How the Soviet Stasi recruited Hitler’s SS thugs to take control of East Germany
First Class Comrades by J Boulter is the definitive account of the communist secret police
“It seems to me,” said Erich Mielke, the man who would head this organisation right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, “that what is important is that [a] comrade who perhaps cannot write, knows how to win and what to do to destroy enemies”.
Teetotal and a non-smoker, Mielke was fuelled by ideological fervour, remaining an unrepentant Stalinist until the very end. Although his office, which can be visited today in Berlin, is a sleek minimalist place, he never forgot his origins as a party henchman.
This was not a place for the effete Cambridge types you might find in MI6. The German service would be formed from communist veterans of prewar street brawls with the Nazis, particularly those who then served in the Spanish Civil War.
These had not been, by and large, heroic fighting soldiers in the front line against fascism in Spain but, as the author Jack Boulter catalogues in First Class Comrades, his vivid new history, men who like Mielke served there in shadowy security roles, where he notes, “undoubtedly his main role was to silence non-Stalinists”. They did this by “liquidating” Trotskyists, social democrats and anyone else suspected by their Soviet commissars.
Remarkably, Boulter even finds a few early Stasi officers who had served in the Dirlewanger Brigade, a penal unit of the Nazi SS that became infamous for brutality in eastern Europe, notably the suppression of the 1944 Warsaw uprising. Sent to concentration camps as communists, they had enrolled in the SS as a way of getting out, and despite the crimes they may have committed in that uniform were considered sufficiently loyal to the cause of class struggle that they could join East Germany’s secret police.
Boulter’s account is full of such detail about remarkable reversals of fortune as the ideological polarity flicked from Nazism to communism in East Germany. Where should the new communist masters of this land incarcerate social democrats and Nazis as they tightened their grip in the late 1940s? Former concentration camps, natürlich, Sachsenhausen being particularly important.
Boulter notes that after the war, as new government structures took shape in the four Allied occupation zones of Germany, it was only under the hard eye of the Soviet military that comprehensive de-Nazification was practised. While the British or Americans often turned a blind eye to a former Nazi occupying a key post, half a million people lost their jobs in East Germany for having belonged to the party.
As a political secret police force in the late 1940s, the Stasi’s priorities were carrying out these purges and neutralising the other parties that re-emerged after the defeat of 1945, notably the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats. By the turn of the decade, with Europe increasingly under the grip of the Cold War emerging between East and West, that changed — instead, it became an instrument of internal control and a service for hunting western spies.
“We have been specially checked,” said Wilhelm Zaisser, the first chief of the new service, of the Stasi’s status within East German society. “We are, so to speak, first class comrades.” For much of the country’s 39-year history, the boss of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, the Ministry for State Security, held cabinet rank.
The centrality of this repressive apparatus and the self-proclaimed elite status of its secret police might put you in mind of Animal Farm, which was published four years before the formation of East Germany. The organisation extended its tentacles throughout society under the excuse of fighting foreign espionage.
However, when the German Democratic Republic faced an existential crisis just four years after its foundation, in the summer of 1953, it had very little to do with enemy agents, and the Stasi was completely blindsided. Workers angry at the harsh pay terms imposed on them had started sit-ins and protests, in an escalating crisis that was brought under control only by the use of Soviet troops to clear the streets.
This momentary faltering of the GDR happened a few months after the death of Stalin, at a time when people dared to hope for greater freedom. In the aftermath, Zaisser was sacked as Stasi boss, and repression redoubled.
A few months after the unrest of 1953 the Stasi launched the first of its grossaktionen or major operations, arresting 109 suspected agents of the embryonic West German intelligence organisation. Boulter deploys Stasi archives here, reproducing the long list of questions that had to be asked of those taken to the interrogation cells.
For each of those arrested, facing a personal crisis, there was a way out. Mielke instructed those carrying out the interrogations to assess in each case, “the extent to which there are prospects for recruitment”.
It also proved adept at recruiting agents in the West. Adolf Kanter, codenamed “Fichtel” in the Stasi archive, was one of their most successful: starting in 1949 he infiltrated the Christian Democrats, rising within the party alongside the future chancellor Helmut Kohl, filing 1,200 reports of high-grade intelligence across the decades.
Kanter was such a successful agent that he evaded discovery until after the fall of the GDR, as western counter-intelligence finally accessed its secrets. When finally tried in 1995 at the age of 70, Kanter received a two-year suspended sentence.
As the pace of operations stepped up the Stasi gained more and more sources, and spying and informing became an endemic pattern of life in the GDR. It wasn’t a life that many people wanted. Between the end of the war in 1945 and 1961 it’s estimated that three and a half million Germans who couldn’t bear it any longer fled west. Who wanted grim living standards and harsh repression?
This exodus produced a crisis that led the GDR’s leaders to erect what they named, with a suitably Orwellian flourish, the “anti-fascist protective barrier”, or Berlin Wall. And it is at this defining moment of Cold War history that the book ends.
The first 16 years of Boulter’s narrative weigh in at over 600 pages, so one can see why one or more additional volumes could be needed to take the story up to the GDR’s collapse. It is the definitive account, a compelling exploration of a mind-bending ideological experiment, its secret servants and the lives they defined.
First Class Comrades: The Stasi in the Cold War 1945-1961 by J Boulter (Oldcastle £28.99 pp732). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members