Evidence that East German borders guards had a clear ‘license to kill’ anyone who tried to cross the country borders. By the way, I just love how the BBC uses the communist term ‘defectors’. So leaving a totalitarian, communist hell-hole counts as ‘defection’? WTF?
But I digress.
Border guards in East Germany during the Cold War were given clear orders to shoot at attempted defectors, including children, a senior official says.
The seven-page document dated 1 October 1973, was found last week in an archive in the eastern city of Magdeburg, among the papers of an East German border guard.
I am sure it was not the only document in existence. At least there is some tangible evidence now. It reads:
Do not hesitate with the use of a firearm, including when the border breakouts involve women and children, which the traitors have already frequently taken advantage of.
This has not come as a surprise to me. What was a surprise is this has not been officially known, confirmed, understood before. It is as if the societies that went through (and were complicit in) the communist ordeal are reluctant to confront the full horrors, the corruption and destruction that were at their core for decades.
I whole heartedly agree with Marianne Birthler, director of the government office that now manages Stasi archives, when she says.
We have a long way to go in reckoning with the past.
Barely started, I would add.
On a related note this is my reaction to the movie The Lives of Others when I saw it not too long ago.
Fighter pilots, diplomats, national athletes… they ‘defect’. Normal people ‘escape’.
Do not hesitate with the use of a firearm, including when the border breakouts involve women and children, which the traitors have already frequently taken advantage of.
The inversion of morality (and indeed of reality) of this statement is staggering.
Of course there would often be women and children because people would be trying to get their families out. They’ve just “invented” a human-shield where there was none! A lone defector wouldn’t ever get to see (or contact?) his or her family again and I’m sure the DDR would have little compunction in giving those left behind a beastly time – they’d find doing that irresistible.
To concoct this cock and bull to justify shooting children who are running away is breath-taking.
And “Traitors” to who exactly? To Germany? I don’t think so.
We have a long way to go in reckoning with the past.
Well, it’s tough being German. Atoning not just for the Nazis but the Commmies too. I can understand the denial which is worlds away from saying I approve of it.
Adriana, did you post here a while back about the use of novel OCR techniques to re-construct shredded Stasi files? At least some people are trying to achieve that reckoning.
I used the word “defector” as well. That’s what I remember they were routinely called in the 80s. I suspect because of the whole Le Carre aura of Berlin at the time. Lazy, inaccurate, and maybe a little sensationalist but I don’t think there was any malice or even real spin to the term. I suspect the BBC just used it now because it was the word that was used then, however inaccurately.
Reading Perry’s post I realize I made an error. I should’ve said “a lot sensationalist”.
Don’t forget the communist’s trick of putting their fence about 1 km inside their border. This led to many people thinking they had escaped, letting their guard down and getting caught just before crossing into the West. Very nasty.
A defector is someone who USED to work for the regime but then turns against it.
If you never yielded, you were not a defector.
The BBC’s use of the term to describe Hans and Hettie scrambling to get out of hell and into a life speaks volumes, if you ask me.
I don’t know whether I’d read too much into this. ‘Defector’ was the only term I heard applied to someone fleeing a Communist state (particularly when they did so in a high-profile manner), even as their actions were being celebrated.
In much the same way, for most people in the US saying that something is ‘decadent’ is high praise, largely synonymous with saying it’s ‘luxurious’. Most people don’t know what the word means, but as Soviet apparatchiks in movies spent a lot of screen time saying that the US was ‘decadent’, the unlettered came to assume that decadence must be something good: baseball, apple pie, Chevrolet, and decadence.
Today the word is pretty commonly used to advertise expensive chocolate.
The BBC article almost gives the impression that this is a breakthrough in that it provides hitherto undiscovered proof of a shoot to kill order. As far as I understand, there has been written evidence of this for a long time. Use of weapons may officially have been considered ‘an extreme measure’, but their use to stop people leaving the country was clearly authorized. This order, on the other hand, was issued to secret service agents deployed covertly among the border guards and as such is arguably more limited in its practical importance than the well documented evidence which has been available for years. (More details on this here(Link), (in German) or here(Link)).
Egon Krenz may well be claiming that he didn’t know, the evidence to the contrary has been there for a while.
Deleted. Unamused. Banned
This is news? When I was in Berlin last year this was treated as common knowledge. There are surviving watchtowers with ports for machineguns in them for goodness sake. Maybe the BBC thinks this is news because all the people who work there convinced themselves it didn’t happen while the Cold War was still going on…?
Random thoughts.
“Defection” in the US had positive, not negative connotations IME. It was most commonly used to describe high profile cases of those travelling abroad who decided not to return (athletes, artists etc).
Everyday people who were able to leave without official permission were mostly said to ‘escape’ or ‘flee’ and were then ‘refugees’ or ‘escapees’. Those who left with official permission were said to ‘leave’ or ’emigrate’.
And I thought everybody and their dog knew that E-German (and presumably any other Warsaw pact country with a border with a western country) had ‘shoot to kill’ orders.
What special school of life ignorance are BBC writers recruited from?
To say that an ordinary person who never stated any personal loyalty to an oppressive state is “defecting” when they try to leave is insulting, however innocently mistaken the intention of the speaker, because of what the word actually means. It implies that a person is flawed, or lacking in some way, or did not live up to something.
We don’t have to advocate politically correct linguistic bullying in order to point out when innocent people are being verbally slighted. The English language does mutate over time, but accuracy is still accuracy, and casual inaccuracy is still a great way of exercising one’s bigotry.
There was an interesting article in the Times the other day about the political culture at the BBC. I’m surprised it hasn’t been mentioned here at all.
It is my own impression that one of the main reasons the German people are edgy about their history is that so many were involved in the regimes that they both participated in and endured from 1933 to 1989.
The Stasi files, like the Verona archives, contain too much that is enormously embarrassing to those who played the role of collaborator within, and dupe without—the latter a legitimate description of the behavior of the western chattering classes, of which the BBC is a charter member.
The answer to Michael Farris’ question is that the recruitment pool for the BBC, among other elements in the west, has desparately looked the other way for a century, trying to avoid having to acknowledge that the set of ideas they have so heavily invested their intellectual, emotional, and moral energies in is a flaming disaster anywhere it is put into practice.
It is a form of cosmic justice that reality will not be denied.
When collectivism states that anything is possible with the correct will to build the perfect society, and, therefore, women and children running to escape slavery are criminals who must be shot on sight, eventually, regardless of the obfuscations and evasions, ordinary people will come to realize that something monstrous is occurring in their midst.
And then they will tear down that wall…
“however innocently mistaken the intention of the speaker, because of what the word actually means”
Well, until today I never, ever associated the verb defect, or the nouns defection and defector with the noun defect (which cannot be used as a verb).
I still think positively of those who defected (from the Soviet bloc to the west).
“To say that an ordinary person who never stated any personal loyalty to an oppressive state”
Well, one of the things about oppressive states is they’re constantly making people profess loyalty to them (much more often and rigorously than less oppressive states). So pretty much any adult who would be in a position to leave a Soviet bloc country had had to profess loyalty, no matter how dishonestly. To be clear, dishonestly professing loyalty to an oppressive state is no sin.
I doubt that to “most” Americans saying something is “decadent” is praise. To some Americans perhaps (for example in certain parts of L.A.) – but not to “most”. The America that goes to church, gets married and brings up children still exists.
It is a bit like (although not as serious as) the endless B.B.C. reports about how G.D.R. stuff is now “fashionable” in Germany, with “Germans” wishing the G.D.R. still existed.
Some Germans – not most Germans.
“I doubt that to “most” Americans saying something is “decadent” is praise”
Not in the traditional meaning, no. But it’s undergoing a rapid semantic shift, where it’s coming to mean something like ‘luxurious’.
A nice example is here, where it’s used to describe a not-very-decadent vacation in New Zealand, of all place (not high on most people’s list of decadent hotspots:
http://www.luxuryvacationsnz.com/Rejuvenation_Tours/RINZ.html
I believe that in east Germany they had to ignore some anti-government demonstrations as only Stasi-stooges turned up. Ordinary folk wisely stayed away.
Anna Funder’s tremendous book “Stasiland” tells a remarkable story of those times and is well worth reading.
I spent quite some time at the US border outpost OP Alpha(Link), participating in patrols along the “grenze”, when I served with A Troop, 1/11th ACR. You would regularly hear the crackle of gunfire (especially at night), and sometimes the sound of mines exploding. Hardly the state of affairs if they were not ordered to shoot.
We thought it would be there forever. November 9, 1989, was one of the most emotional days of my life.
They did shoot people trying to escape. There are many recorded cases. There are many victims.
So, what’s new now ? Did someone think that those people were shot without any orders, and now only were the orders discovered ?
For god’s sake! People were shot and died. What’s all this nonsense about “newly” discovered orders ? I don’t get it.
I think the issue is that they were having a terrible time proving it in Federal German courts. If I’m not mistaken, what Egon Krenz was actually sentenced for was ordering killings at the border, and the reason why his sentence was so light (aside from the government trying to avoid “Siegerjustiz” impressions in the press I guess) was because they had such a hard time getting hard evidence that he had, in fact, ever ordered anyone shot. Documents like this would have been very helpful if present in 1990.
It’s nothing new, the document was already known in 1998, but it’s good that it got more publicity now.
Of course we all knew about that. I am surprised that is hailed as a significant discovery.
until today I never, ever associated the verb defect, or the nouns defection and defector with the noun defect (which cannot be used as a verb). I still think positively of those who defected (from the Soviet bloc to the west).
Then you may want to avoid offending them, by using more accurate language.
“To say that an ordinary person who never stated any personal loyalty to an oppressive state” Well, one of the things about oppressive states is they’re constantly making people profess loyalty to them (much more often and rigorously than less oppressive states).
Forced statements of loyalty are different than genuine allegiances.
“Then you may want to avoid offending them, by using more accurate language.”
Such as?
I’ve defected to an American company in a holiday town on the South Coast.
My pension has defected to an American fund.(When they’re all falling it may as well be American).
The term “defector” implies betrayal, and is the terminology coined and used by the communists. We should not adopt their terminology and ideas.
Lamentably, this is part of a widespread phenomenon: many communist and marxist memes, ideas and terms are a routine part of what you fine in the media and academic papers.
Jacob, again, what do you propose instead?
I’m sure that the communists _intended_ the coinage to imply betrayal. But they intended lots of things that didn’t really work out. I refuse to let the communists define my word usage.
As actually used, during the cold war I never heard or read the word defector used by westerners in a dismissive or negative way (when describing those defecting from the Soviet bloc to the west). It was always a positive word and often tinged with heroism and admiration. The fact that that’s no what the original coiners intended is beside the point.
If anything, I don’t like the word ‘defector’ used of those who went to the to the dark (communist) side.
michael,
Here is the definition from Wikipedia:
The term defector is usually used in time of war, to denote a soldier who went over to the enemy, a turncoat.
I never heard the term “defector” used in a positive context, unless it is an enemy soldier who defects to your side…
michael farris, I was raised with a similar attitude towards ‘Soviet defectors’, and East German, etc. when the defectors we heard of were de facto anti-communist. It really is a case of us turning a pejorative into a positive symbol. This happens a lot. I think even the term ‘Yankee’ started out as a pejorative.
However, your’s and my view of the word is a very American one, and even here is fading.
I now try to catch myself and use the word groups ‘escape’, ‘escaping’ and ‘escapee’, etc. It implies ‘as from a prison or a trap’. But sometimes I still slip and use cold war terms.
I am a defector from the People’s Republic of Kanada. I’m a frostback here stealing American jobs.
I do not know whether “Yankee” started out as pejorative (although it was by the time of unpleasantness of 1861-1865). but it has certainly become a broader term.
I believe “Yankee” started out as meaning one of the inhabitants of the six States of New England – and even there it was limited (for example the Roman Catholic Irish part of Boston would not have normally been called “Yankees”) then it came to mean people from the North (as in the division between North and South) – and now it is sometimes used to mean citizens of the United States generally.
It must be really strange for a person from, for example, Alabama to be called a “Yankee”.
Oddly enough George Walker Bush is a Yankee.
Born, and then sent to school and university in Connecticut (as in Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur”) – although he has spent a lot of time in Texas (hence the accent – although it is odd that it is a stronger accent than that of his brother who was actually born in Texas and went to university there).
The Bush family are certainly Yankee – Essex England originally, and then New England.
Although their Anglicanism (Episcopalianism) is not Yankee – New England was associated with what the English call the nonconformists (more Protestant than the Anglicans).
Indeed George Walker’s move to a more Protestant style of worship – so often associated with his Texas roots, could be seen as a return to “old New England” traditions.