German Democratic Republic under the SED

Background and rise to power

Germany was divided into four occupation zones in 1945. In the Soviet zone the Communist Party (KPD) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) were merged into the SED on 21 and 22 April 1946, under Soviet pressure in the Soviet zone and not in the western zones; its newspaper, Neues Deutschland, appeared from 23 April 1946. The Federal Republic of Germany was founded on 23 May 1949 from the three western zones. On 7 October 1949 the People's Council in the Soviet zone declared itself the Provisional People's Chamber (Volkskammer) and put the constitution of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) into force. Wilhelm Pieck, co-chairman of the SED, became President on 11 October and Otto Grotewohl, the other co-chairman, became Minister-President on 12 October. Walter Ulbricht, deputy minister-president, was the SED's dominant figure and became its General Secretary in July 1950 (the title was changed to First Secretary in 1953).

The 1949 constitution named a parliamentary republic and guaranteed freedom of opinion, while Article 6 made "Boykotthetze" (incitement to boycott democratic institutions) a crime, a provision later used in political trials. The elections of 15 October 1950 offered one list of the National Front, which included the SED, the "block" parties and the mass organisations, and the official result was over 99 per cent in favour (Weber, Judt). On 17 June 1953 strikes over higher work quotas spread into a nationwide uprising that Soviet troops and the East German police put down; at least 50 people were killed and thousands arrested (Kowalczuk; Hertle). The Ministry for State Security (MfS, "Stasi") had been created on 8 February 1950. Between 1949 and 1961 an estimated 2.7 million people left for the West, many of them young and skilled; the exodus was the main pressure on the state's economy and on its claim to legitimacy (Harrison; Taylor).

How power was organized

The SED's Politburo and Central Committee Secretariat took the main decisions; the Council of Ministers, headed by Grotewohl until his death on 21 September 1964 and then by Willi Stoph, carried them out. Ulbricht chaired the new State Council from 1960; Honecker replaced him as party leader on 3 May 1971 with Soviet backing, and from 1976 held both the party leadership (General Secretary) and, as chairman of the State Council, the formal headship of state until 18 October 1989. The 1968 constitution described the SED as the leading force of society. The "block" parties (CDU, LDPD, NDPD, DBD) and mass organisations (the youth organisation FDJ, the trade-union federation FDGB, the women's league DFD, the Pioneers, the Society for Sport and Technology) sat inside the National Front and took part in single-list elections; the reported turnout and approval were above 98 per cent through the 1980s. For the local elections of 7 May 1989, citizen groups counted the votes at polling stations and published results that differed from the official 98.85 per cent approval (Kowalczuk).

The Ministry for State Security under Erich Mielke (Minister 1957 to 1989) combined a secret police, an intelligence service (headed by Markus Wolf for foreign intelligence) and prison and investigation functions. At the end it had about 91,000 full-time staff and, by the estimates of the Stasi Records Agency and historians, roughly 170,000 unofficial collaborators (Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter), among about 16 to 17 million inhabitants (Gieseke). Its Directive 1/76 of January 1976 described "Zersetzung" (literally "decomposition": measures such as discrediting a person or disrupting their private and working life) as a method for operations against opponents, and case files in the archive record such measures (Gieseke; Behnke and Fuchs). The Border Law of 25 March 1982 (Section 27) set out when border troops could use firearms. At least 140 people died in connection with the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989, according to the 2017 study by the Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam and the Berlin Wall Foundation; the figure for the whole inner-German border is higher and is counted differently by different bodies.

Economic planning ran through Five-Year Plans and the State Planning Commission. In the 1980s the GDR owed substantial hard-currency debts to Western banks and relied on credits from the Federal Republic, arranged in 1983 and 1984 (Steiner). In October 1989 mass demonstrations, above all the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig, and the flight of citizens through Hungary and the West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw ended the SED's hold on power.

The propaganda apparatus

Party direction. The Central Committee's Agitation and Propaganda apparatus set the line for the media. Albert Norden headed the Politburo's Agitation Commission and was Secretary for Agitation from 1955 to 1967, Werner Lamberz held the post from 1967 until his death in a helicopter crash in Libya on 6 March 1978, and Joachim Herrmann held it from 1978 to 1989 (after leading Neues Deutschland from 1971 to 1978). Kurt Hager, Secretary for science, education and culture from 1955 and a Politburo member from 1963, was the party's chief spokesman on ideology. The press was run through licensing and paper allocation, the state news agency ADN and its photo service Zentralbild, and weekly guidance to chief editors from the party apparatus (Holzweißig). Neues Deutschland, the SED's central organ from 1946, had a print run of roughly one million at its peak. Its editors-in-chief included Hermann Axen (1956 to 1966), Joachim Herrmann (1971 to 1978) and Günter Schabowski (1978 to 1985); regional SED newspapers, the block parties' papers and the FDJ's Junge Welt followed in a graded hierarchy (a 1951 subscription-drive board for the party press).

Radio and television. A State Radio Committee ran the radio services (Berliner Rundfunk, Radio DDR, the Deutschlandsender and, for foreign listeners, Radio Berlin International, which broadcast in several languages from 1959). The Deutscher Fernsehfunk began regular television in December 1952, with the news programme Aktuelle Kamera; its main building stood at Berlin-Adlershof, and Heinz Adameck chaired the State Committee for Television from 1968 to 1989 (the Adlershof centre; an Aktuelle Kamera interview of December 1961; the 1963 report on the radio services). From 21 March 1960 to 30 October 1989 Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler presented Der schwarze Kanal (the Black Channel), a weekly programme of about 20 minutes that showed cut extracts from West German television news and political magazines with his own commentary; it ran for 1,519 episodes, and the GDR's own audience surveys, according to later accounts, put its viewership at a few per cent by the 1980s (Holzweißig; the Deutsche Rundfunkarchiv). It was begun in answer to a West German programme, Die rote Optik (1958 to 1960), which had analysed GDR television.

The Berlin Wall. On 15 June 1961 Ulbricht answered a journalist's question about a possible wall in Berlin with the sentence "Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten". Border crossings were closed in the early hours of 13 August 1961. The official GDR term for the barrier was antifaschistischer Schutzwall (anti-fascist protective rampart), and the press called the closure "Grenzsicherungsmaßnahmen" (border-securing measures); the stated reasons included the claims that West Berlin was a base for recruitment of workers, espionage and a NATO attack. Historians record that the closure ended the mass departures that had been under way since 1949 and that Soviet and East German leaders had discussed it for months (Harrison; Hertle; Taylor). The framing appeared on banners, posters and in schools and ceremonies for the next 28 years (a Leipzig newspaper extra distributed on 13 August 1961; a sign beside the new wall, November 1961; a house-community banner in Bitterfeld; a 1986 parade for the 25th anniversary; Pioneers at the border-troops memorial, 1986).

Broadcasts aimed at the GDR, and the response. The same definitions apply to external broadcasting by any state. RIAS (Radio in the American Sector) began in Berlin in 1946 under the US Military Government and was funded by the US government until its merger into Deutschlandradio in 1994; it had a mostly German staff and its schedule combined news, commentary, cultural and entertainment programmes. Deutschlandfunk, a West German federal broadcaster that began in January 1962, and the ARD and ZDF television networks, whose signals covered most of the GDR, were funded by the Federal Republic or by licence fees and, in the case of Deutschlandfunk, had a statutory duty to address all Germans. Nicholas Schlosser's study of RIAS describes its reporting of the strikes of 17 June 1953 and the way US officials and German editors shaped content; the GDR's authorities called it the "Hetzsender" (agitation station) and attributed its reports to US war aims (the 1952 Leipzig display-case panel against RIAS). The GDR's response had several parts: campaigns against listening, such as the FDJ's "Aktion Blitz kontra NATO-Sender" of September 1961 which targeted television antennas pointed west; radio jamming of Western stations, documented for the 1950s and after (the jamming write-up); and Der schwarze Kanal. West Germany and the United States ran a parallel set of Cold War broadcasts, among them Radio Free Europe, as state-funded or state-sponsored persuasion directed at the GDR and its neighbours. The two sides differed in structure: GDR citizens could in practice choose between domestic and foreign media, and most did tune to the West where they could, while West German citizens had far less access to GDR broadcasts and no comparable domestic monopoly existed there. The record on how far listeners believed either side's broadcasts is partial (Schlosser; Meyen).

Campaigns and themes. The state's own output returned to a small number of themes: the "peace" campaigns against West German rearmament and NATO (the 1950 factory boards against remilitarisation; the 1950 Leipzig "Atlantic Pact" float; the 1950 "American beetle" campaign), friendship with the Soviet Union, the National Front's elections (the 1961 election poster pillar), the mass youth rallies (the 1949 FDJ torchlight march) and, in the 1980s, protests against US missiles in Western Europe (Halle, 1983; Suhl, 1983). The archive's definitions fit most clearly: name-calling ("Hetzsender", "Kriegstreiber" for Western leaders), scapegoating (Western "militarists" and "revanchists"), fear appeal (the war-threat posters), manufactured consensus (single-list elections), euphemism (the "protective rampart"), card stacking (the selective editing of Western clips in Der schwarze Kanal) and identity fusion (the party song "Die Partei, die Partei, die hat immer recht").

Timeline

• 21 and 22 April 1946: the KPD and SPD merge into the SED in the Soviet zone; Neues Deutschland first appears on 23 April.
• 23 May 1949: the Federal Republic of Germany is founded.
• 7 October 1949: the German Democratic Republic is founded; Pieck becomes President on 11 October, Grotewohl Minister-President on 12 October.
• 8 February 1950: the Ministry for State Security is created.
• 15 October 1950: first single-list elections to the Volkskammer.
• 17 June 1953: the workers' uprising is put down.
• December 1952 and 1960: regular television begins; Der schwarze Kanal starts on 21 March 1960.
• 15 June 1961: Ulbricht's statement on the wall; 13 August 1961: the border is closed.
• 3 May 1971: Honecker replaces Ulbricht as party leader.
• 21 December 1972: Basic Treaty with the Federal Republic; 18 September 1973: both states join the UN.
• January 1976: Stasi Directive 1/76 sets out "Zersetzung"; 16 November 1976: the singer Wolf Biermann is expatriated.
• 19 January 1989: Honecker says the Wall will stand for 50 or 100 years.
• 7 May 1989: local elections with the published counter-counts; 7 October 1989: the 40th anniversary; 18 October: Honecker is removed.
• 30 October 1989: the last Der schwarze Kanal; 9 November 1989: the border is opened after Schabowski's press conference.
• 18 March 1990: first free Volkskammer election; 3 October 1990: German unification.

How it ended

On 4 September 1989 the Monday demonstrations began again in Leipzig and grew to about 70,000 people on 9 October and about 300,000 on 23 October. After Honecker's removal on 18 October, Egon Krenz became General Secretary and head of state. On 9 November 1989 the Politburo's travel regulations were announced at a press conference by Günter Schabowski, who answered when they took effect with "Das tritt nach meiner Kenntnis ... ist das sofort, unverzüglich"; crowds went to the crossings and the guards opened them that night. The SED gave up its constitutional leading role on 1 December 1989, the Ministry for State Security was renamed in November 1989 and dissolved by January 1990, and a Volkskammer elected freely on 18 March 1990 negotiated unification with the Federal Republic, which took effect on 3 October 1990. The Stasi Records Act of 1991 opened the Stasi files to the people concerned.

Same-standard note

This page uses the same structure and definitions as every other regime page: a technique is listed only where the archive's working definition and a documented example fit, the same technique ids are applied to every regime, and offices and dates are stated without judging the people who held them. The scale and purpose are set out as history, not ranked: a one-party state of about 17 million people, dependent on the Soviet Union, with a political police that recruited a large informant network, a closed border on which people were shot, and a media system in which the party set the line. The US-funded RIAS, the West German broadcasters and the GDR's own foreign and domestic services are described under one definition (state-sponsored broadcasting aimed at another state's audience), and they differ in context: RIAS and Deutschlandfunk operated beside a plural domestic press in the West, whereas the GDR had no independent domestic press. Other regime pages record other systems, each with its own scale, intent and context.

Sources

• Constitution of the German Democratic Republic, 7 October 1949 (Article 6) and 6 April 1968 (Article 1); Border Law of 25 March 1982; Stasi Directive 1/76 (Richtlinie Nr. 1/76 zur Entwicklung und Bearbeitung Operativer Vorgänge), January 1976, in the holdings of the Bundesbeauftragter für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes (BStU, now the Stasi Records Archive of the Bundesarchiv): https://www.stasi-unterlagen-archiv.de
• Mary Fulbrook, The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (Yale University Press, 2005); Hermann Weber, Die DDR 1945 bis 1990 (Oldenbourg, 2012); Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, Endspiel: Die Revolution von 1989 in der DDR (2009) and 17. Juni 1953 (2013); Andreas Malycha and Peter Jochen Winters, Die SED (2009).
• Hope M. Harrison, Driving the Soviets Up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953 to 1961 (Princeton University Press, 2003); Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: 13 August 1961 to 9 November 1989 (2006); Hans-Hermann Hertle, Chronik des Mauerfalls (1996); Hans-Hermann Hertle and Maria Nooke (eds.), Die Todesopfer an der Berliner Mauer 1961 bis 1989 (Ch. Links, 2009; 2017 update by the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam and the Stiftung Berliner Mauer): https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de
• Jens Gieseke, The History of the Stasi: East Germany's Secret Police, 1945 to 1990 (Berghahn, 2014); Klaus Behnke and Jürgen Fuchs (eds.), Zersetzung der Seele (1995).
• Gunter Holzweißig, Die schärfste Waffe der Partei: Eine Mediengeschichte der DDR (Böhlau, 2002); Michael Meyen, Denver Clan und Neues Deutschland: Mediennutzung in der DDR (2003).
• Nicholas J. Schlosser, Cold War on the Airwaves: The Radio Propaganda War against East Germany (University of Illinois Press, 2015); Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv, Der schwarze Kanal programme documentation: https://www.dra.de
• Andre Steiner, The Plans That Failed: An Economic History of the GDR (Berghahn, 2010); Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (2005); Louis Fürnberg, "Lied der Partei" (1949); speeches of Walter Ulbricht (15 June 1961) and Erich Honecker (19 January 1989) as printed in Neues Deutschland, 16 June 1961 and 20 January 1989.

In the archive

Collection objects (52)

Case studies

• Cold War radio jamming (1948 to 1988)
• The Crusade for Freedom: Truth Dollars for a CIA-funded radio, 1950-1971

Learn and Write

• Cold War propaganda: US and Soviet posters, radio and leaflets