Revolution 1989 (54 page)

It was not clear that the appeal would be heeded. The army was still preparing to move on to the streets. Hans Illing was an NCO with an infantry regiment based at the main army barracks on the edge of Leipzig. By early afternoon the men knew that they had been ordered to take up positions by Leipzig railway station, directly on the route of the demonstration. It was his job to hand out weapons from the armoury. ‘I issued rubber truncheons and shields and helmets, then gave the officers their handguns - 9mm Makarov pistols, with live ammunition. Each officer got at least two magazines . . . Then the company commander came and gave the order to hand out Kalash nikovs which were loaded on to the lorries . . . There were pretty bad scenes, with young men lying on their beds and crying because they knew their wives and parents would be on the demonstration. So feelings were not good.’ He knew his mother and stepfather would probably be on the march. ‘I rang my parents to warn them that they shouldn’t go out that day . . . because it was so dangerous, there’d be live rounds fired.’
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More than seventy thousand demonstrators had gathered outside the Nikolaikirche by around five p.m. ‘and the atmosphere was extraordinarily tense’, said one of them, Aram Radomski. ‘None of us knew what was going to happen, whether the shooting would begin. We just knew that if we were not there, it would be a sign that we had given up, which we could not do.’
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In Leipzig Party headquarters, they were still waiting for instructions from Berlin. ‘We rang repeatedly. We told them of our appeal and we tried to persuade the bosses but they gave no immediate answer,’ said the Leipzig Party’s second Secretary, Roland Wötzel. ‘We got hold of Egon Krenz personally. He said he would call back. So we waited. But things were getting absolutely critical. The march was reaching the railway station, where most of the army forces were concentrated, and still we had no instructions. Finally Hackenburg gave the order to pull the troops back and let the demonstrators past peacefully. It was touch and go.’ At the same time General Gerhard Stassenburg, the Leipzig police chief, told his men to let the march go ahead without interference and only to shoot in self-defence.
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Egon Krenz continually maintained later that he was the saviour of the day and it was his decision to let the demonstration proceed. He spoke to the Soviet Ambassador, Kochemasov, who advised him to let the march go ahead. But he did not call the Leipzig Party officials back until about half an hour
after
they had already made the decision not to intervene. He hesitated briefly when he spoke to Hackenburg, but then said he had made absolutely the correct decision and the Party approved. This was the turning point, when the people knew that the regime lacked the will or the strength to maintain its power.

 

Erich Honecker survived in place for another week. Plotters had been sharpening a stiletto, but it was the demonstrators in Leipzig who sealed his fate. There had been no public criticism of him for eighteen years. Now there was a tide of complaints within the ruling Party that came from all directions. The officially approved Writers’ Union called for ‘revolutionary changes’, insisting that what must be feared ‘is not reform, but fear of reform’. Its President, Hermann Kant, one of the foremost East German Communists, wrote an open letter calling on the leadership to show ‘self-criticism’. The Communist Youth paper,
Junge Welt
, took a giant step by printing it. He urged Honecker to talk to the opposition and ‘grasp the nettle, even if we do not like the individuals involved, or, as Communists, feel ill at ease with some of their ideas’. The mayors of Dresden and Leipzig called for dialogue. Honecker was unmoved. ‘Everything will collapse if we give an inch,’ he said.

Why did it take so long for Honecker’s colleagues to turn against him? There had been moves to oust him the previous February, but the plot fell apart. Planning chief Gerhard Schürer, one of the most powerful of the oligarchs in the regime, discussed removing Honecker with Krenz, who seemed like the only obvious successor acceptable to a majority of the old guard. ‘I’ll make you a suggestion,’ Schürer had said. ‘I’m an old man and in any case close to retirement. I’ll leave some time soon. I shall demand that Honecker . . . be removed. Of course you can’t intervene and say “I want to be General Secretary”. But I can propose you. I’m prepared to do this because otherwise the GDR will go
kaputt.’
The two men discussed it for three hours at Schürer’s country retreat in Thuringia, Dierhagen. But finally Krenz said he was not prepared to unseat ‘my foster father and political teacher. I can’t do it. There’ll have to be a biological solution to this problem.’
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Krenz could have made a move while Honecker was ill, but he felt constrained. He decided to wait until after the fortieth anniversary celebrations ‘which were so desperately important to him’ were over. This was not because Krenz was a sensitive and caring soul. He was deeply ambitious. His caution was because he was unsure of his own strength. Now he realised there could be no delay. He could not afford to wait for the ‘biological solution’ offered by Honecker’s death, which could take many years. He had to act now. ‘There were too many things that can happen by accident,’ Schabowski said. ‘At a demonstration someone throws a stone, it hits a soldier, another soldier gets scared or trigger-happy and then the shooting starts. If that happens I thought we could all say goodbye - they’d come at us Party men and we’ll all be hanging from trees.’
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The other plotters were Siegfried Lorenz, Party boss in Karl-Marx-Stadt and a crucial, though unexpected supporter, the Stasi chief Erich Mielke, who was looking out for his own position. The head of the East German trade unions, Harry Tisch, a powerful man in the state, was behind the coup. So was the Prime Minister, Willi Stoph. Tisch visited Moscow and tipped off Gorbachev’s entourage that the move was imminent. Gorbachev’s immediate reaction was extraordinary for a Soviet leader. He told Shevardnadze, but no other Communist magnates in Moscow. Nor did he consult any other leading figures in the ‘socialist commonwealth’. According to his chief adviser on Germany, his first thought was to discuss it with Kohl and Bush.
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On Monday 16 October, most of the country’s top Communists were in a meeting room at the Party headquarters watching live footage on West German TV from Leipzig, where this time a vast crowd of at least 120,000 people, no longer scared that violence would be used against them, demonstrated. This was one of a dozen protests in other towns and cities throughout the GDR that evening. They were chanting ‘Gorby, Gorby’, ‘Wir sind das Volk’ and - for the first time that Honecker was aware - ‘Down with the Wall’. Honecker repeatedly said, ‘Now, surely something has to be done.’ The army Chief of Staff, Colonel-General Fritz Streletz, refused point-blank to bring out his men against peaceful demonstrators. ‘We can’t do anything. We will let the whole thing take its course peacefully.’
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The leadership was due to meet at the Party headquarters the next morning, Tuesday 17 October. At dawn, Mielke rang the Stasi officer in charge of security in the building and ordered him to make sure that the main meeting room was surrounded by reliable men. He did not want Honecker to summon his own personal bodyguards at the time his political assassination was taking place. The plotters had planned everything to the last detail. At ten, while the meeting was coming to order, Stoph began. ‘Please, General Secretary, Erich, I suggest a new first item be placed on the agenda. It is the release of Erich Honecker from his duties as General Secretary, and the election of Egon Krenz in his place.’

Honecker expected none of this. He thought he still had time left. But he did not allow his face to change expression. As if nothing had happened, he simply ignored the Prime Minister’s comment and said ‘Let’s get on with the agenda.’ Several voices protested. Then he cleared his throat and said, ‘All right then, let everyone have their say.’ First he called the old guard, people he expected would support him. But one by one they all turned against him. They had done his bidding for years, obediently. Now, not a single voice spoke up for him. When the vote came it was unanimous. In the time-honoured way of Communist Parties, he performed his final duty and put his hand up to vote against himself. The industry chief Mittag and propaganda chief Hermann were ousted at the same time and Krenz was unanimously elected General Secretary.

Without saying a word Honecker left the room and returned to his office to make two phone calls. The first was to the Soviet Ambassador: ‘Hello, Comrade Honecker here,’ he said. ‘I want to tell you straight away . . . that it has been decided to relieve me of my duties. The decision was unanimous.’ A few minutes later he called his wife. ‘Well, it has happened.’ He collected some personal items and then asked his driver to take him to his villa in Wandlitz. He never entered the building again.
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East Berlin, Tuesday 31 October 1989

 

THE PLOTTERS WHO REMOVED Erich Honecker from power believed they would earn the people’s gratitude and respect. They were badly mistaken. The new Party boss, Egon Krenz, had for many years been the second most hated man in the country. In the forty-six days he was to survive in office, he achieved the distinction of reaching top spot. The first big demonstration calling for his resignation took place on the evening that he replaced Honecker. Though he now attempted to present himself as a reformer, a man who had always wanted liberal changes in the GDR, nobody believed him. They remembered that he had been crown prince in the GDR for many years, and behaved like one. They remembered that he was the man who just a few months ago had praised the clearly fraudulent election results as an example of democracy in action. Many East Germans still had a mental picture of him in Beijing, which he visited soon after the Tiananmen Square massacre, shaking hands with Deng Xiaoping and praising China’s firm action to quell unrest.

Jokes about him quickly began to appear in Berlin: ‘Q: What’s the difference between Krenz and Honecker ? A: Krenz has a gall bladder.’ Crude caricatures of him were carried on protest marches, many showing him as the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, with the caption ‘Why, Grandmother, what big teeth you have.’ The satirist Wolf Biermann, as usual, summed him up pithily as ‘a walking invitation to flee the Republic’. Igor Maximichev, the Soviet Union’s Deputy Ambassador to the GDR, had dealt with him frequently. ‘Egon Krenz was . . . devoid of any charismatic qualities. He wasn’t accepted by the people. He wasn’t attractive. He couldn’t find the words to speak to the people because he only spoke in Party jargon.’
¹
He showed what he was made of in his first address as the leader. ‘We . . . have no other interest than that of the people . . . Our historical optimism results from the knowledge of the ineluctability of the victory of socialism founded by Marx, Engels, Lenin.’ East Germans’ response was to take to the streets in even greater numbers, to call for Krenz to go; for the right to travel and for the Berlin Wall to come down. During the week after he succeeded Honecker more than a million people took part in a series of demonstrations in towns and cities throughout East Germany.

This was the first day Krenz heard the full truth about the catastrophic financial position in which Honecker had left the country. The facts had been hidden from all but the regime’s economics tsar, Günter Mittag, the freebooting financier Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski, Stasi chief Erich Mielke and the State Planning chief Gerhard Schürer. Now the rest of the leadership were told. They were left in a state of shock. Bankruptcy was staring them in the face within a few days. East Germany did not possess enough cash to pay interest payments due on foreign loans and was likely to default. A top secret ‘Report on the Economic Situation of the GDR, With Consequences’ was presented to Party chieftains by Schürer, who now revealed the unvarnished figures of the national accounts. The previous May Schürer had tried to persuade Honecker to think seriously about the debt crisis - ‘or we will become insolvent’ soon. But the leader refused to confront it, saying the time was not right. Both he and Mielke told him ‘to make sure you shut up about this’. Schürer remained silent, as he was ordered to do, but now he spoke up and declared that in truth the country was insolvent already.
²

All the propaganda about the GDR’s success was based on lies, the report said. The stark reality was that under ‘actually existing socialism’, nearly 60 per cent of East Germany’s entire industrial base could be written off as scrap and productivity in factories and mines was nearly 50 per cent behind the West’s. Most damning of all, debt had increased twelvefold in the last fifteen years to DM 123 billion and was rising at around DM 10 billion a year - ‘extraordinarily high for a country like the GDR’, said Schürer. He pointed out the illegal decep tions that were required to hide the facts from Western governments and banks, the short-term loans taken out to pay interest on long-term credits. If the financial markets realised how brazenly the GDR was lying about its assets, loans from the West would cease instantly. It was probably too late for the country to stop borrowing. Schürer said that if some radical action to reduce debt had been taken five years earlier, that might have helped. But now things had gone too far. ‘Just to avoid further indebtedness would mean a lowering next year of living standards by 25 per cent to 30 per cent, and make the GDR ungovernable. ’
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Krenz and the others looked aghast at this. Their chances of political survival were slim at best. That would reduce to zero if one of their first actions was to announce painful austerity measures. But the immediate problem was critical: how to raise the money to meet the next interest payment? ‘It is absolutely necessary to negotiate with the FRG government financial assistance of two to three billion Marks as a short-term loan beyond the current limits,’ they were told. If they could not raise it within two weeks there ‘could be a damaging confrontation with the International Monetary Fund’. Once that happened, the GDR’s reputation as a creditworthy nation would disappear. Schürer and his team of economists came up with a bold and desperate idea: in effect, they proposed to ‘sell’ the Berlin Wall and use it as a bargaining chip for more loans. ‘We should put the currently existing form of the border on the table,’ the report said. It was an extension of the sale of people to the West, which the regime had been doing for years. The West Germans may be prepared to go along with it, Krenz was told. Reunification would be ruled out in any negotiations, or even a confederation, but there could be promises of much more co-operation on a range of issues. ‘In order to make the Federal Republic conscious of the GDR’s serious intentions, it must be declared that such conditions could be created, as early as this century, that will make the border that exists between the two German states superfluous.’
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