A Childhood Behind Barbed Wire

By Alexander Latotzky

“I wanted to call them all by their names” appears on a memorial stone for the victims of the Stalinist repression in a park in St Petersburg just next to the Peter and Paul Fortress. It is a quote from “Requiem” a book of poetry by Anna Achmatowa (2). She wrote it for her son Lev who was incarcerated for 17 months during the period when Jeschow was head of the Secret Service.
Astrid, Gabriele, Roland, Renate, Bärbel, Thomas, Jürgen, Birgitt-Elsa, Klaus, Wolfgang, Joachim, Felicitas, boy (name unknown, born in 1947 in Bautzen) – a long list of names. They could all be on a list that would never be completed and never will be. They are the names of the children, who were born between 1945 and 1950 in Soviet Special Camps in Sachsenhausen or Bautzen, in Buchenwald, Ketschendorf, Fünfeichen, Mühlberg, Torgau, Hohenschönhausen or Jamlitz, who lived with their mothers in such misery and sometimes, like so many inmates, died.
More than 150,000 people, of whom about 123,000 were German, were incarcerated in these Camps in Germany between 1945 and 1950. Exactly how many young people and children were kept is difficult to establish today. According to Russian law, 12 year olds have criminal responsibility, which explains why they are not entered in the books separately. Children who were born in such camps are given no mention at all. On their release, mothers had to insist that their sons or daughters be included on any discharge certification just so that there was proof they existed at all.
The grounds for the mothers’ detention varied and were mostly absurd. They ranged from an accusation of “Distribution of Supposed Anti-Soviet Slander” to “Tendency to High Treason”. Only a few cases cited “Concentration Camp Guard” or “Gestapo Employee”. Even if one or two of the accusations were true, they did not apply to the children. Nevertheless they remained prisoners. Relatives were not allowed to fetch them from the camps.
When the Special Camps were closed in 1950 the suffering of the almost 14,000 prisoners did not end. The “internees”, who had been held without ever going to trial and formed the so-called “special quota”, were mostly released. 3,400 people were handed over to East Germany for final judgement. 10,500 inmates, who had gone before the Soviet Military Tribunal (SMT) were handed over to the East German Ministry of the Interior as “convicted criminals”. Almost all of the women went to the Hoheneck prison at Stolberg in the Erzgebirge region and with them more than 30 babies from Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald. In Hoheneck the children were taken away from their mothers by the East German officials. Most of them were sent to children’s homes and only saw their mothers again years later.
This book tells the stories of the mothers, the “camp children” and all those who helped save their lives. It contains a selection of personal stories portrayed by the mothers in question and their children. It was not easy to find them and it was even harder to motivate them to talk about this time so very long ago. Some could not talk about it for fear of damaging their health; others simply did not want to talk about it. One girl, who had been born in one of the camps, wrote “I was born in Torgau and was always with my mother or grandmother even in the Sachsenhausen camp. I wasn’t in a home but have nevertheless always battled with a depression that gets even deeper and more intense the older I get. I was rather backward in my speaking and everything and had to catch my older sister and brother (who had lived with relatives for the 5 years) up. Reading a book about this time is bad enough but to see everything again ...”. And her letter ended with the sentence “I am curious, but also afraid”.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alexander Latotzky
• Release date: Oct 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465906274

Alexander Latotzky

Pendelt seit vielen Jahren zwischen Berlin und einem kleinen Dorf in der Prignitz/Brandenburg um den Lärm der Großstadt zu entfliehen, ohne die er aber auch nicht leben kann.

Book preview

A CHILDHOOD BEHIND BARBED WIRE

Mothers with children in Soviet Special Camps and in the custody of East Germany

By

Alexander Latotzky

Copyright 2011 by Alexander Latotzky

Published at Smashwords

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(translated from German: Nicki Burston)

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This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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For my children David and Nele

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Blow, blow wind

Greet my child

Touch her ponytail

Pull her little skirt

Though she is far from me

I would so love to be with her

Blow blow wind

Greet my child

Catch my little boy

Kiss his little dimples

Tell him I am so alone

I would so love to be with him

Blow blow wind

Greet my child

Käthe Kirchner (1)

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Foreword

I wanted to call them all by their names

Gerhard, Diana-Beate, Isabella, Hubertus, Alexander, Petra, Victoria, Günther, Karin, Dagmar, Roswitha, Bernd, Virginia, Peter, Johannes, Barbara, Boy (name unknown).

I wanted to call them all by their names appears on a memorial stone for the victims of the Stalinist repression in a park in St Petersburg just next to the Peter and Paul Fortress. It is a quote from Requiem a book of poetry by Anna Achmatowa (2). She wrote it for her son Lev who was incarcerated for 17 months during the period when Jeschow was head of the Secret Service.

Astrid, Gabriele, Roland, Renate, Bärbel, Thomas, Jürgen, Birgitt-Elsa, Klaus, Wolfgang, Joachim, Felicitas, boy (name unknown, born in 1947 in Bautzen) – a long list of names. They could all be on a list that would never be completed and never will be. They are the names of the children, who were born between 1945 and 1950 in Soviet Special Camps in Sachsenhausen or Bautzen, in Buchenwald, Ketschendorf, Fünfeichen, Mühlberg, Torgau, Hohenschönhausen or Jamlitz, who lived with their mothers in such misery and sometimes, like so many inmates, died.

More than 150,000 people, of whom about 123,000 were German, were incarcerated in these Special Camps in Germany between 1945 and 1950. Exactly how many young people and children were kept is difficult to establish today. According to Russian law, 12 year olds have criminal responsibility, which explains why they are not entered in the books separately. Children who were born in such camps are given no mention at all. On their release, mothers had to insist that their sons or daughters be included on any discharge certification just so that there was proof they existed at all.

The grounds for the mothers’ detention varied and were mostly absurd. They ranged from an accusation of Distribution of Supposed Anti-Soviet Slander to Tendency to High Treason. Only a few cases cited Concentration Camp Guard or Gestapo Employee. Even if one or two of the accusations were true, they did not apply to the children. Nevertheless they remained prisoners. Relatives were not allowed to fetch them from the camps.

When the Special Camps were closed in 1950 the suffering of the almost 14,000 prisoners did not end. The internees, who had been held without ever going to trial and formed the so-called special quota, were mostly released. 3,400 people were handed over to East Germany for final judgement. 10,500 inmates, who had gone before the Soviet Military Tribunal (SMT) were handed over to the East German Ministry of the Interior as convicted criminals. Almost all of the women went to the Hoheneck prison at Stolberg in the Erzgebirge region and with them more than 30 babies from Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald. In Hoheneck the children were taken away from their mothers by the East German officials. Most of them were sent to children’s homes and only saw their mothers again years later.

This book tells the stories of the mothers, the camp children and all those who helped save their lives. It contains a selection of personal stories portrayed by the mothers in question and their children. It was not easy to find them and it was even harder to motivate them to talk about this time so very long ago. Some could not talk about it for fear of damaging their health; others simply did not want to talk about it. One girl, who had been born in one of the camps, wrote I was born in Torgau and was always with my mother or grandmother even in the Sachsenhausen camp. I wasn’t in a home but have nevertheless always battled with a depression that gets even deeper and more intense the older I get. I was rather backward in my speaking and everything and had to catch my older sister and brother (who had lived with relatives for the 5 years) up. Reading a book about this time is bad enough but to see everything again .... And her letter ended with the sentence I am curious, but also afraid.

During the time of East Germany the women were strictly forbidden from saying anything about their fate. When some of them began to tell their stories after 1990 they were ridiculed or even called old-Nazis who were probably justifiably locked up for so many years. Such an experience can lead to bitterness, sometimes to a feeling of resignation or a desire to keep silent forever. Many women have, even to this day, remained silent about their time in the camps; they have not even told their partners or their own children. However, the carefully constructed protective layer of the repression is thin. Voices faltered when telling the stories, conversations had to be interrupted and continued on other days. In some families the silence continues into the present day. I met former camp children who hardly knew a thing about this part of their lives and only now could find out more about their birth place, the circumstances of their birth or their fathers from the Russian documents. Some have started to look for their un-named fathers.

Four eye witnesses did not end up in a Special Camp but rather in Russian or East German secret service prisons and were born on the way to Siberian work camps. Their mothers represent another group of women whose fate remains unresearched and unnoticed.

Those women affected remain anonymous in some reports or their names have been abbreviated – depending on their wishes. Sometimes the gender of the child has been altered. Some women would only take part on these conditions. The anonymity takes nothing away from the experiences.

My thanks go to all those women from self-help groups and clubs who were so helpful in my search. I would also like to thank all those municipality and archive employees for their support as well as Michael Viebig (from the Red Ox memorial in Halle), Wolfram von Schiliha and his colleagues at the Sachsenhausen memorial and Jan Lipinsky, author and historian. My thanks also to Lottchen Fischer from Berlin, called Flo, a former detainee at Sachsenhausen, Dr Annette Kaminsky, who succeeded in 1997 in bringing some mothers and children together at Sachsenhausen and finally to the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship who funded this project. My very special thanks go to Marina Hovannessjan of the Berlin branch of the German Red Cross for her invaluable help and to Dr Bodo Ritscher from the Buchenwald memorial whose contribution to the book was a comprehensive history of the camps. I also thank Mr Sauter, former manager of the now closed women’s prison Hoheneck, who allowed me to glimpse the fate of more than a thousand women through the records in the archives.

And finally, of course, I thank all those who spoke out. Without them, this book would never have been written.

A special mention goes to Leonid Kopalin who I met at an event at the Konrad Adenauer Fund. Leonid Kopalin was responsible for rehabilitation issues for the public office of prosecution. I spoke with him about children whose fathers, Soviet soldiers, were court marshalled for having a relationship with a female inmate. He promised his support and at a further meeting I was able to give him some sparse information and documentation about some of the affected women. At least two cases were clarified thanks to Mr Kopalin. One daughter now knows when her father died and where he is buried. Others are still waiting.

My research pointed to almost 100 mothers with children. This work was for me also an opportunity to come to terms with my own story. That Sasha, whose mother scribbled on a small piece of material in mortar that her son like to be cuddled to sleep and asked the unknown recipient to look after her son – well that was me. My mother died eleven years after her release at the age of just 41.

This book documents a part of German post-war history that, as the SDP politician Markus Meckel said at the Bautzen Forum, hardly anyone knew anything about at the time, and that hardly anyone knows anything about now and if it does not come to light, that no one will ever know the complete history of East Germany.

Manfred, Werner-Joachim, Lydia, Heinz, Monika, Erika, Michael, Ingeborg, boy (name unknown) ... I wanted them all to become more than just an anonymous part of a total number of victims and call them by their names.

Berlin, spring 2001

This is the first eBook version, revised and including additional information. Since the release of the first published version in 2001 many more victims have come forward. The furthest contact came from Dolly W from the USA. But actually, I wanted to be finished with my work on this topic. My father, whom I had only found in 1999, passed away in 2004 and the publisher, with whom I had worked for so many years, went bankrupt. So a fifth edition was unlikely. I am tired of this work that has continued to show the cynical nature of the Stalinist terror and the communist system. My children have always encouraged me to keep going. Nele put on an exhibition about her grandmother (whom she had never had the opportunity to get to know) at the Potsdam University and invited me to attend. David showed me how I could use the new medium eBook and which software I would need. So, after two more children, Dietmar and Jorinna, contacted me I have indeed continued my work.

This is my first edition of the eBook. I hope you find it as interesting as the four printed versions that preceded it.

Berlin, spring 2011.

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Contents

Research Results:

How women came to the German labour camps

Erika Pelke The child fell in the bucket

Daily Lives of mothers and their children in the camps

Your orders please

The bishop’s visit: baptism of the children?

Hoheneck – German Democratic Republic (DDR) takes over

Separation: There was a dreadful noise

Children of the State government

Thrashing for the brats

Lost years

Biographies and Reports

97 mothers with children

Annette

Helga and Viktoria

Renate

Ursula and Petra

Klaus

Martha and Wolfgang

Hedwig

Traute and Gabriele

Irmgard and Dorothea

Ilse and Waltraud

Ilse and Gerhard

Betty and Felicitas

Christa-Maria and Barbara

Ilse and Diana-Beate

Ursula-Susanna and Sasha

Summary

The Special Camps in the Soviet Occupied Zone of Germany

Past History

Formation and development of the Special Camp system

Inmates: interned and sentenced by the Soviet Military Tribunal

Life and death in the camps

Decommissioning but no end

Appendix

Epilogue

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Research Results

Grounds for detention: How women came to the German labour camps

From 1945 onwards approximately one million Soviet soldiers moved into every region that just a few months before had become the Soviet Occupied Zone. One dictatorship, the Third Reich, died with their arrival only to be replaced in East Germany by a different dictatorship in the form of the Stalinist repression apparatus. Actual and alleged opponents of the occupying force could be interned without any court process or legal judgement; others were put before a Soviet military court (Tribunal) and were then sent to the so-called Special Camps. Dependents were not informed; for them the camps inmates had simply vanished. The majority were wrongly arrested, often on incredible grounds that today would be classed as political persecution. This has been confirmed by the colonel of justice and head of the rehabilitation issues for the public office of prosecution of the Russian federation, Leonid P. Kopalin. (3)

This has also been substantiated by new statistics provided by Dr Dieter Müller of the documentation department of the Opposition and Repression History in Dresden. The cases of 10,509 people who had been convicted according to the notorious Paragraph 58 of the penal code of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic were examined there. The largest group (43%) among these had been convicted of espionage in accordance with paragraph 58.6. Up to 2009, 99.3% of them were rehabilitated via the Russian military public prosecution department! A further 28% were convicted according to paragraph 58.2 (armed rebellion or penetration of armed groups into the Soviet area with an anti revolutionary intent). For this group the rehabilitation rate lies at 85.1% (4). Up to, but excluding real criminals, the rate was similarly high in other cases.

This means nothing less than the large majority of people with Soviet Military Tribunal convictions were, according to the current Russian legal interpretations, wrongly delivered to the Special Camps or carted off to the Soviet GULags. As described by a vindication document, they were arrested and detained unreasonably, on political grounds and would be recognised today as victims of political repression by the Russian state. Unfortunately, it can no longer be established (due to a lack of a judicial review) just how many people were detained without any court process.

Closely connected with this on the basis of the strictly confidential order 00315 was the notorious Commissioner for Internal Affairs and General Commissioner of State Security, Lawrenti P. Berija. (5) He did not only authorise the arrest of war criminals and Nazis but also other categories of enemy elements. From October 1946 the Allies, via the jointly issued Directive 38, afforded the Russians the freedom for their mostly high-handed behaviour. Thereafter, people who were considered dangerous by the occupation forces could be sent to the Special Camps. (6) Today it is undisputable that Moscow was not only interested in punishing apprehended Nazis in the camps. This can be seen from a letter from General Major of Justice of the Soviet occupying force in Germany, Boris M Schawer, to the camps commander, Colonel General Swiridow. The letter was written on 24 June 1947 because of the refusal of the camp commander to admit more prisoners into the already overcrowded establishment without the approval of a military attorney. Schawer stated:

"The arrest of persons who have been transferred to the Special Camps in accordance with the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKWD) order no. 00315 is the result of special proceedings. No charges will be made and there will not be any documentation of the penal proceedings. Therefore the military lawyers cannot legally ratify these cases. Please inform all commanders of the Special Camps that the missing ratification is not grounds to refuse to accept the special contingents into the camps…". (7)

These people were quite simply supposed to be incarcerated and removed from society, during which time they may die without another thought – every third person did not survive their time in the camps.

Nevertheless it took some time for the news to spread amongst all levels of the Soviet Military Administration (SMAD) in Germany that judicial proceedings were not necessary for many camp inmates. On 31 July 1947 the Soviet Military Administration commander in Sachsen-Anhalt, Michail A Schljachtenko sent the following communication to the head of the Soviet Military Administration Germany, Wassili D. Sokolowski:

"Strictly Private and Confidential

To General Marshall of the Soviet Union W.D. Sokolowski, Karlshorst

Special Camp No. 1, located in Sachsen –Anhalt, near Mühlberg and Bad Liebenwerda.

More than 13,000 persons of the special contingent are housed in the camp, of which approximately 1,500 are female, as well a small number of youths and children.

The majority of inmates have been in the camps since 1945. The camp is under the control of the Internal Ministry of the USSR; we do not have control of it.

I consider it appropriate to present the following issues to you:

It is necessary to send without delay a strong group of experienced workers and lawyers to the camp, who would be in a position (within a very short time span) to process the materials for the many (perhaps the majority) Nazis and other criminals and to hand the cases over to the military court.

Currently this work is carried out at such a pitiful speed that it could drag on for decades. For example, the working group of Special Camp no.1 only processed 6 cases for 7 people in a quarter (from May to July of this year); indeed in two cases the investigations have not yet been completed. Through the cases that are before the tribunal, the workers of the working group of Special Camp no. 1 have shown themselves to be lacking in general education and juristic specialist knowledge..."

The communication has the hand written comment "General Maklow …. (illegible) about General Serow (illegible) ten thousand prisoners are in the zone, their cases will not be processed" 2.8.1947, Sokolowski (8).

German officials supported the Soviet occupier’s habit of arresting citizens from the start. They were initially involved in the country's existing administrative offices for information. This task was taken over in 1947 by the 5th Commission of the People's Police, whose founding was the result of an order from the Soviet Military Administration in Germany. Many former members of the illegal military organization, the Communist Party of Germany, worked together with the secret police