Coming to Terms: Dealing with the Communist Past in United Germany Bundesunmittelbare Stiftung des öffentlichen Rechts Preface 5 I. The Post-Communist German Experience: Special Features 14 1. Securing and Opening the Files 15 2. Records and Lustrations 20 3. Elite Changes 24 4. Communist Injustice before the Courts 32 5. Restitution, Rehabilitation, Compensation 40 II. Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED-Dictatorship 44 1. Origins: Parliamentary Inquiry Commissions and Initiatives 45 2. Structure of the Foundation 48 3. Mandate and Scope: Services and Activities 52 III. Other German and International Institutions: A Brief Overview 56 1. Federal Institutions 58 2. Civic archives 72 3. Other Institutions, museums and memorial sites 74 4. Victims Associations 86 Coming to Terms: Dealing with the Communist Past in United Germany This brochure is commissioned and published by the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED-Dictatorship (Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur). Written in collaboration with the Foundation by Bernd Schaefer, Senior Research Scholar with the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington D.C., it provides an overview of salient features and important institutions pertaining to processes of coming to terms with the communist past in Germany since 1990. Berlin, October 2011 Dr. Anna Kaminsky C OmInG TO TERmS: DEAlInG wITh ThE COmmUnIST PAST In UnITED GERmAny During the course of the 20th century Germany experienced two different dictatorships, the twelve years of fascist Nazi Germany’s “Third Reich” between 1933 and 1945 and the 40 years of communist rule in East Germany between 1949 and 1989 (the latter preceded by Soviet military occupation of Eastern Germany and East Berlin since 1945 when German communists were guided in building up dictatorial structures). Coming to t erms: 6 Dealing with the Communist Past in u niteD g ermany Both periods of dictatorships had some structural How Germans came to terms with those two dictatorships elements in common while they also displayed obvious existing on their soil varied significantly, given the major contrasts. Both dictatorships started and ended very differently, differences in both international and national environments with Nazi Germany resorting to a global war of aggression after 1945 and from 1989. Meanwhile both experiences in resulting in millions of war dead and the genocide of European redressing injustices of the past have begun to reference Jewry. Respective crimes committed by the two German each other in public German discourse. They have led to a dictatorships differed vastly in scope and geographical range. convergence in the sense that obligations exist to face dictatorial pasts from the perspectives of victims rather than After the demise of Nazi Germany and the Second World those held by perpetrators. The process of how to come to War’s ending in Europe, Soviet military authorities used certain terms with various injustices and crimes committed during Nazi concentration camp sites in Eastern Germany between dictatorships also facilitated a scrutiny of the latter’s legacies. 1945 and 1950 for their ten “special internment camps” to They warrant a search for lessons applicable to post-dictatorial detain some real, and many alleged, national-socialists. democratic systems and corresponding societal structures. About 43,000 of them, i.e. 35 percent of individuals interned, perished during confinement. The German population in areas that became the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) experienced the differences and similarities of two succeeding dictatorships from 1933 to 1945 and 1945 to 1989. The GDR was established on 7 October 1949 and imposed on the population by German communists organized in the Socialist Unity Party (SED) with the vital assistance of the Soviet Union and without popular legitimization. A façade of “democratic” institutions was set up with the SED actually pulling all the strings by virtue of its There were about 250,000 political prisoners in the GDR over the course of 40 years Coming to t erms: 8 Dealing with the Communist Past in u niteD g ermany self-assigned absolute unfettered power. Over the course of years, people living in this socialist state had to experience multiple features of repression. Opponents of the regime, or members of rival political parties during the early postwar years, were at any time subject to various forms of administrative repression or arbitrary arrests based on partisan definitions of criminal law. The judicial system was entirely subordinated to the SED’s respective political interests. Overall 250,000 people were arrested between 1945 and 1989 for political reasons (between 1961 and 1989 about 30,000 of them were released to the West after ransom was paid to GDR authorities by the West German government). Thousands were deported to Siberian camps by Soviet authorities after 1945 and during the 1950s. Until August 1961 alone, more than three million people fled the GDR through the still open borders with West Germany: Such constituted soviet tanks terminate the massive east german popular revolt in June 1953 9 the largest refugee movement in Europe after the end of World War II. Traumatic experiences were created, for instance, by the violent Soviet crackdown on the massive East German popular revolt in June 1953, the 1956 defeat of the Hungarian uprising and subsequent repressive measures in the GDR, the August 1961 construction of the intra-Berlin border and the walling-in and fencing-in of 17 million people in the GDR now separated from their kin in West Germany, the 1968 Warsaw Pact military intervention in Czechoslovakia, or the 1981 martial law crackdown on the Solidarnosc labor and peasant union movement in neighboring Poland. All those events had in common that attempts by people in the GDR and Eastern Europe to attain democratic rights and freedoms were met by dictatorial regimes with a full force of repressive measures. the Berlin w all in the 1970s Coming to t erms: 10 Dealing with the Communist Past in u niteD g ermany The communist regime in the GDR remained in power as process of self-democratization began. Free elections on long as Moscow had a vested interest in and the power to 18 March 1990 resulted in an overwhelming majority for East maintain a division of Germany and the existence of a separate German political parties advocating rapid unification with the socialist German state. By 1989 at the latest, the USSR had Western Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). By then the implicitly withdrawn its warranty of armed intervention to slogan from the beginning of the revolution had changed to maintain the survival of a socialist East Germany. In parallel “We are one people”. Ensuing negotiations between government developments, a refugee wave exiting the GDR to West representatives from both German states then culminated in Germany through Hungary and Czechoslovakia ultimately a currency, economic, and social union on 1 July 1990 and in toppled the SED regime in conjunction with unrest inside the a comprehensive Unification Treaty signed on 31 August 1990. GDR. There massive and After extensive multilateral and bilateral deliberations, the four persistent peaceful demonstrations victorious allied powers of World War II (USSR, USA, Great The slogan from held countrywide in small and big Britain, France) ratified on 12 September 1990 in Moscow with the beginning of cities took place. All this was both German states in a so-called “2+4 Treaty” upcoming the revolution had inspired by the huge path-breaking German unification and the status of united Germany as a changed to demonstration in the city of Leipzig member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) “We are one people” on 9 October 1989, which military alliance. Soviet armed forces in the GDR, which that ultimately forced the opening of at height of the Cold War in Europe had amounted to 400,000 the Berlin Wall and of the country’s sealed borders with the men, were to leave the Eastern part of united Germany by 1994. West by 9 November 1989. A “peaceful revolution” featuring the slogan “We are the people” gradually dismantled Back in 1945, Soviet military occupation authorities had communist state structures and established foundations for established on East German territory the five states of the emergence of a multi-party democracy. After the self- Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony, Saxony- liberation of East Germans through a political revolution, a Anhalt and Thuringia. The city of Berlin was divided into four Coming to t erms: 12 Dealing with the Communist Past in u niteD g ermany sectors with the Soviet Union administering the largest of them individuals. Those activities occurred during the GDR’s last in the Eastern part. In 1952 the GDR had these five states year between November 1989 and October 1990 – and thus replaced with 14 districts and a separate 15th entity for East before Germany’s official unification. Important decisions in Berlin. With German unification on 3 October 1990, however, the context of democratization, like applying criminal law to the original five East German states from 1945 were re- perpetrators, compensating the victims, and opening the established. Together with the files, originated from the last GDR government (which also reunited city of Berlin, now figuring happened to be the only free and democratic one) after the Berlin was voted the as a state of its own, they joined the March 1990 elections. capital city by the existing eleven West German states German parliament to merge into one Federal Republic Subsequently taken up by the federal parliament of united of Germany. In 1991 united Berlin Germany and the five new states in its Eastern part, broad was voted the capital city by the German parliament and political majorities reached consensus about a public duty to ultimately became the seat of united Germany’s federal address, and possibly redress, the manifold issues of injustice government in 1999.