[LINK] "The last man in East Germany"

[rfmcdonald]

Alex Harrowell has a post up at A Fistful of Euros describing the last odd convulsions of East Germany's state police as the East German state slowly came apart in late 1989.

Uwe Hädrich had been arrested for attempting to emigrate on the 13th of September, 1989. The TV could only be tuned from outside the cell, so he could only watch official TV; of course, the famous press conference with Günther Schabowski was very official indeed. But that didn’t affect the charges against him. The wall gone and the borders open, he remained detained, accused of espionage and illegally crossing the border, subject to constant interrogation and solitary confinement. (Hädrich was an executive with the DDR’s consumer goods system, and therefore presumably a show-trial candidate.) Eventually, on the 7th of December, the new Modrow government announced that there were no political prisoners in East Germany.

Except for Herr Hädrich, of course. He was suddenly released that afternoon, as if he’d been forgotten about in all the excitement and only now remembered. According to the files, he was the last political prisoner. He went home; back in jail, the Minister of Security himself, General Erich Mielke, had just been booked in and assigned the very cell Hädrich had left.

But the revolution, the emptying of the jails, and the mere arrest of its chief didn’t stop normal operations at the Stasi. At precisely eight o’clock the next morning, a Stasi case officer called on Hädrich to ask him questions about whether he had contacted the Federal German embassy in Hungary. Every day, the case officer arrived to quiz Hädrich, and presumably wrote up his findings back at the office.