A Brutal Status Quo 5

1949 Members of NATO 1989 EC Member States MAP 1. Later Cold War Members of NATO Warsaw Pact COLD WAR EUROPE 0 500 mi

0 500 km

Iceland

Norwegian Sea Sweden

Finland Leningrad North Norway Helsinki Atlantic

Ocean North Sea Soviet Union Moscow Denmark Baltic United Sea Kingdom Ireland Netherlands East Warsaw

London East Poland Kiev Bonn Belgium Prague N Paris West Czechoslovakia Luxembourg Germany Budapest Austria Hungary France Switzerland Romania Black Sea Yugoslavia Bulgaria Portugal Italy

Albania Spain Turkey Greece

Mediterranean Sea

Morocco Algeria Tunisia

over multiple aspects of the occupation. To cite just one example, Soviet occupation forces raped women on a massive scale, and there was little the Western allies could do to stop them short of using force.7 Conflicts with the Soviets in divided Germany and elsewhere culmi- nated in the decision of the Western allies, working with local leaders, to turn their occupation zones into a state, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) or West Germany, in May 1949. In order to make clear that unifying

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DENMARK

MAP 2. B a l t i c S e DIVIDED GERMANY a IN 1989 SCHLESWIG- North Sea HOLSTEIN Rostock

Hamburg

GERMAN r Bremen e v DEMOCRATIC i R

NETHERLANDS r REPUBLIC e LOWER SAXONY d O

. R East W arta W es Berlin e r

O

der R.

NORTH RHINE-

N E l e WESTPHALIA b i e s s R e R Merseburg i i Leipzig v R v e i er r v e

Cologne r Erfurt Region Dresden Bonn HESSE Jena Historically Known As Saxony Koblenz

Main R i RHINELAND- v e r Prague PALATINATE BAVARIA SAAR FEDERAL REPUBLIC CZECHOSLOVAKIA OF GERMANY

M er o Danub e Ri v s

e BADEN- r l e v R i i WÜRTTEMBERG R v e r e n

i h

R Munich FRANCE

N

SWITZERLAND AUSTRIA 0 100 mi

0 100 km

into NATO.12 The GDR became part of the Warsaw Pact, although the rul- ing regime had no electoral mandate for that membership decision, unlike in the West. Elections did take place regularly in the GDR, but the tallies were clearly fraudulent—the SED regularly won around 99 percent of the vote—and in any event did not matter, since would not have been able to get rid of Soviet troops even had its leaders wished to do so.

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MAIN

TRAIN REFORMED CHURCH STATION

LEIPZIG RIN G ROA D

“EASTERN KNOT”

THE “ROUND CORNER” Swan BUILDING, HEADQUARTERS Pond OF THE STASI IN LEIZIG

Market Square

OLD CITY OPERA HALL NIKOLAI HOUSE CHURCH ROAD G

N Nikolai Karl RI Churchyard G I THOMAS Marx Z CHURCH Square

LEIP

D

OA KARL MARX R

UNIVERSITY

G

N I

R

G ZI

P GEWANDHAUS

LEI (CONCERT HALL)

N

ROAD LEIPZIG RING

T

S

MAP 3.

T

R O

K LEIPZIG CITY CENTER

R A H AND RING ROAD

at the Michaelis Church and Sievers’s Reformed Church combined, but staff members at the Reformed Church put the numbers at closer to dou- ble that.109 The police also did not know about two extra attendees at the Reformed Church, hunching down in the open-air tower. Radomski and Schefke were doing their best to get comfortable in the damp and to avoid the worst of the pigeon dung. Beneath them, Sievers prepared to speak to what he counted as 1,500 people jammed into a space built for 450.110 He opened his remarks with a famous passage from Corinthians: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child.” He then told the assembled, in simple but powerful words, that the time had come for them to put away childish things and to become adults. Sievers knew that the two men in the

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MAP 4. DIVIDED BERLIN

Heiligensee/Stolpe IN 1989

FRENCH N SECTOR STASI PRISON, HOHENSCHÖNHAUSEN W E

Bornholmer St. Chaussee St. S

Staaken Invaliden St. Friedrich St. ALEXANDERPLATZ REICHSTAG BRITISH GATE STASI HEADQUARTERS, SECTOR NORMANNEN ST. Checkpoint Charlie Heinrich- Heine St.

Sonnenallee US SECTOR SOVIET SECTOR

Dreilinden/ Drewitz Waltersdorfer Chaussee

Course of the Berlin Wall 0 5 mi Border Crossing Point 0 5 km Point of Interest

eanwhile, since the travel reform that Krenz had envisaged Mwas taking shape in the form of a draft law, both Friedrich Dickel and Mielke, the interior and Stasi ministers, respectively, were becoming involved, since their agencies handled implementation of such laws.50 Their ministries were, of course, notionally state offices but actually subordi- nate to the party organizations and to the Politburo (and Mielke was a Politburo member). Hence, when the Politburo wanted the security and interior ministers to do something, they did it.51 Dickel assigned his subordinate Gerhard Lauter the task of supervising the drafting of the law and other matters related to the potential prac- ticalities of implementation.52 Lauter, born in Dresden and educated in Leipzig, was a party loyalist in the extreme. He had risen rapidly through the ranks, first of the police and then of the Ministry of the Interior. Lauter had experience with both weapons and counterterrorism operations and had even taken part in a successful hunt for a deserter from the Soviet armed forces.53 On top of all of this, he was also an “unofficial employee” of the Stasi, meaning that he served the Stasi in addition to the police and

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This Stasi map of the Bornholmer Street border crossing complex, with the eastern entry at the bottom and West Berlin at the top above the dashed line, indicates its east-west length as being 210 meters (roughly 700 feet) with an additional bridge span to the west of 113 meters (roughly 400 feet). The typed map key at right reads roughly: “Explanation of Sym- bols: 1. Service Buildings; 2. Barrier Gates; 3. Guard Posts; 4. Pre-Control Area; 5. Customs and Passport Clearance Area.” The area to the bottom left, marked with the number 5, contains the vehicle processing lanes. (MfS, from file BStU, MfS HA I, Nr. 3510, 14)

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