Daughters of the KGB (13 page)

Also in Potsdam, the technical college for training nurses and social workers was kept under particularly close scrutiny although the students were not rebellious intellectuals but ordinary kids seeking low-level professional qualifications. In September 1985 Carola Dessow began her studies there after failing an academic course at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Her divorced mother worked as a nurse in Leipzig, and this may have influenced her choice of back-up studies. Carola already had some black marks in her Stasi file, having voiced her opinions in Berlin about peace and disarmament, and frequented performances by young folk singers whose compositions touched on these issues. Unknown to the students at the technical college, the deputy principal and Carola’s class teacher were both IMs, who reported that she continued voicing opinions that did not conform with official policy.

Among her crimes they reported were failing to read the SED newspaper,
Neues Deutschland
, refusing to learn to shoot an air gun in sport lessons and alleging that the GDR was not a democracy. A heavyweight Stasi operation was mounted to trap this student nurse, who was considered to be infecting the student mass. This included co-opting another girl student to report on her circle of friends. On 29 March 1986 when all the students were in the classrooms a fire brigade survey of the student accommodation was conducted, the ‘firemen’ being Department XX Stasi officers in borrowed uniforms. The building was closed to the public, including students, and a janitor who was an IM opened the door of Carola’s room with a pass key. Photographs were made of handwritten and typewritten papers found among her possessions, including a draft ‘letter to the government of the GDR’.

At that time when mechanical typewriters were used, the Stasi had an entire department that held specimens of text produced by every typewriter in the GDR, each of which had minor irregularities, such as a particular letter microscopically higher or lower than the others. Thus, any typewritten dissident leaflets could swiftly be traced to their author. Such a person was immediately liable to a prison sentence of not less than two years under sections 219 and 220 of ‘the GDR law book’. It was not enough to arrest and imprison Carola, because the MfS wanted to catch all her ‘fellow conspirators’. An additional IM was therefore found among the student nurses to join her circle of friends and report from the inside. It was easier said than done because Carola was wary of anyone trying to do this. The Stasi captain in Dept XX who was in charge of the operation noted in his ‘Appreciation of the Working Plan’ in August 1986 that the several IMs watching Carola had been unsuccessful in ‘penetrating her circle’. Checks were run on all Carola’s friends in Leipzig, Potsdam and elsewhere, in case any of them had requested an exit visa.

At the start of the autumn term of Carola’s second year, a theatre group was formed in the technical college and a new IM was drafted in for this high-priority operation from the Potsdam film school, in the hope of getting close to her. In January another clandestine search was made of Carola’s room. The incriminating papers were still in her locker with new ones on the subject of Chernobyl. The deputy principal of the school was ‘informed of this by a student’ and a four-page plan of operation drawn up. At 7.30 a.m. on 22 January the student IM telephoned the Stasi district office to confirm that Carola was in class. The janitor and an MfS senior lieutenant entered her room and checked that the incriminating papers were still there.

Twenty minutes later the deputy principal took Carola from the classroom and accompanied her to her room, where the papers were ‘discovered’ and notification was immediately sent to the Ministry for Health Education, the SED district office in Potsdam and the college administration. Carola was taken in for questioning and, on the following day, a report on her case marked
Urgent
was sent by teleprinter to the head office of Department XX. But this was accompanied by the appalling news that the student body and the majority of the teaching personnel did not agree Carola should be suspended from the college, nor arrested. Rather, she should ‘voluntarily’ end her studies. And that, in short, is what happened. On 19 March 1987 she packed her remaining belongings and left the college.
⁹

Hers was the good fortune to be found out late in the Stasi years, and thus avoid serving several years in prison, which would earlier have been the case. Her punishment was therefore to be denied
any
further education.

It is a measurement of SED paranoia that the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had been organising public demonstrations against government policy in Great Britain
for forty years
when the campaign against Carola Dessow caused much midnight oil to be burned in Stasi offices and many hundreds of man-hours to be wasted on this one futile ‘operation’, typical of tens of thousands of similar operations in the GDR, most of which ended more tragically for the Stasi’s targets, young and old. Among the victims were the punk rockers and their male and female fans in the GDR, who boldly but ill-advisedly displayed their dyed hair, shaven heads and body-piercing to the public gaze, making themselves natural targets for random round-ups by the Volkspolizei, the Stasi and even the Kriminalpolizei. Their very existence was taken as unlawful criticism of the regime and, when they exacerbated this by flying paper aeroplanes bearing punk slogans or setting up an improvised pirate radio transmitter with very limited range to broadcast their music on a beach, for example, the full force of the GDR law was brought to bear on them. The GDR was governed by miserable old men and nowhere was this made more plain than in the Stasi’s war on youth.

Notes

1
.    Ironically, the author was imprisoned for the crime of
illegale Eintritt
– illegal entry into the GDR

2
.    A. Funder,
Stasiland
, London, Granta 2004

3
.    Ibid, pp. 15−32

4
.    G. Schnell,
’Das Lindenhotel’ Berichte aus dem Potsdamer Geheimdienstgefängnis
, Berlin, Links Verlag 2007

5
.    G. Schnell,
Jugend im Vizier der Stasi
, Potsdam, Brandenburgische Landeszentrale, 2001

6
.    K. Kassabova,
Street without a Name
, London, Portobello Books 2008, pp. 258–9

7
.    Schnell,
Jugend
, pp. 40–6

8
.    Ibid, pp. 47−50

9
.    Ibid, pp. 51−7

7

L
IES
, S
PIES AND
M
ORE
S
PIES

By the beginning of 1945 a large proportion of Hitler’s millions of men in uniform were not ethnic Germans. They included Orthodox Russians and Ukrainians, Catholic Poles and Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs from India, Belgians, Frenchmen, Scandinavians and even Central Asian tribesmen who could speak no European language. Although multi-ethnic recruitment into the Waffen-SS made the numbers look good on paper, it was obvious to all Hitler’s senior officers that they could not win the war because it was impossible to replace the constantly escalating losses of men and materiel. The Nazi state imploded with its cities and factories flattened by ever-larger formations of bombers causing death and destruction by day and night, and its armed forces were trapped between the Soviet armies advancing inexorably on the eastern front and Allied ground forces driving in from the West. While the Western leaders were concentrating on winning the war against the Axis powers, Soviet supreme Josef Stalin was busily planning his strategy for the post-war world.

Many German servicemen of all ranks were convinced that the Western Allies would swiftly rearm them to fight ‘the Ivans’, who were patently not going to stay allied with the Western democracies for long after the German surrender removed the only reason for their brief alliance with Stalin. They reasoned that, because the USSR was almost certain to revert to Lenin’s and Stalin’s policy of international sabotage and subversion of the period 1917–39, the best time for the democracies to stamp out Soviet Communism – which they had failed to do with the interventionist forces 1917–22 – was to attack the USSR while it was still weakened by the loss of 30 million military and civilian casualties suffered in the war and the colossal destruction of infrastructure caused by Operation Barbarossa.

The flaw in this reasoning was all too apparent to Stalin. The democratically elected governments of the Western Allies did not have the autocratic powers necessary to declare war on anyone after Hitler’s demise because their conscripted servicemen expected to be sent back to their homes and families as soon as the last shots were fired in Germany. They had, after all, been called up – or were given to believe they were in uniform – for ‘the duration of hostilities’ only. By that was meant hostilities against the Axis forces. Few of them would have welcomed the launching of a new war against the USSR, and millions of discontented soldiers, sailors and airmen voting in the next elections against the governments that were keeping them in uniform was something that no democratic government could contemplate. One of the most notable victims of this was Britain’s Winston Churchill, who was described by Clement Atlee, his victorious opponent in the July 1945 general election, as ‘the great leader in war of a united nation’ yet was deeply dismayed to be voted out of office in that election, a scant few weeks after leading his country to victory.

Patently, other means had to be found to fight the new Cold War. Conveniently established at Pullach, south-west of Munich in the zone occupied by US forces, was a key department of Hitler’s military intelligence, the Abwehr. Promoted to the rank of major-general, Reinhard Gehlen had headed the division Fremde Heere Ost (FHO) – Foreign Armies, East – since 1942, and survived the downfall of his boss, the anti-Nazi Admiral Canaris.
¹
The admiral’s fall from grace was due to telling Hitler in early 1944 that the war was already lost. His execution on 9 April 1945, when he was hanged naked on a gallows at Flossenburg concentration camp, was for alleged complicity in the plot to assassinate Hitler on 20 July of the previous year. However, Gehlen managed to avoid the savage retribution that fell on hundreds of other associates of the conspirators, and also rode out the uneasy reorganisation as the Abwehr was taken over by SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg and absorbed into the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RHSA) – or Chief Administration of Reich Security.

Foreseeing the eventual German defeat as clearly as had his executed master Canaris, Gehlen diverted a part of FHO’s staff to preparing for life after the war. Shortly before the surrender, he went to ground with his closest staff members after burying fifty-plus separate caches of microfilmed files and other documents relating to the Soviet armies and espionage activities inside waterproof canisters in the Bavarian and Austrian Alps, with which to buy favourable treatment from the Americans, by whom he intended to be captured. The files also included details of a network of pro-German stay-behind agents in the areas of Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia occupied by the Red Army. According to Stasi sources, there were 600 such trained and equipped agents of Gehlen’s organisation in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany alone.

On 22 May 1945 Gehlen voluntarily surrendered to, and was temporarily arrested by, an officer of the US Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) in Bavaria. The deal he proposed to his captor would have been outrageous if made to any other agency. It was quite simply to dig up the cached material and place it and his network of agents in Soviet-occupied territory in American hands, in exchange for his release and that of several close collaborators. Gehlen’s name was removed from the list of POWs, so that he ceased officially to exist, thus blocking any attempt by the Soviets to demand rendition of this key figure in the struggles of the eastern front. Four months later, after Gehlen’s proposed deal had been tossed back and forth between General Eisenhower’s chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, the former head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and Allen Dulles of the OSS office in Berne, Switzerland. Gehlen knew he had worked out all his moves correctly. In late September, he and three senior staff officers were flown to the US, not as prisoners, but as valued collaborators in preparation for the Cold War. As a small bonus and token of the accuracy of his information, he broke the cover of several OSS officers who were undercover members of the US Communist Party.

Gehlen next surfaced in July 1946, back in Germany under the protection of G-2, the US Army intelligence branch. By the end of the year he had obtained the release of many former Abwehr officers, who became the nucleus of a reborn FHO in Pullach, where control was nominally in the hands of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after it was set up in 1947. Gehlen’s staff and network, initially known to its American supervisors as ‘the Gehlen Organisation’, grew to number nearly 400 officers and several thousand sources. Initially there was an embargo on recruiting former SS personnel. Whether this was on moral grounds or because such men might be susceptible to blackmail by the NKVD or others who knew about an embarrassing incident in their past is unclear. If the latter, it was with good reason – as the affair of Heinz Felfe was to show.
²