MAHER: Hello I’m Michael Maher in Berlin. Seventeen years ago most of this wall came down. Now only small sections remain as a reminder of a nation divided by the Cold War. Our story tonight is about a country that no longer exists and the ongoing controversy over its dreaded secret police. It’s also the story of an Australian writer who helped uncover the dirty secrets of what’s been described as the most perfected surveillance state of all time.

ANNA FUNDER, Author: I remember learning German – so beautiful, so strange – at school in Australia on the other side of the earth. My family was non-plussed about me learning such an odd ugly language and, though of course too sophisticated to say it, the language of the enemy.

Then in the 1980s I came to live in West Berlin for a while and I wondered long and hard what went on behind that wall.

MAHER: Anna Funder is the author of Stasiland. Her book tells of a time when Berlin was on the front line of an ideological war between the forces of capitalism and communism. It tells of the suffering of ordinary people at the hands of the Stasi – East Germany’s Orwellian Security Apparatus.

Funder is back in Berlin to research her next book.

Now another war is underway. This time it’s a war over history, a war between victims and perpetrators.

Hohenschonhausen Prison. Following World War II, Hohenschonhausen became a Soviet internment camp. Under the Russian’s control at least 1,000 people are estimated to have perished within its walls. After the Russians left this is where their clients, the Stasi, locked away those deemed enemies of the State. It now stands as a memorial to the excesses of a zealous regime. A memorial well organised former Stasi agents are agitating to have shut down.

ANNA FUNDER: I think there’s a kind of shamelessness about it. They will organise in groups and protest outside the prison that this prison should come down because it’s a shame and a blot on German history but it’s a shame and a blot on German history of their making.

MAHER: Visitors to Hohenschonhausen learn how their fellow Germans were abused behind its bolted iron gates. Former inmates like Sigrid Paul are still alive to give firsthand accounts. Frau Paul was accused of conspiring to help students escape to the West and for that she was given a four year sentence.

FRAU PAUL, Former prisoner of Hohenschonhausen Prison: When I was kept here in this basement from January to August 1964, three doors along a man could be heard screaming “We’ll never make it out of here again”. He screamed that day and night, as he had no idea what time it was.

MAHER: The man Frau Paul is referring to was locked in this rubber padded cell.

SIGRID PAUL: When he was taken out of the cell after about three weeks I was made to clean out the cell. I had to clean blood and excrement from the right side over there. I’m not saying that to horrify you, just to show the terrible experiences people went through in this place.

MAHER: Every German knows about Nazi death camps like Dachau and Auschwitz. But not so many know of the systemic oppression practised in prison camps throughout East Germany and the rest of the Soviet Bloc.

The renowned Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal said “If you consider only the oppression of its own people, the Stasi was much worse than the Gestapo”.

FRAU PAUL: They come to the memorial with only superficial interest. During the walk you notice they become more and more interested. At the end you notice a real sadness, especially in the very young who had no idea what was going on – what was happening during that time. Occasionally, the grief among the visitors is so great that they can’t leave the place because they are just standing there crying.

(TALKING TO A TOURIST):I’m not allowed to take that.

TOURIST: You can. I was a guide in the German Museum for ten years, but a tour like yours . . . I’m so moved by it.

FRAU PAUL: Thank you so much.

It was very bad and we just have to admit that. And it has to be told to the next generation.

MAHER: In August 1961 barbed wire was rolled out across Berlin to mark the site of the world’s most notorious wall. Born into the black dictatorship of Nazism Frau Paul had her youth and much more taken away under the red dictatorship of Communism. But unlike former Nazis, very few members of the regime that built this wall were prosecuted after the Cold War ended. In the spirit of German reconciliation, not one of the Stasi men who ran Hohenschonhausen was put on trial.

ANNA FUNDER: The Stasi were not made into criminals, they were not criminalised and that means that the Stasi can say what we did to our own people was legal.

MAHER: Today the physical remnants of the GDR – the German Democratic Republic – are fast disappearing. Soviet style architecture is being given a glass and steel makeover. Only the odd communist icon has been preserved as a gesture to nostalgia. But at a café on Karl Marx Avenue over coffee and schnapps two ex-Stasi agents talk as if the Cold War is still in full flight.

GOTTHOLD SCHRAMM, Ex-Stasi Colonel: The border isn’t there any more – you can travel now – but the ideological and material boundary is. It’s growing each year.

MAHER: Gotthold Schramm was a Stasi Colonel here in Berlin. Peter Wolter was a Stasi spy in the West.

Let me ask you Herr Wolter do you think that you have anything to apologise for as a result of your involvement with the Stasi?

PETER WOLTER, Former Stasi spy in the West: No. I don’t have to apologise for anything and I won’t apologise for anything. I can only apologise for not having worked even more efficiently.

MAHER: You were taking your orders from the Soviet Union – you had a leader in the Soviet Union like Stalin who killed millions of his own people. How did you feel about being in bed with a country like that?

PETER WOLTER: Ask about Bush. How many people did he kill until now?

MAHER: But that doesn’t excuse . . .

PETER WOLTER: Ask about Nixon, ask about Kennedy, ask about the Vietnam War in which Australia was involved.

MAHER: But we’re talking about East Germany and the Soviet Union and both of you are saying that really you have nothing to apologise for. Would you do it again?

PETER WOLTER: Yeah. Definitely…. definitely. The GDR was the weaker country, it had to react, it had to defend itself. The GDR was pushed into a corner. It had no other choice but to defend itself by any means and unfortunately many people had to suffer and to accept personal restrictions.

MAHER: It was from here that Schramm and Wolter took their orders. This was the lair of Eric Mielke – East Germany’s Intelligence Tzar.

ANNA FUNDER: He was someone who was keeping tabs on everybody and he was also killing people from here or issuing the orders to have them liquidated, as they say.

MAHER: Chief of the Stasi for almost the entire forty year existence of the GDR, from these offices he ran a surveillance agency acknowledged the world round as second to none.

ANNA FUNDER: They were the best. This was, as far as anyone can tell, the most thorough surveillance on earth. One in six people was informing on their colleagues and friends and neighbours and family.

MAHER: The Stasi went to extraordinary lengths to spy on just about everyone in East Germany. An extensive filing system kept with a manic thoroughness allowed no detail to go unrecorded. Some of these Stasi’s methods might have been laughable had the consequences not been so dire. Cameras concealed in birdhouses, in neck ties and in wooden logs.

ANNA FUNDER: They made a science of it. They were perfectionising methods of controlling people and in the beginning it was the usual methods of imprisoning people or breaking their arms or legs but later on in the 70s and 80s it became much more sophisticated and the main methods of repression were what they so beautifully termed the psychological destruction of a soul.

They would destroy one’s reputation in the workplace by spreading rumours, having agents spread rumours, or ruin a marriage in the same fashion. Incarcerate someone as mentally ill and keep them on doses of drugs and so on. These are not people who didn’t know what they were doing, they were writing doctoral theses on how to destroy a soul.

PETER WOLTER: Many of these people have been on an ideological crusade against the GDR for decades and you have to ask yourself why they were imprisoned in Hohenschonhausen at all? There must have been a reason for that too. There were people who sabotaged the GDR – and they were quite rightly punished.

MAHER: In this city where some of the darkest chapters of the 20th Century were written, few claim the crimes committed by the red dictatorship were on a par with the nightmare of Nazism. But nor do the Stasi’s victims want their stories devalued as the minor mistakes of an essentially enlightened regime. As Anna Funder discovered, ordinary people like Frau Paul, a dental technician, not a saboteur, had their lives destroyed.

ANNA FUNDER: She expresses it herself in the best of all possible ways. She says, you know in the morning I get up and I look at myself in the mirror and I think I made the right decision but, and then she breaks down, I had to decide against my son.

MAHER: In January 1961, Frau Paul gave birth to her first child. A son – Torsten was born with a ruptured diaphragm, a damaged stomach and oesophagus and he was spitting blood. His doctors weren’t sure if he would live. To save him they moved Torsten to a better hospital in the West.

FRAU PAUL: Before the wall was built, I visited my son every day at the clinic in West Berlin. There was only one public transport system for all of Berlin. But all this ended suddenly with the construction of the wall. I couldn’t see my son any more after the wall was built and it hurt very badly. The wall separated me from my sick baby and to me it was always a wall through my heart.

MAHER: It was at this point that Frau Paul and her then husband decided to escape. But after one failed attempt they gave up, hoping that Torsten would soon be well enough to return home.

Three students they’d befriended during their escape bid persisted, staying with Frau Paul for a short time while waiting to cross to the West through a tunnel. The Stasi had them all under surveillance.

FRAU PAUL: Two weeks after the students left I was kidnapped on the street. I’d left the house to go to the bus stop when two men approached me and grabbed my arms. A black limousine pulls up, I get pushed into it and I was gone. My first interrogation took 22 hours.

MAHER: During her interrogation at Hohenschonhausen the Stasi offered Frau Paul a deal. She could visit Torsten in the West so long as she agreed to betray one of the students planning the escapes. At enormous cost to herself Frau Paul refused the Stasi’s black bargain.

FRAU PAUL: I think you can imagine what it was like. The separation from my son was the worst thing that happened to me in my whole life. Of course it made imprisonment all the more difficult for me but at some stage I came to terms with it, thinking ‘I’m in prison . . . I don’t know what the future holds’.

MAHER: After 19 months, Frau Paul was freed. But Torsten still wasn’t well enough to be reunited with his family. Frau Paul had to rely on letters from her son’s nurses for news of her first born.

FRAU PAUL: (READING LETTER FROM NURSE)
Berlin, 9th of April 1965.

Torsten is really making a lot of progress now. It’s such a pity you can’t enjoy watching it yourself. One could despair – such drama within one city! But I don’t want to write about that, I’d rather tell you something new about Torsten. He tells me to write to you and say he’ll be coming home to Kaulsdorf soon.

All the best to you for now and a thousand sweet little kisses from Torsten, also to his Daddy.

Yours sincerely
Nurse Gisela

MAHER: This photo was taken on the day Torsten finally returned home. Defying doctors’ expectations, baby Torsten is now a 45 year old man. His memories of his early years are faint, but a visit to Hohenschonhausen to see where his mother was gaoled stirred deep feelings about his family’s tortured past.

TORSTEN: Yes, I’ve been there. It was a distressing, crushing feeling and I was scared too somehow – sad and unable to comprehend that something like that could have happened. Something you would not think possible, like thinking of old forms of torture and then to see it did exist.

ANNA FUNDER: I understood that story intellectually and to some extent emotionally but I didn’t have children when I wrote it and I found it powerful then but now that I have children I find it almost unthinkable. Frau Paul has just, she’s an absolutely extraordinary woman, she has a dignity about her that is incredibly moving when you consider her history and a strength as well. But that said, they broke her and they ruined her life.

MAHER: Frau Paul still lives on the same suburban street where the Stasi arrested her more than forty years ago. She dismisses the version of history put forward by Peter Wolter and Gotthold Schramm as a lie and cites her personal story as proof. But she worries that her fellow Germans appear reluctant to hear that story and to confront the horrors of Hohenschonhausen.

FRAU PAUL: People find it difficult to deal with the subject in this country. I notice it all the time, and I notice it with friends too. When I start talking about the issue, which is very important to me, many try to avoid it – or they have no interest in it. They just don’t want to hear it. They find it too embarrassing this German history.

ANNA FUNDER: Generally the sense that I get in this culture is we’ve had enough of it. We don’t want to talk about it anymore. I am in favour of remembering things so as not to do them again. So I hope that Hohenschonhausen stays and I hope they put up more boards in the streets to remember things by.