ABSTRACT
The Russians liberated the east of Germany from Hitler in 1945, but it was a liberation which, for many Germans, was experienced as injustice. While the Soviets used denazification statutes in the main to arrest National Socialist functionaries, they also arrested quite a number of Germans, including women and even children, who were in no way guilty of any involvement, administrative or otherwise, in National Socialism. Many Germans were held for years without trial, or tried without even a semblance of fairness, and sentenced to extremely high sentences, often involving labour. Some were deported to the Soviet Union to labour camps. Increasingly, as the Soviet Union tightened its ideological grip on the Eastern zone, political opponents of sovietization from the ranks of the Social and Christian Democrats, but also ‘renegade’ communists, were sentenced and incarcerated. Some unfortunate individuals, such as the Social Democrat Robert Zeiler, were imprisoned under the National Socialists and the Soviets. The Soviets held at least 130,000 Germans on the basis of denazification directives in so-called Special Camps, ten of them in all. Conditions there were appalling. At least 43,000 people died, including 700 who were sentenced to death by Soviet military tribunals (Niethammer 1999:109ff.). Illnesses such as typhus, dysentery and tuberculosis, resulting not least from undernourishment and from the unhygienic condition of the camps, accounted for many deaths. When the last three camps were dissolved in 1950, over 3,000 internees were transferred to the Saxon town of Waldheim, where draconian sentences, including 24 death sentences, were imposed by East German courts (Werkentin 1998:12-16). Prison sentences were subsequently served in GDR prisons. Life after internment in the Special Camps was not easy. The subject of the Special Camps was taboo in the GDR. The truth hardly corresponded to the propagated image of the Soviet ‘brothers-incombat’.
