Bärbel Heinrich: She was imprisoned for helping people escape the GDR
BY ANNAMARIA OLSSON
The article was originally published by Baltic Worlds, a scholarly journal of the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies at Södertörn University.
„I did time in Hohenschönhausen, if that means anything to you. I helped people escape the GDR. We got caught. You and me should talk sometime.”
I had just finished a presentation about my NGO’s refugee engagement when a striking lady with strawberry-blonde curls and neat, Marlene Dietrich eyebrows, who had moved restlessly around the room until my right side was clear of small-talkers, put a hand on my arm.
A couple of weeks later Bärbel and Wolfgang Heinrich, both in their 70s and convicted refugee helpers, met up with me at the S-Bahn station Hohenschönhausen in the former East Berlin. Wolfgang came across as warm if slightly introverted, yet comfortable in the role of a loyal ally striding at his wife’s side, while Bärbel, the extrovert, chattered away and held forth about this and that.
It was the first of many meetings, forming a relationship that continued over the years. The timing couldn’t have been more symbolic as the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall was approaching, and the media was buzzing with accounts of those earth-shattering days in 1989.
The November wind was biting as we approached the notorious Stasi prison Hohenschönhausen where both of them had been detained while awaiting trial. The charges involved offenses against Section 105, subversive human trafficking. Their motives for getting involved lay on different pinpoints of the spectrum between private and political. On 13 June 1961, when news of the Berlin Wall’s construction was broadcast, the then fourteen-year-old Bärbel was with her foster family in Sweden together with her sister. Her mother was in a residential health facility in West Germany and her brother was in the East, while her father was at home in West Berlin. The family reassembled at home in West Berlin in the end, but all their other relatives ended up in the GDR. It would be ten years before they saw each other again when they got permission to go to a wedding in Dresden in 1973.
“I’d seen a bit of the East before, when I’d taken the train to Sweden through the transit section,” said Bärbel. “Dresden was something else. Unimaginably depressing and grey. It was called Tal der Ahnungslosen, valley of the clueless, as they couldn’t get Western TV channels there. My relatives used to come on holiday to East Berlin just to watch TV. They couldn’t tear themselves away!”
At the wedding, she got into conversation with a cousin who said she wanted to escape. There was also a man there who discreetly enquired whether Bärbel would consider helping people get out. “I said yes without batting an eyelid or thinking of the potential consequences.”
IN THE END it wasn’t relatives but complete strangers Bärbel was going to help flee. The same was true of Wolfgang, although his motives were different.
“I was 25 when I was caught, and I’d recently finished military service. The whole logic of the army is based on the idea of an enemy. Which meant Russians and the East. There was ideological brainwashing about everything to do with communism. While I was in the army I got involved in a group that carried out special missions.”
“So it was a kind of state-organized operation?” I asked.
“I didn’t realize until later what kind of enormous machinery there must have been behind it all. We smuggled out academics, a well-known physicist, for example. I think there must have been agreements. Otherwise some of our actions would have been impossible to carry out.”
Bärbel, meanwhile, had met a group of students organized into more grassroots-level assistance shortly after the wedding.
The set-up was always the same. West Berliners with entry permits to the East were given the addresses of GDR citizens who wanted to leave — individuals to whom they either passed on the time and place for transit, or drove out to the transit sections themselves. The transit sections were the corridors of regulated mobility for goods and people to move in and out between East Germany, its neighbors and West Berlin. Foreign and Western vehicles had to pay road tolls, under strict instructions to cross the section more or less in one go, unless they had an urgent need to answer the call of nature, get a snack or petrol. Brief stops during which GDR citizens could, with careful planning, hop into a car boot or hide between goods and packages. Unlike traffic between the border crossings in Berlin, lorries in the transit sections were only sporadically stopped.
“I managed to get ten people out. We failed with the last two, and they ended up in prison like us,” Bärbel said.
In 1975, aged 28, she was taken to Hohenschönhausen, little suspecting that she was about to spend the following 28 months in prison. Wolfgang, then 25 years old, still a stranger to her, had already served some of his 33 months.
“You know, in those days the prison wasn’t marked on the map, because officially it didn’t exist and only the most loyal Stasi and party people lived in the area.”
Hohenschönhausen was a well-kept secret and during its life- time over 11,000 people who in different ways were considered a threat to the foundations, order and existence of the GDR were imprisoned here. Even though the GDR’s constitution of 7 October 1949 stated that every citizen had the right to emigrate, the new state was quick to start persecuting people intending to find a new life or future other than the one offered by the ‘workers’ and farmers’ state’. Before the Berlin Wall was built to stop the ‘flight from the Republic’ — Republikflücht — 2.5 million Germans had managed to escape to the West. In 1979, attempted escape could mean up to two years in prison, and in “serious cases” up to eight. 9,196 people were charged with the offense of flight from the Republic in 1988.
Continue reading the article on the website of Baltic World: https://balticworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/BW_2023_60-70_OLSSON.pdf