East Germans Face Their Accusers (original) (raw)
Magazine|East Germans Face Their Accusers
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/12/magazine/east-germans-face-their-accusers.html
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- April 12, 1992
Credit...The New York Times Archives
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April 12, 1992
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Section 6, Page
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From the moment Vera Wollenberger left home at the age of 18, she was the prototype of an East German rebel. Her father was an officer in the oppressive State Security police, the Stasi, and she fled from him to begin an idealistic life of social activism. She believed in the promise of Communism and joined the ruling party, but was expelled after a few years for her liberal views. In 1982 she began protesting the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles on East German soil, and a year later she helped organize a human rights group called the Church From Below. She was constantly harassed by the Stasi, once imprisoned, and fired from her job at a Government research institute. By maintaining her principles despite such pressure, Wollenberger emerged as a heroine of the movement that brought down Communist rule, and in 1990, at the age of 38, won election to the Bonn Parliament.
In Bonn, she helped shape a remarkable new law, aimed at giving Stasi victims a measure of justice. Under the law's provisions, the vast and long-secret Stasi archive was opened on Jan. 2. Each victim is now entitled to read his or her entire file, including reports submitted by spies and informers. From these files emerge secrets that have shaken Germany and shattered many lives, including Wollenberger's.
"What I have had to go through," she wrote after learning what was in her file, "I wouldn't wish on anyone, not even my worst enemy."
Wollenberger's file contained reports submitted by more than 60 different Stasi agents and informers. The most complete reports, from an informer code-named Donald, included full accounts of her anti-Government activities, as well as intimate details of her private life.
Who was Donald? Vera Wollenberger's reading of the file left only one possible, terrible conclusion. With what she later called "awful agony," she realized that the man who had betrayed her to the Stasi was her own husband, Knud, the father of her two young sons.
When she confronted Knud, he swore "by our children" that he was innocent. The file, however, proved he was lying. The Wollenbergers separated -- they are now divorced -- and Knud moved into an apartment without a phone in a small Thuringian town.
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