Here, prisoners could not tell day from night. They would move only within the confines of the building, there were no walks or exercise within the prison premises. They were brought to stand beneath the grate, because it was the only place from which they could see the sky. The sky over Berlin.
The eastern-socialist part, that is. The Hohenachönhausen Memorial was opened at the former prison complex for political prisoners constructed by Soviet forces after World War II. After the Soviets, the Stasi – DDR Special Police – used the prison and it had been operation until the very end of DDR. Today, the prison looks like it was “frozen” in a time before the unification of Germany and is one of the significant reminders of the recent past in this country. We tour the cells, interrogation rooms, corridors… Among the guides through this memorial centre are its former prisoners. Their testimony is direct, and the eeriness of this complex resists the perverse nostalgic charm of “Soviet art” or DDR tourism, those relics (souvenirs) you can purchase on the streets and squares of Berlin.
The Stasi – along with the Trabant, one of the main “brands” of DDR – numbered some 600 thousand “unconventional” collaborators. At the initiative of former prisoners, this place was made into a museum. The torture committed by the Stasi was not physical but mental. The interior is a retro catalogue: linoleum, wallpaper, table lamps, typewriters… The aesthetics of socialist-realist minimalism; with red lamps in the hallways coming on and off in line with bureaucratic procedures aimed to inhibit and psychologically torture the prisoners. The building was designed so that the prisoner could only see his interrogator. Cyber-Kafkaesque.
The State Security was the “sword and shield of the Party”. Article 1 of the DDR Constitution said the Party had a leading role. The entire quarter was closed off. There were a number of entrances, there was no address, the Stasi lived in the quarter, some of them still do. The younger staff now oversee workers working for capitalists, says Reinhard Fuhrmann, our guide and former prisoner. In 1972, he had tried to escape from DDR. He was sentenced to two years, but let go after serving one. Or rather, he was “ransomed”. West Germany paid the DDR sums to redeem political prisoners. Fuhrmann does a quick calculation in his head, and says that in today’s money, one political prisoner was worth 50 thousand Euros. The DDR principle of operation was: “We need money, and we have political prisoners aplenty”. Today, the Stasi have an Society for Legal and Humanitarian Support, a non-governmental organisation, and they say they were just following the law. They are nostalgic about the DDR. However, the DDR laws were written in such a way that the Stasi were practically incapable of breaking them. The state did not investigate break-ins into households. You could report a break-in after seven days, but it would soon succumb to the statute of limitations. According to an agreement between the two Germanies, the West could not prosecute those that were not breaking any law in DDR.
In the courtyard is a plaque commemorating the dead, about a thousand people killed after 1945, when the Soviet secret police was in charge here. The leadership of the German Communist Party had spent the war in Moscow. Stalin killed half of them and sent the other half to Berlin in 1945 to rule in his name. Honecker literally meant “it’s our turn now,” says Fuhrmann who is also a historian. Honecker, the long-standing leader of DDR, had himself spent ten years in a prison under the Nazis.
Before the war, food was prepared here for soup kitchens. After the crash of Hitler’s Germany, the Soviets wanted a secret prison in Berlin. They built 68 cells in the basement, without windows. They were used for political opponents, 16 percent of the inmates were Nazis, four prisoners per cell. They could sit only on the edge of the board. The interrogations would begin after 10 p.m. and last until the prisoner signed a confession. If not that night, then the next…
Confessions from these interrogations were uniform: “I, so and so, on date such and such, committed a crime in the service of American imperialism in order to aide the preparations for World War III with the aim of destroying the Soviet Union. I served as a CIA spy.” “And who would let you go after such a confession?” our guide laughs. He also adds that 90 percent of the non-Nazi prisoners were rehabilitated by today’s Russia.
Were there really some who did work for the Americans, we ask Fuhrmann. One young man, a lawyer who worked in the police administration, Fuhrmann keeps his name confidential for ethical reasons, came from a social democratic family, became a member of the CP, and noticed that unlawful acts were being committed during regular police operations: property seized, evidence fabricated. He started visiting people who were meant to be next, tipping them off, saying “we’ll be here tomorrow at six, make sure you’re gone by then.” But one morning, the man he tipped off said “I’m not falling for your provocations.” Disappointed with the practice of the regime he belonged to and the snitch mentality it installed in its subjects, he went to West Berlin incognito. There, they told him he could not cross over just like that, because he had been arresting people back home, he best go back and send reports to West Berlin. He started working for the CIA. Soon, he was discovered and arrested. Fuhrmann had looked into his file, which included his correspondence with West Berlin. On 17 June 1953, a workers’ revolt broke out in Berlin, only to be thwarted by the Red Army, so it was stupid to kill a police major in the middle of this situation for fear of spreading bad feeling among the security services. Instead of being executed, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. After 12 years, he came under the “ransom of prisoners”. When he got out of prison and arrived in the West, he contacted the CIA, but the only response he got was: “We don’t know who you are.” Today, this man is 86 and lives in Berlin.
The Soviets had a versatile torture mechanism: cells with water and standing cells, or cells with low ceilings in which you could only sit. Things changed after Stalin’s death. Those who had been convicted as summary trials were released, but the DDR state security wanted to have their own “high-ranking” prison and their own torture methods. They put windows in cells where it was possible, and in 1960, they constructed a new prison facility where Fuhrmann had served his sentence. The old building was closed, the Soviet officers left, and the Service was developing its own methods. They were soon put in practice. They called the old building of the Soviet prison the “submarine” because the lights were always on like in a submarine, and you could always hear the humming of the ventilation the way you hear the generators in a submarine. And, of course, just like a submarine, the building was windowless.
The main idea for the new building was to put each prisoner in solitary confinement. This Kafkaesque version of communism – making sure the interrogator is the only person a prisoner would be able to see while in prison intensified the feeling of solitude and misery of the individual in the system, which in Fuhrmann’s words was depressing to the point of desperation.
“Head down!” was the first command given by the Stasi escorting an arrested person from the white van often marked with “fresh bread” or “fresh fish” while actually serving as a “mobile” prison cell. The prison was aggressively clean – to the point of sterility. The smell of disinfectant penetrated one’s brain. The cells “smelled of soap”, remembers Fuhrmann, who wore felt shoes, socks and an old army uniform dyed black. During the day, he was only allowed to sit on a stool. He was not allowed to rest his elbows on his knees. Walls of glass replaced windows. The prisoner was meant to develop a “longing for interrogation” when he could “unburden” himself and talk to someone. “I was once even allowed to write a letter. I received only one package, and I saw a layer only once. The cells were sound-bugged, and the solitude was broken only by the “cell informer” – a privileged prisoner responsible for provocation.
The Stasi had 16 prisons competing in how many “informers” each could mobilise. Fuhrmann was 25 years old when he was incarcerated. His father was a civil servant and had to commit to never visiting his son. When he died, the mother, by that time retired, filed a request for a passport. In the DDR, old-age pensioners were eligible for passports because they were considered benign. At the end, he was reunited with this mother and sister in the West.
Fuhrmann studied at the University of Jena. He and his friend decided to escape. He arrived in Yugoslavia via Bulgaria – to Dimitrovgrad. Although Tito’s Yugoslavia had harboured political fugitives from the DDR, him and his friend were deported back to Bulgaria, allegedly because of an exchange, because the Bulgarians delivered someone who was “interesting” for the Yugoslav services. The Stasi were not interested in the escape of two students as mush as in the student group at Jena that Fuhrmann was a member of and that advocated “democratic socialism”, something the DDR authorities could not stomach, for them it was a “revisionist plot in the service of imperialism”. He was prohibited from further study in the DDR for life and he got a job as an associate worker.
A file was kept on him for 19 years after he was released and at the end the “Fuhrmann materials” were six meters long.
published in newspaper “Danas”
26th October 2012
http://www.danas.rs/danasrs/drustvo/terazije/ceznja_za_saslusanjem.14.html?news_id=249969