Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} From My Life by Erich Honecker From My Life by Erich Honecker. Born: 25-Aug-1912 Birthplace: Neunkirchen, Saar, Germany Died: 29-May-1994 Location of death: Santiago, Chile Cause of death: Cancer - Liver Remains: Cremated. Gender: Male Religion: Atheist Race or Ethnicity: White Sexual orientation: Straight Occupation: Head of State. Nationality: Germany Executive summary: East German leader, 1971-89. Wife: Edith Baumann (div. 1953) Wife: Margot Feist (Minister for Education, b. 17-Apr-1927, m. 1953, one daughter) Daughter: Sonja (b. 1951) East German Leader 1971 to 24-Oct-1989 Sedition Dec-1935 Escaped from Prison Berlin, Germany (6-Mar-1945) Assassination Attempt 31- Dec-1982 Cholecystectomy 18-Aug-1989 Treason 1990 (charge dropped due to health) Corruption 1990 (charge dropped due to health) House Arrest 1990 Manslaughter 192 counts, arraigned (31-Jul-1992), charge dropped Deported from the Chilean Embassy in Moscow (29-Jul-1992) Extradited from Russia to Germany (29-Jul-1992) Order of Lenin Risk Factors: Kidney Cancer. Margot Honecker defends East German dictatorship. She was known as the "purple witch" for her arresting lilac rinses and tenacious political outlook. Now the widow of the former East German leader Erich Honecker has broken a 20-year silence to defend the dictatorship, attack those who helped to destroy it, and complain about her pension. Margot Honecker, 84, who as education minister of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) served alongside her dictator husband, describes her homesickness for a "lost nation" and calls its demise a tragedy in an interview due to be broadcast on German television on Monday evening. The documentary, which was years in the making due to Honecker's dogged insistence she would never give an interview to "West German" media, shows her at home in Chile where she escaped to with her husband after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in the early 1990s. For the first time since 1989 Germans are given an insight into Honecker's life and a full-blown taste of her unforgiving views about a GDR that she continues to idealise. In shockingly frank exchanges in which she cuts a robust, vigorous figure, she defends East Germany to the hilt and refuses to accept any responsibility for its more tyrannical traits, including her own role as the minister responsible for thousands of forced adoptions. "It is a tragedy that this land no longer exists," she tells the interviewer, Eric Friedler, adding that, while she lives in Chile "my head is in Germany". She does not, however, mean united Germany, rather the "better Germany" of the GDR. Honecker dismisses in a single sentence the fate of hundreds of people who lost their lives trying to escape East Germany for a better life in the west. "There was no need for them to climb over the wall, to pay for this stupidity with their lives," she says. Asked why the revolution of 1989 took place if, as she claims, the country was such a good place to live, she suggests that the demonstrations were driven by the GDR's enemies. "The GDR also had its foes. That's why we had the Stasi," she says, referring to the country's repressive secret police. Questions about the programme of forced adoptions of the children of regime opponents, for which she was responsible, are met with the response: "It didn't exist". Equally, the economic demise of the GDR "is simply untrue", and she describes victims of the regime as "criminals who today make out that they were political victims", who were in some cases "paid". Does she have any feelings of guilt? "It didn't touch me at all. I have a thick skin." Friedler said that over the several days he interviewed her, Honecker, who during her 26-year tenure as education minister introduced weapons training to schools, and ordered every teacher to report all incidences of deviation by pupils from the communist line, remained bizarrely detached from reality and resolute in her defence of East Germany. "Margot Honecker showed no remorse, or discernment, she expressed no word of regret or apology," he said. "She might be in Chile, but she is very well connected to a whole guard of old comrades. She regularly spends hours reading the internet, knows exactly what's going on in Germany, but says her desire for Germany is restricted to … the GDR." She also takes the opportunity to complain about her €1,500 state pension which she receives every month from Germany, calling it "derisory". Honecker predicted the socialist Germany for which she and her husband, who died of cancer in 1994, fought for, would have its chance again. "We laid a seed in the ground which will one day come to fruition," she says. "We just didn't have enough time to realise our plans." Former inmates recall life in Erich Honecker's GDR prisons. The Nazis jailed partisans such as Erich Honecker in the Brandenburg-Görden prison. Several decades later, when Honecker had become the East German leader, he in turn locked up political adversaries in this very jail. Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there remain Germans who tout the legacy of the German Democratic Republic. The oft-heard claim that "not everything was bad about the GDR" and that the Soviet-allied state had great day care facilities, as some still assert, strikes 68-year-old Manfred Wilhelm as utterly absurd. He was a political prisoner. In 1981, Wilhelm was sentenced to eight and a half years behind bars for the crime of inciting hatred against the state — just for telling a few political jokes to friends and in bars. He was locked up in Brandenburg-Görden prison, where Erich Honecker, the leader of the GDR, was once jailed by the Nazis. When Wilhelm's sense of humor offended the Stasi, he was sentenced to eight years. Honecker was the prison's most infamous inmate. The young communist was jailed there between 1937 and 1945 by the Nazis, and then freed by the Red Army. By 1971, he had become the most powerful man in East Germany. The dictator would do to his political enemies what the Nazis had once done to him: throw them in jail. That became a lucrative business for the chronically skint communist state; the GDR jailed its citizens, and West Germany paid to have them freed — as it would for Wilhelm in 1985. Drews, a Catholic priest, preached to the prisoners once a month. Many inmates held at Brandenburg-Görden prison and elsewhere in the GDR suffered tremendously. At least 500 prisoners took their lives. Starting in 1988, Catholic priest Johannes Drews, who was allowed to hold a monthly sermon at Brandenburg-Görden prison, experienced firsthand what inmates were going through. Though he was not officially allowed to talk to them, he did anyway. Drews says he was "inwardly very motivated" to do this because the Soviet army had incarcerated his grandfather in the former Sachsenhausen Nazi concentration camp between 1945 and 1948. It is estimated that at least 170,000 people were incarcerated during the GDR's 40-year existence. Brandenburg-Görden prison, located along the Havel River just west of Berlin, was one of East Germany's biggest jails, and held up to 3,500 inmates. Historian Tobias Wunschik, who researched its history and mistreatment of inmates, has now published a detailed, 1,000-page study on the prison. Wilhelm's stories and those of other former prisoners greatly helped Wunschik compile his study. Most significantly, though, the historian relied on files kept by East German secret police — the Stasi — which was instrumental in pitting political prisoners against each other and spying on them. Wunschik estimates that up to 12 percent of prisoners were in fact undercover Stasi agents. Political prisoners were treated worse than ordinary inmates "even though they did not behave inappropriately." Convicted murderers would physically abuse Wilhelm as inmates to lined up in corridors to be counted. Overall, Wilhelm remembers, there was a lot of distrust among the inmates. He says it was very difficult to talk to other inmates about how he felt. At some stage, he decided to think positively as a way of dealing with the monotony, hostility and pervasive sense of suspicion. He says he would think about his previous experiences and his dreams for the future. The double isolation — from both their East German society and from the world outside it — was extremely difficult to cope with. To get a sense of what was going on in the outside world, inmates even built miniature radios with which they secretly tuned into West German radio programs. Compassionate Catholic priest. Drews had a feeling that some of the repressive methods used by the GDR bore similarities to what the Soviets and Nazis did to their prisoners. To combat this, Drews always made an effort to greet inmates with a handshake and to tell them about the goings-on in the country. After all, by autumn 1989, hundreds of thousands were taking to the streets, demanding political and societal reforms. After the Berlin Wall had fallen on November 9, 1989, the prisoners sensed that they, too, would finally be freed. Four weeks after this historic event, they insisted on a press conference. Drews says he will never forget this day. Inmates led him into their cells, in which ten prisoners or more had often been crammed. They showed him the bunk beds, the handful of chairs, and toilets without walls that robbed them of a bare minimum of privacy. "We tend to forget so fast," Drews said.