but also to use it. The already mentioned IM intelligence report of 1960 reveals that there was another reason why the Americans carefully protected the powerful information they held: ‘IM Alexander’ informed his leading officers that ‘the American secret service were exploiting the object’s criminal activity against the GDR by scouting out documented circles of individuals and priming them for propaganda’.7

The MfS also had an interest in forcing West German individuals to collaborate in espionage with the help of compromising files from the years predating 1945. But the attempt to obtain information from the Document Center via IMs ran into difficulties after three years. In 1963, the connection to ‘IM Alexander’ broke down and could not be re-established. The material that had been processed until that point was not enough to enable East Berlin spies to penetrate the American government department. For this reason, they decided to shift to formalities for the time being and have the BDC premises observed by the Mitte border command.

According to MfS officer Skiba’s report on a conversation he had in 2012 with his former boss Wolfgang Schwanitz, who was the leader of the MfS’s East Berlin district administration in the 1960s: ‘We had it under close observation back then, photographing from the outside, trying to get the names of the individuals who were working there. But we didn’t have direct access to the archives or the card index. That rankled with us, of course; we would have loved to get a foot in the door in Ludwigsburg [the location of the Central Office for the Investigation of NS Crimes], too.’

In 1968, the informer ‘IM Horst Meyer’ reported the external dimensions of the Document Center and stated that it was ‘a flat-roofed building of 15 by 12 metres, predominantly guarded by an American duty station and surrounded by a wire fence topped with barbed wire’.8

By 1970, however, IM reports revealed that the building had expanded to 50 metres in width and that it allegedly contained 13 subterranean levels. Perhaps the thought of vast piles of Nazi files caused the spies’ imaginations to become overactive. Either way, the intelligence was so contradictory that those in charge of the operation decided to discontinue the collection of information on the BDC premises.9

Two years later, a West German state lawyer from Osnabrück was observed going into the Document Center and coming out again three hours later. On the same day, the director of RIAS (Radio in the American Sector) was also on site, with numerous boxes of film in his possession.

In 1974, the Stasi obtained drawings and detailed descriptions of the Document Center. From the wooden hut that housed the American guard posts to the subterranean concrete bunkers and flat-roofed stone buildings (which, according to MfS sources, served as the storage facility for the Völkischer Beobachter [the Nazi Party newspaper]), the spies continued to map out the obscure object of their desire, situated in the midst of allotment gardens on Berlin’s Wasserkäfersteig.

Seven years later, ‘IM Horst Fischer’ succeeded in siphoning off officers from the US Army’s Guard Battalion at the BDC. In the process, the East Berlin spies found out that the BDC would no longer be guarded by the Americans after 1 August 1981, and that the handover of the Nazi files to the FRG authorities was allegedly being planned. As the MfS no longer had a relationship with the Document Center, those responsible were unsure whether the ‘FRG authorities were to take over the object and guard it themselves, or whether the files would be taken and stored in the FRG’.10 This, admittedly, was equally unclear in Bonn and Washington — and would remain so for a number of years. In East Berlin, it was presumed that the Nazi files had passed into the ‘hands of the Federal authorities’.

‘Research has to be done’

For Bundestag President Karl Carstens, November 1978 was an opportunity to reminisce about his time as a junior lawyer in the Third Reich. For days on end, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) politician searched through his cellar and loft for personal documents from the Nazi era. ‘Yet another leading Christian democrat is hunting for his past,’ wrote Der Spiegel after rumours of Carstens’ NSDAP membership from 1940 until the end of the war became public.11

Suddenly, Carstens’ candidature for the highest position in the state shot out of reach. For 1979 would bring not only the election of a new president in Bonn, but also the decision in the German Bundestag (parliament) to lift the statute of limitations for murder — a decisive step which would mean that NS criminals could be brought to trial even 35 years after the end of the war. Was there now the chance of a Carstens trial? That would have drawn criticism for the conservatives, not just from the rival Social Democratic Party (SPD), and from abroad, too.

Carstens’ hunt through his private archive paid off: he was able to produce a de-Nazification court verdict from 3 June 1948 which testified that although he had applied for party membership in 1937 ‘under pressure from his superiors’, he had intentionally handed in his papers incomplete and late, with the result that his application of 12 May 1939 was rejected due to the intake freeze in effect at that time. On account of the fact that Carstens had requested to leave the SA in 1935, and had therefore no longer received the student benefits provided by the state, the court even declared him to be a resister of sorts, who ‘in accordance with his powers, had actively resisted the Nazi dictatorship and suffered in the process’.12 It seemed Carstens’ independent research had only led him to exonerating material, mocked Der Spiegel in a November 1978 report on his attempt to justify his past.

Carstens himself claimed that although he had not been a true resister, he had taken a hostile stance to the party: a moral tightrope act, perhaps, for in order not to endanger his graduation, the temporarily impeded party member had collected membership fees for the NSDAP between 1937 and 1939, during his time as a junior lawyer. The question is, can someone be hostile to the system and yet help it at the same time?

The Stasi were interested in Carstens’ NS past, too, but were unable to provide anything to further incite debate. In their Normannenstrasse headquarters, they were completely dependent on the Western press when it came to Carstens’ case, and simply lifted articles from Der Spiegel and other media sources. Carstens’ Stasi file (under the moniker ‘Matrose’), for example, commented that he had been ‘particularly burdened by his Nazi past and mentality’, that he had been a member of the SA and the NSDAP, and that he had participated in war crimes trials as a judge. Reading between the lines, you can almost hear the sighs of the East Berlin data collector: ‘At the present time, there is not yet any documentary proof or internal information that document already-known or new aspects of Carstens’ fascist past or which are suitable [for] finding him responsible for further activities or decisively incriminating him. The sources presented are based exclusively on FRG press releases.’13

As controversial and accurate as the information on the later Bonn federal president may have been, the fact that it had already been revealed in West Germany meant that it could hardly serve as ammunition for propaganda campaigns such as those in the ‘Brown Book’. The democratic press in the West had already uncovered the information — and without the help of the MfS, which was now reliant on them.

Nonetheless, the Stasi didn’t let the opportunity to evaluate and comment upon the revelations in the West German media slip by. They stated that, as a member of the SA, Carstens had shown ‘his positive stance towards fascist Germany’, receiving state financial support for his studies in the process — something which was only granted to students who demonstrated their National Socialist mentality.14 Meanwhile, the debate in West Germany regarding the NS past of the presidential candidate was also revolving around similar questions.

The crux of the matter was whether Carstens, born in 1914 in Bremen, had been a convinced National Socialist, or more of an opportunistic follower who complied out of career reasons due to the pressure exerted by those around him. Had Carstens really ostentatiously worn the party symbol on his Wehrmacht uniform as a trainee in the anti-aircraft artillery school, as many witnesses claimed but he himself vehemently denied? Usually, party membership was incompatible with the Wehrmacht and thus suspended during military service. The Stasi had heard this, too, and therefore constrained themselves to the following comment: ‘This assertion cannot be verified; it doesn’t normally correspond to the accepted practice at the time.’

Carstens had joined the SA in 1934 and was accepted into the NSDAP in 1940. He filled out the enrolment form back in 1937, allegedly under pressure from his superiors. The Stasi’s researchers summarised the further development of his career as follows:

He graduated and sat his second State exam. The chairman officiating at the exam was the Hamburg Higher Regional Court president Rothenberger, later state secretary in the Reich Ministry of Justice, a man of Hitler. He evaluated Carstens’ exam performance as ‘commendable,’ the second-best rating that was given. At the beginning of 1940, the membership freeze in the NSDAP was lifted and Carstens’ party membership came into effect. The membership had allegedly been on hold from the start, as Carstens was already a soldier in 1939.15

But the Stasi’s researchers were unable to content themselves with referencing the defamatory material published in the Western media. So the historians of Department IX/11 were given some homework: ‘Research has to be done,’ they were told, in particular on the war and military court of Bremen and the Reich war court of Berlin, where Carstens was active between 1939 and 1945 as an assessor and defence lawyer. Participation in NS court rulings was a much more serious charge than nominal party membership. This had been made clear shortly beforehand in the case of the Baden-Württemberg minister-president Hans Filbinger, who was forced to step down once it became known that he had participated in handing out death sentences shortly before the end of the war as a naval judge.

But the more detail the Stasi tried to obtain in reconstructing Carstens’ past, the less they ended up with. In 1980, an IM from Bremen reported that West German NS-victim associations were planning to publicise new proof of Carstens’ former loyalty to the NS during the national election campaign, in an attempt to ‘ensure the CDU’s defeat’.

For the MfS, any propaganda action regarding the NS past of the newly elected West German federal president remained wishful thinking due to lack of proof. In any case, Carstens’ true opponents were not in East Berlin, but in his own party. That’s where the rumours about his involvement in the Third Reich started, among his very own — the right wing of the Christian Democrats. That didn’t escape East Berlin’s attention; they soon noticed that the Bonn debate was not about Carstens’ NS past, but a power struggle between the right wing of the CDU and the party leader, Helmut Kohl: ‘They wanted to publicly taint Carstens in order to make him look unsuitable for the role of federal president. The real aim was to shunt Kohl out of the picture … the same extreme legal forces who had so far supported such “right-wing” individuals as Carstens would now sacrifice him without hesitation just to get rid of Kohl.’16

As long as German politicians kept knowledge about their pasts to themselves, Vergangenheitsbewältigung was much more frequently a means to an end in East and West Germany than the Sunday soapbox oratories let these politicians presume; a tool for intrigue that was used willingly and often.

The cards never lie

At 8.00 a.m. on a Monday morning in 1988, Lieutenant Colonel Dieter Skiba’s telephone rang. The leader of Department IX/11 in the Ministry for State Security picked up the receiver and heard a gruff voice bark at the other end: ‘Have you read the papers yet today?’ It was Stasi boss Erich Mielke.

‘Yes, Comrade Minister,’ replied Skiba dutifully, ‘I’ve read Neues Deutschland cover to cover.’

‘I don’t care about that, I mean the Spiegel,’ Mielke replied. ‘If there’s something in there, let me know.’

Monday was ‘Spiegel Day’, even at the Stasi Normannenstrasse headquarters. Skiba just had one problem: How was he supposed to know what revelations the Hamburg-based news journal had decided to cause a stir with this time? The only copy in his sector was with the director of Department IX, which was responsible for research. ‘I had to go to the general and wait in the front room until he was finished with it,’ Skiba told me.17

After waiting for an hour, Skiba got his hands on the magazine and began checking to see whether there was any information from the NS era in his department about the individuals in question. ‘We couldn’t just call and say: “Comrade Minister — we don’t have anything!” That’s why we always collected everything, even the newspaper cuttings, in case it came into old Mielke’s head that we had to do something.’ Mielke was expecting a written report by Monday evening, ‘so that by the Politburo meeting first thing on Tuesday morning, he could discuss it in detail with the general secretary’.

One could simplify things by dividing history into winners and losers, in which case Dieter Skiba has been on the losing side twice already, historically speaking.

His state collapsed, his agency was disbanded, and his party renamed itself again and again as it descended into post-socialist irrelevance. Along this route from the SED (Socialist Unity Party) via the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) to the socialist party Die Linke, the all-powerful unity party of the GDR lost several million members.

Skiba gave vent to his feeling when we met in the Berlin publishing house of Neues Deutschland, the erstwhile SED party newspaper. ‘The SED had around 2 million members. Now think about how many of those 2 million are still in the left-wing party now and really identify with the GDR.’

Skiba may have been on the losing side, but he’s no opportunist. And that’s not something that can be said about many of his former comrades. ‘Twisting and turning like a goat tethered to a rope, all of a sudden they were resisters,’ he said grimly, staring at the dove-blue wallpaper of the run-down office.

The Society for Legal and Humanitarian Support (Gesellschaft zur Rechtlichen und Humanitären Unterstützung, or GRH) is based on the 20th floor of the Neues Deutschland building, from where, according to its charter, it campaigns for ‘rehabilitation, justice and historical truth’. Former GDR head of state Egon Krenz is also a member, which speaks volumes about the GRH’s compatibility with the current political consensus of the Federal Republic.

Skiba accepts the fact that critics see the GRH, which he founded with former cadres from the SED, MfS, and the GDR National People’s Army, as an obstinate bunch of old reactionaries. But by the same token, no one can accuse him of being a turncoat.

He knows all about turncoats. ‘There are always going to be people like that, and that’s why I say that mere membership of a party doesn’t say anything about the mentality and behaviour of those people. That’s why we tried to reintegrate the millions of NSDAP members back into society. In the GDR, you couldn’t just say that every eighth person is a Nazi a priori, that kind of thing just won’t wash!’

The question is, how do you build a Socialist People’s Republic with millions of former fascists? Skiba was seven years old when the Third Reich lost the war and Germany was divided. Gradually, the inconceivable extent of German wrongdoing became known, and as different as the two German states were, the governments in Bonn and East Berlin were united on one point: never again could fascist crimes be perpetrated on German soil.

Skiba, a farmer’s son, got involved in building up the GDR — first in agriculture, then with the Ministry for State Security. ‘The subject of the Nazis didn’t use to hold any relevance for me; after all, I was just a farmer.’ He joined the MfS in 1958 and was transferred to the district office in Oranienburg. There, he was to devote his attention to redeveloping the national memorial site of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Over the years, Skiba also analysed the trials of SS men in Sachsenhausen and, in 1968, was one of the first to become part of the newly founded central department IX/11 in the Ministry for State Security — ‘not a specialist in the field, but already well-versed’.

For decades, Skiba and his colleagues delved into the pasts of their countrymen and women, collecting biographical material from the Third Reich, evaluating it, passing it on. His office was the East German counterpart to the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations in Ludwigsburg, which was responsible for the criminal prosecution of National Socialist crimes in the Federal Republic.

The MfS had held files from the era of the Third Reich ever since its foundation in 1950, Skiba explained: ‘They were taken over from the Kriminalpolizei K5, where Mielke was significantly involved in the manhunt for Nazis.’ According to Directive 201 of the Soviet Military Administration in 1947, the K5 was responsible for the prosecution of NS criminals in the GDR.18

Since 1952, the MfS had included Department XII, the central registry and archive where Nazi files were registered, processed, and archived. Skiba’s special unit, IX/11, eventually emerged from this, officially called into life by Stasi boss Mielke with Directive 39/67. Department IX/11 worked in close collaboration with the documentation centre of the GDR Internal Ministry, which was founded in 1964 and also collected files from between 1933 and 1945.19

The fact that Mielke’s men were intensifying the search for Nazi files two decades after the end of the war was due in part to the big political debates of the 1960s in West Germany. ‘It’s all connected to the problems with the statute of limitations,’ Skiba explained. ‘The archive materials had to be prepared for use in the fight against a statute of limitation for Nazi and war crimes in the Federal Republic, and for the support of the committee of the National Front [an alliance of political parties and mass organisations in the GDR].’

As previously mentioned, Politburo member Albert Norden was already making use of defamatory material in the early 1960s for targeted campaigns to discredit West German politicians and officials. Whenever it seemed politically advisable, the Stasi also supplied West Germans like Beate Klarsfeld or Günter Wallraff — anti-Nazi activist and undercover journalist, respectively — with defamatory material about FRG politicians. In 1969, Klarsfeld famously slapped the face of German chancellor and former NSDAP member Kurt Georg Kiesinger at the CDU party conference. When she campaigned for the federal presidency in 2012, it was revealed that she had received a payment of 2000 deutschmarks (at the time approximately $1500) ‘for further initiatives’ a week after the conference, and she was accused of being an ‘SED puppet’.20 However, Klarsfeld couldn’t have known that she had been directly supplied by the Stasi. Officially, the information came from the documentation centre of the GDR’s State Archive Administration. According to Skiba, who was present when Klarsfeld was handed the NS files on Kiesinger: ‘The fact that the MfS played a significant role in that wasn’t common knowledge.’

Keen to continue discrediting its political enemies, the MfS was watching developments in the West closely. Back then, according to German criminal law, the statute of limitations for murder expired after just 20 years. This meant that NS murder crimes could not be effectively tried from 1965 onwards. After a series of heated debates, the Bonn parliamentarians agreed on a compromise: they postponed the beginning of the statute of limitations from the end of World War II to the year that the Federal Republic was founded. In this way, murders carried out under the Third Reich could be legally tried and punished until 1969.

When this deadline was close to expiring, the parliamentarians postponed the statute of limitations problem once more by increasing it to 30 years. It was only in 1979 that the Bundestag lifted the statute of limitations for murder and genocide once and for all with a majority of 255 votes to 222.

The Federal Republic wrestled with the statute-of-limitations question for two decades, and in East Berlin it wasn’t just Skiba and his colleagues industriously collecting material. The MfS department responsible for international intelligence, the HVA, was also interested in finding out where West German politicians stood on the statute of limitations question.

In the CDU and FDP, in particular, there were concerns over the potential prosecution as accessories to murder of those who gave orders from their desks.21 Even within party circles, there were a considerable number in the late 1960s who would have been personally affected — the FDP politician Ernst Achenbach (NSDAP membership number 4789478 from 1 December 1937), for example, who campaigned for the interests of NS and war criminals for decades as a lawyer and Bundestag member. Nor did it escape the HVA’s attention that Achenbach’s colleague Hans-Dietrich Genscher had supported his draft bill for the statute of limitations on NS crimes in 1968.22

Over the course of time, Department IX/11 grew to include 50 workers: researchers, archivists, indexers, analysts, librarians, and technical-support workers. ‘Like a drop in the ocean,’ Skiba said. ‘It wasn’t much, if you consider that the Ludwigsburg Central Registry initially employed over 200 state lawyers.’

But the Stasi’s researchers weren’t just interested in compromising details about the Nazi past of ‘enemies of the people’ in the West. They were also investigating the former political lives of their own comrades in the Workers’ and Farmers’ State, who, Skiba asserted, ‘we were able to identify as suspect GDR citizens from archive materials’.

They combed through East German authority archives, and procured materials from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union in the hunt for leads on the Nazi past of their German suspects. Collaboration with Moscow wasn’t always easy: ‘The Soviets had masses of files, and we got our hands on many of them, but they didn’t let us look at everything,’ Skiba recalled. ‘We would have liked to have all the files about political emigrants from Germany who were convicted and executed in the show trials of the 1930s. But they didn’t give them to us.’

By the end, the Stasi historians had amassed 10 kilometres of files and prepared a list of 1.5 million membership cards. Every regional unit of the MfS, every war office or military intelligence unit, was able to lodge queries with Department IX/11: What was the NSFK? What role did the SA play in Pößneck? ‘There were several thousand queries every month,’ Skiba estimated. ‘Statistically, I’d say that we responded to around 15,000 to 18,000 queries a year.’

The file trade

Skiba and his people were always well informed about the readers in the archives. Anyone who wanted to research file material from the Third Reich in the GDR State Archive had to lodge an official application that was passed on to Department IX/11. As long as the applicant didn’t seem suspicious to the Stasi, he or she could get access to the files — provided they weren’t being used by IX/11 as part of an ongoing trial. If that were the case, ‘they didn’t get anything’.

It was part of the MfS’s Cold War logic that they assumed the enemy would be active and trying to obtain intelligence on the GDR archive. A note in the files from 1983 about collaboration between the Stasi and the State Archive Administration gives the urgent warning that ‘enemy attacks on the state archive have noticeably increased in recent years, in particular regarding the investigation of GDR archive holdings as part of complex research topics, ideological attacks regarding the misuse of archive materials of the GDR and the exploitation of opportunities for making contact with archive readers’.23

In order to recognise and effectively prevent the ‘subversive misuse of the GDR’s archival holdings’, no-access inventories were to be newly defined, direct contact between foreign researchers in the files prevented, and the State Archive Administration designated as the central authority for the authorisation process.24

During the Cold War, Stasi historians officially had no access to Western archives. That also applied to officially traded microfilms of the US National Archives. Skiba’s people had obtained a catalogue of the microfilms archived in Washington and made a shopping list. There was just one problem: ‘The Americans didn’t sell them to us!’

And so Stasi historians tried to get to their coveted information via trades. Skiba recalled: ‘We made the following offer to researchers from the West: “You can get a People’s Court verdict against this or that person if you get us this and that in Washington.”’ From time to time, historians from the West would be excused from paying copying costs if they provided archive material in return. This meant that the agents always posed as archive employees.

‘With the help of a little avarice, we got them,’ Skiba said, without a trace of satisfaction. After all, even his department suffered from constant financial difficulty. In the last years of the GDR, the work of Stasi historians was significantly hindered by the rampant shortage of foreign currency.

When, in the 1980s, original documents from the Document Center came onto the black market in West Berlin, the Stasi soon caught wind of it. ‘But we didn’t have any money, so we couldn’t buy them,’ Skiba said.

There’s a certain irony in the fact that, by the late 1980s, the GDR’s omnipresent secret service wasn’t even in the position to acquire the United Nations war-criminals list. Skiba became aware of the list’s existence when his department received queries from the West regarding wanted war criminals.

‘I wrote to the minister saying that it was important for the GDR to know which individuals were on the UNO’s war criminals list, and that we needed 500 dollars in order to snap it up.’ Mielke wasn’t sure whether the war-criminals list was of importance for the GDR anymore. After some to-ing and fro-ing, Skiba was granted the money. But by then it was too late. ‘Things were already coming to an end, so we didn’t even need the list anymore.’

A government can’t choose its people

One of the myths of East–West German post-war history is that the GDR was a fortress of anti-fascism, while in the Federal Republic tens of thousands of veteran Nazis had already reacquired leading positions in the state and society.

The de-Nazification phase was quickly tied up in the East, too. After the war, the Soviet occupying powers and the GDR’s K5 criminal investigation department tracked down suspected Nazi criminals in East Germany. Many thousands of East German citizens were arrested between 1945 and 1948 (when de-Nazification officially came to an end), and interned in special camps without trial. After the foundation of the East German state in 1949, the last remaining inmates of the Soviet camps were condemned in constitutionally questionable circumstances during the so-called Waldheimer show trials.

If Vergangenheitsbewältigung were an Olympic sport, the GDR legal system would have finished in front of the Federal Republic’s until the very end. Even in 1989, the GDR state public prosecutor listed 12,881 new verdicts passed that year on NS suspects. For the same time period in the Federal Republic, it was just 6485. However, the East German statistic included not only the 4000 verdicts from the Waldheimer trials, but also the numerous de-Nazification trials in which nominal memberships of NS organisations were punished.25

‘Many individuals had been in the NSDAP or SS,’ Dieter Skiba said. ‘We placed particular emphasis on preventing former leading figures from the fascist era from getting back into important posts.’ But that hadn’t always been the case. ‘Department IX/11 was simply founded too late.’

It seemed practically impossible in both East and West to create a state without the technocrats and millions of former supporters of Hitler’s regime. The Stasi files reveal astonishing parallels: in the GDR, too, not just in the West, former NSDAP members had pushed their way back into leading roles after the foundation of the state. It was only in the late 1960s that — also as a result of the changing generations — a reduction in the number of individuals with Nazi pasts in important societal roles became evident.

‘But the kind of exposed Nazi elite that made their way back into exalted positions in the Federal Republic, we didn’t have that in the GDR,’ Skiba said defensively. ‘We didn’t have the kind of SS generals who wrote memoirs or who had attended Nazi marches.’ After all, it wouldn’t have been smart to confess to having been an old reactionary in the GDR, something that was more possible in West Germany due to the culture of freedom of opinion.

In the East, the gap between claims and reality was more of a chasm. Take the church, for example. Stasi researchers generously supplied the ‘agitation department’ of the SED’s Central Committee with compromising details about the backgrounds of FRG church functionaries. This resulted in propaganda actions with titles like ‘Clerical militarism in action! SS leaders, Nazis and militarists in leading positions of the West German Evangelical Church’.26 And yet numerous ex-Nazis had found shelter in the church in East Germany too, as the Stasi knew only too well.

Stasi researchers secretly procured handwriting samples from leading evangelical figures in the East. Using false identities, they spoke with people close to them and compiled intelligence reports.27 They made long handwritten lists about ‘pastors with active fascist pasts’, detailing their former roles and memberships of NSDAP organisations in the Third Reich.

The results were devastating. A 1962 analysis of the concentration of former fascist officers in the Evangelical Church of the GDR drew the following conclusion: ‘It has been established that all important military and in part also economic roles of our Republic are occupied by former fascists with specialist knowledge, or through rotation in office by correspondingly qualified pastors.’28

A large number of the functionaries engaged in the GDR’s Evangelical Church at the time — in its governing body, training centres, church organisations, and congregations — were alleged to have been active fascists before 1945. In the church governing body of the jurisdiction of Saxony alone, there were 22 former members of the NSDAP and five of the SA. The level of influence of church men with Nazi pasts can be seen in the example of superintendent Ernst Kracht, born in Rügen on 27 May 1893: Kracht was responsible for 17 congregations, 21 rectorates, and had been a leading member of the SS from 1933 onwards.

The establishing of former Nazis in the regional churches had less to do with intelligence actions on the part of the West than MfS analysts suspected. It was primarily possible because, during the de-Nazification of East German pastors, most of the members of the NS organisation Deutsche Christen had been removed from their roles and replaced with members of the Confessing Church, which during the Third Reich had resisted Nazification by the dictatorship. ‘But these supposed cleansing initiatives,’ the MfS now realised, ‘did not apply to former members of the NSDAP, SA and other fascist organisations.’29

A Stasi dossier from 1963 came to the sobering conclusion that ‘The majority of church governing bodies consist predominantly of former NSDAP members who, even today, still have an adversarial attitude to the politics of the Party and government.’30

At the MfS, the ‘sword and shield of the party’, they soon realised that even members of the Confessing Church could have been members of the NSDAP or even the SS. But this didn’t hinder the Stasi in its attempt to recruit former NSDAP members to infiltrate the regional church of Saxony.31

Even in the 1960s, the intelligence services of both German states had few scruples when it came to the selection of agents and ‘unofficial collaborators’. Just like the German Federal Intelligence Service in the West, which had no problem employing people like the SS murderer Klaus Barbie, the MfS, too, had few misgivings when it came to selecting suitable henchmen. On the contrary: knowledge of enemy agents’ Nazi pasts could come in useful for blackmailing them into betraying secrets and acting as double agents.

The MfS also wooed former SS men and members of the NSDAP, Gestapo, or SD, as the historian Henry Leide revealed.32 These included NS criminals who had been classified as ‘key culprits’ by the Allied Control Council Directive 38 of October 1946. At the district offices of the MfS, the instruction was issued to ‘prepare’ as many of the individuals in question as possible for ‘genuine collaboration with the MfS, or to make use of the circumstances available to force them into doing so’.33 The idea was to smuggle these individuals into the West and use their Nazi past to pressure them into working for the MfS from there.

But surely there was quite a conflict in doing this? Skiba brushed that aside: ‘As I always say: Anyone who sits at the table with the Devil is going to need a long spoon. After all, you can hardly plant renowned anti-fascists into West German Nazi networks! That’s why we needed former NSDAP or SS or even Gestapo and SD members, in order to penetrate the West German secret service and get to the information.’

When it came to dealing with former National Socialists among their own ranks, matter-of-fact pragmatism prevailed in the GDR, as Skiba was very well aware. He spent years evaluating the files, searching for and finding thousands of former party members, SS members, and Gestapo men who had long since established themselves as People’s Comrades in ‘really existing socialism’. What happened when the Stasi wised up to them?

Nothing at all. NSDAP membership alone wasn’t relevant to us. We passed on the information, of course, when we found a record card showing that someone had been a NSDAP member. But when we talk about Nazis, we have to make sure we clearly define who we mean by that. For us, members of the NSDAP or the Hitler Youth and so on weren’t the kind of Nazis we were interested in. When we talked about Nazis, we meant the activists, not just the Nazi Party, but primarily those in the secret services, the Gestapo, the police and legal system, the Ministry of Propaganda. Our definition of a Nazi wasn’t about membership of the NSDAP, but the role that someone played during the era of fascism.

However, the fact that membership of the NSDAP or SS didn’t present a problem in itself doesn’t mean that the MfS weren’t interested in finding out everything they could about the pre-1945 pasts of GDR citizens. An instruction stamped ‘Secret and Classified’ from the Stasi State Secretariat on 2 June 1954 ordered all district offices to submit all their material to their regional offices within two months and to evaluate it ‘post-haste’.

It had become clear to the founders of the MfS that the Nazi files distributed among the government authorities were a source of interesting information about their own people. In practice, as the Stasi leaders wrote, it turned out that the evaluation of old files ‘could produce important clues for operative work’.34 For this reason, all NS files then had to be centralised as a matter of urgency.

From then on, the Stasi researchers went to great lengths not only to avoid mistaken identity — for example, where people shared the same name — but also to try to attribute individual culpability to the suspects in question in every case. If they couldn’t manage to do so, they had to disappoint their prosecution-hungry comrades in the district offices and call them off the case in question, whether they wanted to or not. Until 1948, suspects could still be interned and condemned within the framework of the Allied Control Council directive. ‘But from the 1950s onwards we didn’t use this maxim anymore,’ Skiba said.

‘Membership of the SS or NSDAP wasn’t relevant to us when it came to prosecution. Nor could we have locked up a Gestapo or RSHA [Reich Security Head Office] collaborator whom we had nothing on.’

If a query came from a regional service unit, then the workers of Department IX/11 would have to check whether there was any defamatory material on the person in question in their archives. Officially, Skiba’s department was responsible for the ‘politically operative evaluation and supply of materials from and relating to the time of fascism and their operative utilisation for the activities of various lines and service units of the MfS and its associated research’.35 But in contrast to the FRG’s Prosecution Service, the Stasi prosecutors also employed espionage tactics. ‘We could also work with unofficial collaborators, control of written correspondence, telephone bugging, and observation in people’s home — all of those means were available to us. We also tried to find and question witnesses, but we couldn’t let on who and what it was about,’ Skiba explained.

Unlike in the West, suspects were not informed that they were under investigation. They were clueless. ‘We always worked on the assumption that if they knew in advance we were investigating them for Nazi and war crimes, there was the possibility that their former comrades would help them to flee.’

If the Stasi came into the possession of personal files on GDR citizens of the relevant generation, they compared the names with the perpetrator lists in the IX/11 archive. When Skiba’s people got their hands on the bank-account records of the Ravensbrück Sparkasse savings bank in the late 1970s, an investigation into the customers’ places of residence revealed that 84 female former guards of the Ravensbrück concentration camp were still living in the GDR. ‘We weren’t able to find evidence for a single one of these 84 having been involved in maltreatment, gassing, or shooting. We informed the regional offices of course, saying that Martha so-and-so is living in your region, keep an eye on what kind of woman she is. But when it came to prosecution, there was nothing to be done,’ Skiba recalled.

In 1988, a Walter O., born in Erfurt in 1925, came into the Stasi’s sights. His military conscription book surfaced during an expansion of their archive material, revealing the GDR citizen to be a former member of the Waffen-SS. However, the Department IX/11 director also informed the district office in Erfurt that no further conclusions could be drawn from O.’s membership alone: ‘Given that no information is available pertaining to the concrete execution of duties and behaviour of the person in question within the Waffen-SS, although the documents may prove former membership of the Waffen SS, they do not confirm participation in war crimes.’36

And in the case of Rudolf M., a concentration-camp guard born in 1923 in Ehrenberg on whom there was a pending request for information, the Stasi experts were only able to confirm that he was part of the troop in question. Furthermore, they expressly pointed out that ‘with regard to individual involvement in crimes against humanity, in particular during his deployment in Auschwitz and as an attendant on one of the “evacuations” from the concentration camps otherwise known as death marches, there was no evidence available’.37

After the rigorous cleansings of the immediate post-war era, the GDR, too, soon brought an end to the de-Nazification process. The ‘directive regarding measures of atonement’ clarified the position of former Nazis and Wehrmacht members in the newly founded GDR. All former members and supporters of the NSDAP or its organisations, as well as officers, non-commissioned officers, and soldiers of the fascist Wehrmacht could from this point on take active roles in the public service and all industries. The only exceptions to this regulation were roles within the People’s Police, the justice system, and the inner administration. On the second anniversary of the foundation of the GDR, the last trials following Directive 201 were halted as part of an amnesty action initiated by the president, provided that no higher sentence than a year’s imprisonment was expected.38

On 2 September 1952, a regulation ‘regarding the lifting of restrictions for former members of the NSDAP and its associations and former officers’ came into force. It lifted all ‘established restrictions of rights for former members of the NSDAP or its associations, including former officers of Hitler’s Wehrmacht’ and gave them from that point on the same civil and political rights as all other citizens.

The new leading powers’ offer of integration to former Nazis was well received. In spite of numerous ‘party cleanses’ carried out in the mid-1950s, almost 11,000 SED comrades in the region of Erfurt alone were former NSDAP members, as the historian Sandra Meenzen discovered.39 Other regions were in a similar situation. These statistics had been gathered at the behest of the SED headquarters, and made the party leaders uneasy. Wasn’t that a few too many former Nazis among the comrades?

In some circles, almost all the comrades had ‘brown-tainted’ pasts, as a 1954 report by the Central Committee warned: ‘In the region of Hildburghausen there are key organisations in which almost 100 per cent of the workers are former members of the NSDAP, for example in the party organisation surveying office, where 18 of its 19 members had once belonged to the NSDAP.’40 And if we take not only Nazi Party membership but also membership of the Hitler Youth and BDM into account, the proportion of SED members in the region of Erfurt with a Nazi past climbs as high as 35.8 per cent.41

There were former NSDAP members even in GDR government circles after the war, sitting in the People’s Chamber, Council of Ministers, and SED Central Committee — individuals such as Manfred Ewald, Hans Bentzien, and Horst Stechbarth. Even in the 1980s, there were more former NSDAP members in the SED Central Committee under Erich Honecker than there were former SPD members (in the Soviet occupation zone, the SPD was compelled by the Soviets to merge with the SED after 1945). The West German historian and activist Olaf Kappelt had already published most of the names in 1981 in the FRG’s ‘Brown Book’, Braunbuch DDR: Nazis in der DDR, and two decades later he summed up the Nazi past of the old GDR guard as follows:

For more than forty years, until March 1990, the former NS Gau student leader of Thüringen, Siegfried Dallmann, was in the GDR People’s Chamber. Professor Heinrich Homann held out in the GDR State Council until the very end; the upper-class shipping company heir had joined the NSDAP as early as 1933. Heinz Eichler, the secretary of the GDR State Council until 1989, was another former NSDAP member. And on 7 November 1989, the long-standing director of the GDR press office was removed from his role; he too was part of the old guard of former Nazi Party members.42

Things were no different at the SED party headquarters. And no wonder, for in 1946 the SED Central Committee had already lifted the incompatibility directive, according to which former NSDAP members could not be accepted into the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.

‘Of course we had Nazis in the East, too,’ Dieter Skiba conceded. ‘After all, the GDR couldn’t pick its own people.’ After the war and the desolation it caused, the GDR leadership, just like the government of the FRG, saw no other choice but to integrate the millions of former National Socialists. Clearly it wasn’t possible to build a new state without supporters and experts of the Hitler state — and especially not without the young people who had joined Hitler’s party at 17 or 18 years of age and who were now the generation of the future.

‘Someone who joins a party at 17 or 18 years of age isn’t necessarily a Nazi, not in the sense we see it,’ Skiba explained.

Even in the East German socialist state, people were increasingly willing to look past the youthful mistakes of up-and-coming comrades. Anyone who admitted to their own NSDAP membership orally was not obligated to mention it in the written staff questionnaire. According to Skiba:

We never concerned ourselves with the individuals who had been transferred from the Hitler Youth into the NSDAP as young men in 1944–45 for the Führer’s birthday. As early as 1948, there was an amnesty decree from the Soviet military administration in East Germany, after which the Hitler Youth from the age groups transferred in 1943–44 were classified as exonerated. This also meant that they didn’t need to declare their NSDAP membership in later documentation.

In general, queries regarding NSDAP membership were included on the cadre questionnaires of both the candidate in question and his or her parents. But it speaks volumes that, as Sandra Meenzen believes, numerous SED members obstinately concealed their earlier NSDAP membership: ‘For despite all the SED’s offers of integration, public confession against a background of the GDR’s omnipresent anti-fascist rhetoric and shifting disqualification criteria with the “party cleanses” remained a risky enterprise.’43

In February 1963, for example, the acting minister of agriculture, Karl-Heinz Bartsch, was removed from office and excluded from the SED Central Committee. The party organ Neues Deutschland justified this measure with the allegation that Bartsch, born in 1923, had ‘concealed his involvement with the Waffen-SS, and by doing so caused the Party considerable harm’.44 The Central Committee used the Second Conference in April 1963 as an opportunity to have a discussion about ‘honesty towards the Party’. The party leaders did not demand disqualification from the party of those who had been NSDAP members, but rather appealed to all comrades to be truthful. This was based on the assumption that there was no reason to conceal or lie about the past, for the SED had ‘given all former nominal members of the Hitler party the chance to participate and start a new life’. This applied in particular to the ‘youth which had been led astray and brought up in a fascist manner’.45

And yet, trust is good, but control is better: The motto of the MfS was ‘Be Prepared’. ‘There are many important figures in the GDR who we at the MfS had a divided relationship with,’ Skiba recalled. ‘People who we knew had tarnished stories from their past. But you need to be able to prove it. Afterwards, much of it did turn out to be true.’

The NS pasts of East German functionaries and top politicians became particularly critical when the West got wind of them more quickly than their own State Security Service. In the Federal Republic, the reaction to East German campaigns against West German politicians was to uncover stories about the Nazi pasts of East German top functionaries in turn, and they had the advantage in that they could rely on the help of their American allies and access to the files of the Document Center.

A Stasi memo from February 1969 about the ‘suppression of the Western campaign about supposed Nazis in the GDR’ accuses the ‘Nazi hunter’ Simon Wiesenthal of assisting West German efforts in this regard.46 In the majority of cases, the revelations about the Nazi pasts of East German politicians were researched with just as much care as the information in the GDR’s original ‘Brown Book’. And so the Cold War ensured that both German states occupied themselves with reciprocal investigations.

When Olaf Kappelt published his ‘Brown Book’ in 1981, GDR state security minister Mielke was furious. The ‘rabble-rousing and shoddy work’ of a known anti-communist and Republic traitor was attempting to create the impression that ‘there were a number of former NSDAP members exerting active influence over the political and societal life of the GDR’.47 In the MfS, they immediately assumed that Kappelt had acquired his information from the Document Center in West Berlin. A special unit of workers from departments XX/2 and IX/11 were immediately instructed to check Kappelt’s allegations. In a ‘strictly confidential’ communication of the GDR Council of Ministers from 19 May 1982, the leaders of regional MfS units were reminded that the majority of the individuals named were personalities who ‘had been actively engaged in building up the GDR for decades’. The checks, therefore, were to be carried out in a ‘strictly internal’ manner so that none of those in question found out about it. The possibility that they may not have known about their NSDAP membership was also to be considered. Mielke’s people came to the conclusion that, as far as Kappelt’s book was concerned, ‘the presence of new information could not be denied’.

‘We were told to check the book and see whether there was anything of penal relevance in there,’ Skiba told me. ‘We didn’t find anything.’ The facts, he conceded, were correct. ‘The question was: how did we assess them?’

When it came to assessing party membership, the most important question was how that membership had come about. Was there ever any truth in the much-used excuse that the individuals in question had been transferred into the NSDAP without their knowledge?

In any case, even the MfS didn’t want to rule out the possibility that those named by Kappelt had ‘concealed defamatory details from their files and therefore given the enemy the opportunity for blackmail and further defamation’.48 The Nazi past of many individuals remained hidden from the MfS for a long time because as nomenclature cadres, or prominent leaders of the inner political circle, their files had not been accessible to Department IX/11. When the contents of the ‘Brown Book’ were being checked, the investigators realised that there were 90 such individuals, ten of whom were Central Committee nomenclature cadres and workers of the central party apparatus; 25, in central functions; 31, in local functions; and 24, ‘retirees’.49 In addition, there were 75 individuals who had been members of Hitler’s party after 1943. The investigators concluded that, at least when it came to NSDAP admission up to 1942, it could be assumed that those in question had known about their membership and that an omission to declare it in staff files after 1945 meant ‘as a general rule […] an intentional concealment’.

In this context, the MfS investigators also turned their attention to the question of how individuals of the year groups born in 1926 and 1927 had come into the NSDAP. According to a ‘memo on considerations relating to the awareness or non-awareness of NSDAP membership’, each year, members of the Hitler Youth who turned 19 were transferred into the NSDAP by an ‘administrative act of the Reich leadership’ on 1 September (and, from 1943 onwards, on 20 April, too), provided they had been members of the Hitler Youth for four consecutive years beforehand.50 ‘Former HY members transferred in this manner,’ the MfS concluded, ‘weren’t always aware of their NSDAP membership, because the completion of individual application forms was waived for the transfer of year groups, despite being required by the general organisational guidelines of the NSDAP.’ This applied in particular to youths who had already been drafted into military service at the time of the transfer and whose membership coincided with a time of active service. However, the possibility was considered that those in question could have been informed of the transfer by the local NSDAP group during a period of home leave or a stay in a military hospital.

Whether this was true or not remained the secret of the individuals in question, who tended to plead ignorance both in the East and the West. The possibility that individual application procedures had been waived for the transfer of year groups remained pure speculation — in this case, partly because the efforts of the GDR cadres in question to exonerate themselves coincided with the party leadership’s fear of being seen as a melting pot of old Nazis, particularly by the Western anti-communists. ‘We always assumed that this collective enrolment was carried out, but we didn’t have proof,’ Skiba admitted. For this reason, it seemed appropriate to the MfS leaders, even in the case of NSDAP members admitted after 1943, to include personal statements in the files of those named in the West’s ‘Brown Book’ after checking the information in the GDR’s documentation centre, in order to expose future falsification of questionnaires.51

So, in the end, Department IX/11 was willing to comply with the exoneration strategies of former Hitler Youth members after all. The Americans knew better after intensive study of the NSDAP archives, and had done for a long while. But in ignorance of the NS party files stored in the Document Center, the Stasi’s experts continued to assume that entire year groups of the Hitler Youth had been transferred without their own knowledge.

This assumption was not based upon a systematic evaluation, but rather the investigation of a few individual cases in which the persons in question assured the MfS researchers that they had not known of their NSDAP membership.

Skiba recalled a personal conversation with the former GDR defence minister and NVA (National People’s Army) general Heinz Kessler, who, according to the files, was a member of the NSDAP from 1943: ‘He told me himself that he knew nothing about it.’ Kessler claimed to have already been in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp when his party membership came into effect. This, of course, doesn’t rule out the possibility that Kessler could have signed the NSDAP admission form some months earlier — at a time when the young man’s perspective may have been very different. According to the MfS’s knowledge at the time, Kessler, born in 1920, was not part of one of the younger year groups that were allegedly transferred collectively.

Occasionally, even before the publication of Kappelt’s ‘Brown Book’, the MfS stumbled on inconsistencies during the course of its discreet research. In 1979, the acting director of Department IX/11 turned his attention to a query regarding the ‘NSDAP membership of a male individual born in 1927’ in Bautzen. The NSDAP membership number of the unnamed individual was 9974320, and Lieutenant Colonel Dr Nieblig from the IX/11 argued:

It is known that members admitted in 1944 were given membership numbers of over 9 and 10 million. According to the central record office it was not possible to establish a concrete time period for the allocation of membership number 9974320. The place of issue, however, was definitely Munich. The original record cards available (admittedly there was not a complete collection) support the conclusion that the year group of 1927 was transferred in its entirety in 1944 and that the overwhelming majority had the transfer date of 20.4.1944, while a lesser number had 1.9.1944. According to the procedure set out in the material available, a similar practice would also have been carried out in Bautzen, with Hitler Youth members born in 1927 being transferred into the NSDAP on the 20.4.1944. When it comes to the exact concrete form in which this happened and who in particular it affected there is no proof in the available archive material, because the transfer lists from Bautzen are not at hand.52

This seemed to bring the case to a close — that is, until two years later, when the ‘Brown Book GDR’ was published and revealed former NSDAP member number 9974320 to be General Major Helmut Nedwig, who in his post-war career had ascended the ranks to become leader of the GDR criminal police. The investigation that followed revealed that on the questionnaire in his cadre file, he had stated under Point 15 (‘membership of political parties and organisations between 1933 and 1945’) that he had not been part of any party or organisation back then. In reality, the secret of his membership had already been discovered back in 1948, when the K5 criminal police in Bautzen found NSDAP membership records in which Nedwig’s name was listed with the enrolment date of 1 May 1944.53 Even Nedwig’s second wife was on the list. But Nedwig vehemently denied his membership, saying that it wouldn’t have been possible at 16 or 17 years of age, and that his parents’ approval would have been required. Besides, he added, he was already doing his Reich labour service at the time, and the whole thing was a ‘regional measure carried out without his knowledge’.

However, Stasi researchers noted that this depiction of events contradicted the information in the ‘Brown Book’, according to which Nedwig had been accepted into the NSDAP on 20 April 1944; in other words, before commencing his labour service. Nedwig’s speedy ascension of the ranks within the Wehrmacht also made the investigators suspicious: why had Nedwig become a corporal after just three months and a company troop commander after another four?

These contradictions in the career of the GDR’s highest-ranking criminal-police official prompted the MfS to commence ‘conspiratorial verification measures’ in Bautzen in May 1982 in order to obtain further evidence and ‘reliable witnesses’ who knew Nedwig in the period between 1940 and 1950.

A short while later, the investigations into Nedwig were abandoned. As the leader of Department IX/11 stated on 3 August 1982, no archive material on Nedwig had been found. ‘As a result, membership of the NSDAP cannot be either confirmed or refuted at this point.’ In the absence of new results, MfS colonel Stolze re-cited the assumptions his deputy had made in 1979, and presumed that, in Bautzen, too, all Hitler Youth members of that year group had been transferred into the NSDAP in 1944.54

We now know that, in reality, only slightly more than one-third of the Hitler Youth from the 1927 year group were transferred into the NSDAP. Of the 18 million youths who were HY members from 30 January 1933 until their 18th year, in total only 7 to 8 per cent were transferred into the Nazi Party.55

For the criminal-police chief Helmut Nedwig, however, the matter was closed. A short time later, he was promoted to General Lieutenant.