A TALE OF TWO WOMEN

And Liberation As Oppression

My first visit to West Berlin in 1981 included a heavy programme of visiting places with links to German history, including the many dark places. One of these was the prison at Plötzensee where, during the Nazi period, over 2,000 opponents of the regime were executed, most by beheading. The chill in the execution chamber remained with me for days, I tried to put the damp floor and the whitewashed walls out of my mind but could not. And then I forgot about the experience, until now.

It was a tweet I saw by chance that introduced me to the story of Käthe Tucholla. The tweet showed a GDR postage stamp from 1963 depicting Tucholla playing hockey. She was born Käthe Scheffler in 1910 in Berlin and was a keen sportswoman, playing hockey for the Sparta Lichtenberg. It was through sport that she met the footballer Felix Tucholla, twelve years her senior and a member of the KPD. Together they worked in an anti-Nazi resistance group, publishing and distributing illegal pamphlets, sheltering comrades who were sought by the Gestapo, helping too Soviet agents who had been parachuted into Germany. They were arrested in May 1942 and so began the oppressive journey that was to lead to Plötzensee.

The second woman in this piece also died by beheading, but in a different state, in a different place. I did not know, could not know, that as I visited East Berlin for the first time in May 1981, the last man to be executed in the GDR was awaiting execution. This was Werner Teske, a Stasi officer who had become disillusioned with socialism and offered his services to the Federal Republic. He was executed by a bullet in the head “unerwarteter Nahschuss” or an “unexpected shot from close range”, as they called it. The condemned prisoner had to walk into a room where the executioner lurked behind the door and shot him in the back of the head from close range. This sounds, or may sound, less grisly than beheading but whether it was in reality is a matter of opinion. He was the last to die by judicial execution although the extra-judicial killings at the Wall and other frontier fortifications continued until 1989. The GDR formally abolished the death penalty in 1987, the only Soviet bloc state to do so before the collapse of 1989.

The GDR actually used the death penalty sparingly in comparison with other Eastern Boc state, and after 1970, executions became infrequent, and usually for political crimes, or, as the GDR authorities considered it to be in several cases, treason. The peak decade for executions, therefore, of killing as a means of cementing political control, was the 1950s. In the early years several of those executed were Nazi war criminals. Apart from a handful of murderers, the others were executed for political crimes or, as the GDR may have described it, treason. Two of them were women, the only two women executed in the GDR

Susanne Krüger was 29 at the time of her death. She, too, had been a convinced Communist, she too was married to a man committed to what he saw as the ideals of socialism. Bruno Krüger was a Stasi officer in Schwerin, a part, therefore, of an apparatus of oppression not dissimilar from the one that brought the Tuchollas to their deaths. Perhaps it was the awareness of this paradox that started him on the path of disillusionment with the political system that was being constructed in the GDR, a path that led him to defect across the still open border to West Berlin, where Susanne eventually joined him, bringing their small son. Early in 1955 they were separately kidnapped and returned to the GDR, Susanne after agreeing to meet a former colleague from Schwerin for a drink, after which she was bundled into a taxi which took her back into the East where Stasi officers were waiting to arrest her. She and Bruno were executed on the sae day, both in Dresden, both by guillotine. There is a shocking sequel to this. Their son was placed for adoption with a politically loyal family, where he grew up knowing nothing of his true identity and the awful fate of his biological parents, until, in middle age, finding in his Stasi file a farewell letter from his mother which never reached him.

Two women linked by ideological affiliations, by nationality, by courage. What else do their storis, very different and shockingly similar tell us about twentieth century Communism? It used to seem to me when I was younger strange that the leaders of the GDR some of whom had suffered personally at the hands of the Nazis, (Honecker himself spent much of the Nazi period in prison) and could never be described as opportunists could apparently view the brutal methods the socialist state employed with equanimity. Then I realised that a movement that values loyalty and commitment above all else, that sees the implementation of socialism as historical necessity, cannot tolerate those it sees as traitors, those who are stand in the way of historical inevitability. It is as if the iron law of historical materialism is destroying their enemies, and they are the means by which it happens, as if they were denying responsibility by denying agency.

At the same time it was the denials, the ideological sleights of hand that made Communism unviable. Ruthlessness enabled the taking of power and its consolidation but could never provide a means of building a viable socialist society in the long term. None of this is to deny the heroism of Käthe and Felix Tucholla, any more than to deny the courage of the Krügers as they turned their backs on the monster they had played a small role in creating. It is does, however, raise questions for contemporary aspirations to build a socialist society. For if naked power politics cannot bring viable socialism it is not clear that socialism is achievable by democratic means other. Corporate capture of the liberal state is not a new phenomenon, and neither is the potential of populism to hollow out democratic institutions, although the latter is gaining on salience, including in the Federal Republic of Germany, a state that once considered it had constructed constitutional firewalls against political extremism. Next year’s Bundestag elections may be a sobering experience for all those of us who still hold to liberal values. All this would seem eerily familiar to Käthe Tucholla who lived through the chaotic final years of the Weimar Republic, although without having been disillusioned with the Communist alternative. The short life of Susanne Krüger, herself old enough to have experienced National Socialism and the devastating impact of military defeat, was to show how quickly disillusionment could come, even to someone whose life experiences would have convincingly argued that socialism was the only future for humanity. The lives and deaths of these brave women still have much to teach us. May they rest in peace

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