The GDR in the Context of Stalinist
Show Trials and Anti-Semitism in
Eastern Europe 1948-54
Paul O’Doherty (University of Nottingham)
Introduction
In the period 1948-54 a large number of show trials were staged in the
East European countries which were under Soviet domination. The German
Democratic Republic did not escape this wave of trials, though they were
staged on a much smaller scale there than elsewhere.
Historians writing on the show trials do not seem agreed on whether the
GDR should be included in ‘Eastern Europe’. Lendvai, in 1971, for example,
merely comments that ‘in a more distant past’ East Germany had also had
‘anti-Semitism as an official policy, as a witch hunt’, and then goes on to
deal with all the countries where ‘Zionism’ was a charge made against any
defendants, but leaves out the GDR.’ Hodos, on the other hand, who outlines
the trialswithout concentratingspecificallyon their anti-Semiticaspects, looks
at all seven countries allied to the Soviet Union, including the GDR.’
It is no coincidence that a study which concentrates on the anti-Semitic
aspects of the trials should leave out the GDR, despite Lendvai’s claim about
the ‘more distant past’. Whilst there was a high proportion of defendants of
Jewish origin in many of the trials staged, especially in Czechoslovakia,
Hungary and Poland, this was true of only a small number of cases in the
GDR. The criteria for selecting victims may initially appear to have been
arbitrary,sincethe defendants includedJews and nonJews, SocialDemocrats,
communists and various others. I shall argue, however, that specific criteria
were indeed applied, and that, in the GDR at least, they had little or nothing
to do with Jewishness. ‘Zionism’was a ‘convenient’ if insensitive additional
charge levelled against defendants who happened to be of Jewish origin.
Hodos does not sufficiently differentiate between the circumstances of the
trials in the GDR and in other countries, other than to say that the GDR
was last in line for show trials and that Stalin’sdeath interrupted proceedings,
with the result that they were over almost before they had begun. He does
’ Paul Lendval, Anti-Semitism Without Jews (Garden City, 1971).
George H. Hodos, Show Trials (New York, 1987).
German History Vol. 10 No. 3 01992 The German History Society
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The GDR in the Context of Stalinist Show Trials 303
claim, however, that because Stalin ruled only part of Germany he was more
likely to show restraint in the GDR than in other countries.
In relation to the charges of ‘Zionism’,the fundamental differences between
the showtrials in the GDR and those in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary
were dictated by a number of factors, connected with the GDR’s status as
only part of a country, with Germany’s recent past, and with the SED
leadership’sattitude to the Jewish minority. Importantly, although the GDR
was under Stalinist rule at this time, and thus subject to similar pressures from
Moscow as the three countries mentioned, it was also part of Germany with
a resulting cultural opening to the West denied its Eastern neighbours.
Crucially, its leaders’ awareness of Germany’s recent past and the crimes
against the Jews made them abhor the anti-Semitism which, as we shall see,
was used by the ruling communists in neighbouring states to provoke prostate
sentiment or, at least, to channel dissent away from the state, In
effect, anti-Semitismwassemi-officialpolicy in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and
Poland at this time and for many years after, whereas in the GDR (apart,
possibly, from a brief period in early 1953)to be anti-Semitic was to be anti-
state.
This article will also argue that the original purpose of the trials themselves
was not anti-Semitic, although in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland the
purges and trials became so inextricably linked with anti-Semitic actions and
outbursts on the part of prominent public figures that the distinction became
meaningless. The trials were primarily aimed at consolidating Stalin’s hold
over the communist parties in his new satellite states, by applyingthe principle
divide et imperu. Thelackof original anti-Semiticpurpose alsomade it possible
for the GDR to prevent, at least partly, the trials there from taking an overtly
anti-Semitic direction. All in all, the GDR was probably the state affected
least by the show trials at this time.
Other East European Countries
Starting in 1948,every singlecountry in which Stalin’swrit ran staged a series
of show trials, right up to, and in some cases beyond, the dictator’s death. The
chronological sequence, by country, was approximately as follows: Albania,
Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union, GDR.
Why Stalin should have chosen to stage show trials at this time seems
reasonably clear. By instituting a reign of terror, he was able to divide
communist parties, some of which were quite independent-minded, eliminate
those who were potential opponents of absolute Soviet power, and at the
same time strike fear into the minds of those who survived. Initially, the
victims were those who fell into a number of ‘suspect’ categories: those
’returning’ from Western exile; ‘internationalist’ veterans of the Spanish
Civil War; Trotskyists; leaders of the home underground; ‘cosmopolitans’,a
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304 Paul O’Doherty
euphemism for Jews;3only those who had spent the war years in the Soviet
Union, the so-called ‘Muscovites’,were initially safe. Nevertheless, the trials
soon acquired a momentum of their own, so that even loyal Muscovites such
as the Czech Minister for Defence, Ludvik Svoboda, fell victim.
On the question of ‘cosmopolitans’,Hodos, a Hungarian Jew, differs from
Eschwege, an East German Jew. According to Eschwege, this term was not
a euphemism for Jews, but was a term invented by Stalin to define those who
had spent the War years in the West.4
The different interpretations can to some extent be put down to different
experiences. Although the charge of ‘cosmopolitanism’had been in the air
since 1949, and was generally tied up with other charges relating to Social
Democracy and Western contacts but not explicitly with Zionism, by 1952 in
Prague all of the Jewish defendants were also accused of ‘cosmopolitanism’,
as well as ‘Zionism’, and a similar connection was made during large-scale
purges in Hungary. Hence Hodos’ equation. This, however, was not the case
in the GDR, where ‘cosmopolitanism’ was a charge almost never tied to
‘Zionism’.
Various reasons have been offered for the charges of ‘Zionism’ levelled
against a number of defendants. The deteriorating state of Soviet-Israeli
relations after the founding of Israel in 1948, which Stalin had up to then
supported, is one possible e~planation.~Another is Stalin’s residual fear of
Jewishintellectuals, and especiallytheir internationalism,ever sincehisbattles
with Trotsky, another Jew, over ‘socialism in one country’.6 Whatever the
reasons, being an agent of Zionism or ‘World Jewry’ seems to have been
merely a convenient label which could be added to the list of other accusations
where the defendant was of Jewish origin.
What is clear in all of the show trials is that the instigators were not to be
found in the East European countries themselves. The MVD, successor to
the NKVD and forerunner of the KGB, was ever present, and the decision
as to who should be arrested was usually made in Moscow. The Hungarian
specialbranch, for example, ‘wasresponsible both to Rakosi [party chief] and
to MVD General Byelkin, head of the Soviet Security Services for southeastern
Europe’.’
The most notorious of the show trials was the so-called Slhnsky Trial in
Czechoslovakia, staged from 20 to 27 November 1952. Rudolf Slinsky was
the second most powerful man in the Czechoslovak party, after Klement
Gottwald. Both had been founding members of the party and both were loyal
Muscovites. Slhnsky, however, was Jewish.
’ Hodos, Show Trials, p. 35.
Helmut Eschwege, ‘Die jiidische Bevolkerung der Jahre nach der Kapitulation Hitlerdeutschlandsauf
dem Gebiet der DDR bis zum Jahre 1953’, in Juden in der DDR, ed. Julius H.
Schoeps (Cologne, 1988), pp. 63-100 (esp. p. 85).
Hodos, Show Trials, p. 75.
William V. Wallace, Czechoslovakia (London, 1977), p. 290.
’Hodos, Show Trials, p. 39.
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The GDR in the Context of Stalinist Show Trials 305
Of the 14 defendants, 11 were Jewish, 2 were Czech, and one was Slovak.
In the indictments, their Jewish origins were stressed in all 11 cases. All 14
were found guilty of being Fieldist8/Imperialist/Zionistagents. Three of the
Jewish defendantswere given life imprisonment, the other eleven defendants
were all sentenced to be hanged, and were executed on 3 December 1952.
The whole trial, as well as the atmosphere in the country, had become ‘more
and more permeated with a rabid anti-Semitism’.’ There followed a number
oftrials in which large numbers of people, many of them Jews, were sentenced
to prison and, in some cases, executed.
If it is accepted that there was an anti-Semitic thread running through the
show trials, then the Rajk trial in Hungary initially appears much more
bizarre. Laszl6 Rajk was far and away the most popular man in the Hungarian
leadership. He was Minister of the Interior in the government. He had fought
in Spain, had spent virtually no time in Moscow, and of the entire top party
leadership, he was the only nonJew.’’ The trial took place from 16 to 24
September 1949. Of Rajk’s six co-defendants, three were Jewish-Pal Justus,
a Left Social Democrat, Tibor Szonyi, who had spent the war years in Western
exile, and Andras Szalai, a ‘home’ communist, i.e. a member of the resistance
during the war. It was in this trial that the first accusations of ‘Zionism’ were
raised. Although only a side issue, they came three years before the trials in
Prague and Moscow. Rajk and three co-defendants, including Szonyi and
Szalai, were executed. Three others, including Justus, were given long prison
sentences.I’ In fact, this trial seems largely to pre-date the overt anti-Semitism
of many of the later purges, though both Lendvai and Hodos include it in
their analyses.
After the purge of Rajk, and despite the ‘Zionism’charges, the Hungarian
Politburo had thirteen members, of whom seven were Jews. In late 1952, in
the wake of the Slanskj Trial, a new purge was launched to uncover Zionist
agents in Hungary. Hundreds of people were arrested, a large proportion of
them Jewish, yet the three leading members of the Hungarian Communist
Party, Rakosi, Gero, and Farkas, all of them Jewish, remained untouched.
Why there should have been so many Jews in top positions in Poland,
Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and, to a lesser extent, the GDR, is uncertain, and
can only be speculated upon. George Hodos, himself Jewish and a victim of
the Hungarian purges, claims that, in Hungary and Poland at least, ‘the
virulently racist, anti-Semitic prejudices of the population, fanned and incited
by the prewar, semi-fascist regimes, drove Jewish workers and intellectuals
* Noel Field was an American government employee in Switzerland during World War 11.
Although from a Quaker background, he had communist sympathies and provided them with
much help, including sometimes acting as a courier into Vichy France. During the show trials,
any contact with him during these years was turned into ‘collaboration with an American agent’.
Hodos, Show Trials, pp. 7 4 4 .
I” Ibid. 38.
I’ Lendvai, Anti-Semitism, p. 308.
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306 Paul O’Doherty
to the communists, the only party that had put up an uncompromising fight
against the preparers of the Holocaust’.’2That statement, however, does not
explain the Slansky episode, since pre-War Czechoslovakia was neither semifascist
nor particularly anti-Semitic.
Whilst in most countries Jews have almost always been over-represented,
as a proportion of the population, in the membership of Marxist parties (the
reasons for which lie beyond the scope of this article), the position in postWar
Poland, at least, is underlined by the simple statistic that some 170,000
Jews returned from Soviet refuge” and would thus, if party members, initially
have been regarded as loyal Muscovites and consequently more liable to be
given high positions. In Germany, as in the other countries, almost all of
those placed in high positions had been in the Communist Party pre-1933, so
that it is hard to establish whether individuals were promoted because of their
Jewishness. One of the accusations made against Slansky was that he had
deliberately put Jewish comrades into positions of power,I4 but since, as in
Germany, these were all party members of long standing, the accusation has
the same hollow ring to it as all the other charges.
The Albanian and Bulgarian show trials were primarily aimed at Titoists.
The accusations there were rarely fictitious: there had, indeed, been plans for
a South Slav federation encompassing Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Albania, but
these became anathema after the Stalin-Tito split. From Stalin’s point of
view, the leading supporters of federation had to be purged after the change
of policy.
There were no charges of ‘Zionism’ in these trials. That any of the victims
was Jewish is unlikely: unlike later trials in other countries such information
formed no part of the proceedings. In Romania, the chief defendant was a
Jewess, Ana Pauker, and the Jewish Democratic Committee had been sifted
in the search for ‘enemies’ in 1949. But Pauker was never publicly accused of
Zionism, despite a whispering campaign about contacts with Israel, and the
non-Jewish secretary-general of the Romanian CP appointed a number of
Jewish party members to positions at the head of the Foreign Ministry and
the Central Committee.”
The overall impression is that there was no deliberate, consistent policy of
removing all Jews from high office in Eastern Europe at this time. The
situation varied from country to country. In the so-called ‘Doctors’ Plot’ in
Moscow, nine doctors, six of them Jewish, were arrested on 3 January 1953,
and accused of murdering two party leaders and of planning to murder others.
This, together with the mass arrests that followed, is an example of a
widespread anti-Semitic campaign. The Slansky Trial in Prague and the
’’Hodos, Show Trials, p. 149.
l3Ibid.
I‘ Jiirg K. Hoensch, Geschichie drr TschechosloM’akiuchen Repuhlik 1919 his 196.5 (Stuttgart.
I’ Hodos, Show Trials. p. 105.
1966). pp. 165-8.
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The GDR in the Context of Stalinist Show Trials 307
subsequent arrests there are another example. Yet, as we have seen, antiSemitism
played no part whatsoever in the Albanian and Bulgarian show
trials, and only a negligible role in Romania.
Even in Hungary and Poland, where large-scale anti-Semitic campaigns
were launched, Jewish communists stillmanaged to retain high posts not only,
as we have seen, in the party, but in the secret police as well. At the height
of these campaigns, the Head of the Hungarian Secret Police, PCter, as well
as the Polish Deputy Security Minister, Romkowski, and the Deputy Head
of the top secret Tenth Department of the Polish Secret Police, Swiatlo, i.e.
the very oneswho were carrying out the massarrestsof Jews, were themselves
Jewish. One estimate puts the proportion of Jews in the leadership of the
Hungarian secret police at this time at 70-80 per cent.I6
The trials were far more about establishing absolute Soviet power than
about a vendetta against Jews or any other section of the population. The
Muscovites were generally regarded as trustworthy, since they, for the most
part, had survived large-scale purges in Moscow during the 1930sand after.
Indeed, the Hungarian example would seem to indicate that being a ‘Muscovite’
was more important than being non-Jewish. Only when the application
of the principle divide et imperu forced Stalin to choose between two loyal
Muscovites were other criteria applied, such as Slansky’s Jewishness in
Czechoslovakia.
Nevertheless, the leadership in some of these countries was quite prepared
cynically to exploit racist sentiment in the population at large, especially in
Poland and Hungary, or to whip up such feelings where they were not yet
widespread, with the result that very large numbers of Jews, just a few years
after their numbers had been drastically reduced by the application of the
Nazi Endlosung, were subject to harassment, imprisonment, torture, and even
death. In Poland, a post-War Jewish population in the region of 200,000,
already only a fraction of the thriving pre-War community of three million,
was further decimated by emigration, which was a direct consequence of
Stalinist anti-Semitism.
That, by contrast, a large-scaleanti-Semitic purge never got properly under
way in the GDR is due to a number of factors. Whereas the Soviets were in
complete control in whole countries in the rest of Eastern Europe at this
period, the political future of Germany was uncertain, even after 1949. In
addition, a large part of the German communist movement was in the Western
zones and thus outside Stalin’s immediate control. Widespread arrests were
far more likely to lead to the kind of dissent that elsewhere could easily be
stifled. Also, leaving for West Germany to escape an atmosphere of purges
was an option much less traumatic in its consequences for East Germans than
for others in Eastern Europe, who would have to leave their country entirely.
’’Estimate given by R6bert Gabor, a US agent in Hungary who escaped to the USA in 1947.
Quoted in Charles Gati, Hungary and the Sovier Bloc (Durham, 1986), p. 101.
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308 Paul O’Doherty
Significantly, however, the East German authorities themselves were still
overtly pro-Jewish into the early 1950s, i.e. even after the Rajk Trial.
Relative Harmony in the Soviet Zone/GDR: 1945-52
Amongst those who returned to the Soviet Zone of Germany, later the GDR,
after 1945, an unusually large proportion seems to have been of Jewish
extraction. As a result, a large number of prominent figures in both the SED
and in the state in the early 1950s were Jews by origin. Alexander Abusch,
Anna Seghers, Klaus Gysi, Paul Merker, Leo Bauer, Arnold Zweig, and
Stephan Hermlin are just some of the returnees of Jewish origin who were
prominent in political and/or cultural affairs. Victor Klemperer, a Dresden
philologist and one of those saved from extermination by the Nazis by the
steadfast refusal of his ‘Aryan’wife to divorce him, remained in Dresden and
published LTI (LinguaTertii Imperii), a damning indictment of the twisting
of language by Nazism which has run to several editions.” Stefan Heym and
Wolf Biermann, the latter what the Nazis called a Hulbjude, arrived in the
GDR in 1952/3. Louis Furnberg,the Bohemian Germanwriter, who had spent
the immediate post-war years in the service of the Czechoslovak government,
moved to Weimar in 1954.
What is noticeable is that most of the Jewish exiles who returned had spent
the War years somewhere other than in Moscow. Many of them, including
Abusch, Seghers, and Merker, had been in Mexico. This was to prove crucial
in the context of the show trials which, in the GDR, began in 1953.
Towhat extent these peopleconsidered themselves to be Jewish isuncertain.
Some SED members, like Merker and Bauer, joined the official Jewish
community out of a sense of solidarity in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi
Holocaust. For the most part, however, the Jewishness of these ‘Remigranten’
seems to have been more in the minds of the Nazis and in some cases, as we
shall see, of the GDR state prosecutor, than to have been something which
governed their own consciousness. Certainly, there is no indication that Anna
Seghers’ Jewish origins were important to her, even though her doctoral
thesis, completed in 1924, had been on the subject of Jude und Judentum im
Werke Rembrundts. In Kurt Batt’s biography of Seghers, published in 1973,
he considers the fact that she spent childhood vacations in the Netherlands to
be more relevant to the choice of topic than her Jewish origins, which are
referred to only obliquely. This, however, may in part be a reflection of the
tendency amongst GDR writers of the neo-Stalinist school to avoid, as far as
possible, any reference to Judaism.18
Victor Klemperer, LTI (7th edn, Leipzig, 1975;originally published in Halle (Saale), 1947).
The most recent Reclam edition was published in 1991.
In KurtBatt,AnnuSeghers(Leipzig, 1973),pp. 25-6. ‘DieWahl desThemasJude undJudentum
im Werke Rembrundts, das auf eine Beschaftigung mit der eigenen geschichtlichen Herkunft
hindeutet, mag zugleich mitbestimmt worden sein durch das friihe Erlebnis der
Niederlande, an deren Kiiste die Familie Reiling zuweilen Ferienreisen unternahrn.’
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The GDR in the Context of Stalinist Show Trials 309
Stefan Heym, on the other hand, is very well aware of his Jewish origins.
Yet even he prefers to emphasize the political, and could certainly not be
regarded as a practising Jew. In a rather acrimonious debate with Hermann
Kant in 1979,Heym defended himself against accusations of dishonesty about
his membership of the pre-War communist movement. Heym quoted a Czech
police report from 1935 and a US military intelligence report from 1943, in
both of which he is accused of having communist sympathies, and stated: ‘Ich
wurde namlich nicht nur meiner judischen Nase wegen ~erfolgt.”~
It seems clear that those non-practising Jews who either were members of
or supported the KPD/SED did so out of a belief in the internationalist ideals
which made their own Jewish origins irrelevant. Someof them had been in exile
in Palestine during the War (for instance Arnold Zweig, Gunter Stillmann), a
fact which would seem to indicate an active awareness of their Jewishness
(indeed, the case could be made that Zweig had been a Zionist), and there was,
indeed, an attempt by many Jewish communiststo return from Palestine.” The
vast majority, however, had been elsewhere. The Jewishness of Alexander
Abusch, Anna Seghers, and others is something that other people were far
more concerned about than they were themselves.
In the immediate post-War period, relations between the SED and the
Jewish community were friendly in the extreme. Whether because at that time
Stalin was still supporting the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine, or perhaps
because of the shared experience of exile from the Nazis, leading party
members often took part in Jewish feasts. Indeed, in 1973, Heinz Galinski
recalled taking part in a rally in East Berlin on the occasion of the founding
of the State of Israel in 1948.*’In 1948 Gromyko had supported the UN
partition plan for Palestine, but by 1950, at the latest, a change in Soviet
policy meant that the SED was no longer quite so friendly towards the State
of Israel. Yet the GDR still lagged behind the Soviet Union in condemning
Israel. For while the Soviet journal Literuturnuyu Guzetu attacked Israel as
an accomplice of ‘USimperialism’ in April 1950, similar accusations were not
found in Neues Deutschlund until almost one year later, on 1 March 1951.”
And Jewish organizations were allowed to fly the Israeli flag on special
occasions, right up to 1952, though the significance of this is di~puted.’~
We have already seen that dual membership of the SED and the Jewish
community was possible in the immediate post-War period. Paul Merker, a
communist of long standing who had been editor of the journal Freies DeutschStefan
Heym, Stalin uerlafir den Ruum (Leipzig, 1990). p. 174.
X’ Giinter Stillmann, Berlin-Puliistina und zuriick (Berlin, 1989), pp. 123-61.
Peter Dittmar, ‘DDR und Israel (I)’, Deutschlund Archiu, 10 (1977), 736.54 (esp. 741).
22 Michael Wolffsohn. Ewige Schuld? (4th edn, Munich, 1991). p. 56.
23 Eschwege, ‘Diejiidische Bevolkerung’, p. 91. After his talk on ‘Anti-Semitismin the GDR’,
given at the German Historical Institute in London on 26 Nov 1991, Dr Stefan Schreiner, a
theologian at the Humboldt-Universitat in Berlin and member of the Christian-Jewish dialogue
groupin the GDR since 1970, claimed, in response to a question, that the SED’s friendly attitude
had in fact ceased in 1948 and that the flag Bown up to 1952 was merely an Aushangeschild.
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310 Paul O’Doherty
land while in exile in Mexico, had considered it ‘selbstverstandlich’that he
join the Jewish comm~nity.~~
Perhaps even more significant of the mood of toleration are the cases of
Fritz Katten, then Chief of Police in Berlin, and Julius Meyer. They had both
been communists for years, yet they were also Cohanim, i.e. orthodox Jews
required to observe additional laws because of their descent from Cohens.
The group within the Jewish community around these two was both strict in
its religious observance and in its definition of who was Jewish, and also quite
strongly Marxist, and it vied with a group around Heinz Galinski which, in
keeping with the traditions of Judaism in Berlin, was liberal in religious
matters and liberal or conservative (i.e. FDP or CDU in the post-War period)
in
Despite such harmony, however, there were one or two minor points of
friction, largely centring on the question of Jewish identity and a number of
related issues. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (Joint)
was distributing care packets to Jews throughout Eastern Europe at this time.
The key to such assistance was membership in the Jewish communities. The
resultwasthat, just asin Schleswig-Holsteinin thisperiod additional assistance
for Danes had led to a massive increase in the number of people identifying
themselves as Danish (In a none-too-subtle inversion of the term ‘Danish
bacon’ they were pejoratively referred to as Speckdunen), so it was suspected
that many atheist Jews, especiallycommunist ones, had joined the community
purely for reasons of material gain.
Another bone of contention was the classification of most Jews who had
survived Nazi incarceration as Opfer des Faschismus, whereas the politically
persecuted were invariably classified as Kampfer gegen den Faschismus.
Although either category brought with it many privileges, the distinction was
seen asa consequence of the communist theory that the Jews had been passive
victims, a theory which utterly ignored the leading role of Jewish intellectuals
in the communist movement.26 It is partly in this context that we may
understand Stefan Heym’s rebuke of Hermann Kant (see p. 8 above) even
though it was made some thirty years later. On a purely material level, it is
also significant that designation as a Kampfer rather than an Opfer brought
with it a higher state pension.
A third issue relates to what would appear to be a theoretical conflict
betweenthe German communistsand the CPSU. Stalin’stract on the Nationalities
question, which he had written nearly half a century before, had defined
the Jews as a nationality. Since the SED was copying much of Soviet practice
at this time, the party membership card contained a reference to nationality.
Most Jews who returned to Germany at this time, and especiallythose who
went to the GDR, regarded themselves first and foremost as German anti-
24 Eschwege, ‘Die jiidische Bevolkerung’, p. 81.
25 Robin Ostow, Jews in Contemporary Emr Germany (Basingstoke, 1989), p. 15.
26 Eschwege, ‘Die jiidische Bevolkerung’, p. 70.
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The GDR in the Context of Stalinist Show Trials 311
fascists. Comparative membership figures forthe League of Victims of Nazism,
most of whose members were probably of Jewish origin, and the Jewish
communities, would appear to indicate that, despite the presence of some
communists (i.e. atheists) amongst their ranks, only a small proportion of
Jews were actually members of the Jewish communitie~.~~The majority
were quite happy to accept their official designation as Burger judischer
Abstummung, rather than insist on a separate Jewish nationality. Those who
did insist on the distinction, as we shall see, invariably ran into trouble.
Nevertheless, an almost unanimous picture of harmony between the SED
authorities and Jewish citizens is painted by most observers at this time.
Even after the first signs of a possible anti-Semitic campaign were appearing
elsewhere, and the SED was obliged to follow its Soviet leader in its pronouncements,
especially on Israel, the party maintained good relations with
the GDR’s Jewish citizens. Whilst there had been signs that the atmosphere
might not always be so harmonious, when the change came it was rather
abrupt.
Show Trials in the GDR: 1953-5
In August 1950 the ‘Fieldist’ accusations reached the GDR. A number of
party members, some of them Jewish, were accused of having been recruited
by American intelligence and of having given Noel Field access to internal
party documents. Among those named in the Central Committee declaration
of August 1950 on emigrants’ contacts with Field were Paul Merker, Leo
Bauer, and Bruno Goldhammer (all three Jewish), and a number of others,
mostly non-Jewish.%Six of those named, including Bauer and Goldhammer,
but not Merker, were tried in secret by a Soviet military court in December
1952.Twowere given death sentences, later commuted,and all sixdisappeared
into the Soviet Gulag system. They were only released by Khrushchev in
October 1955.*’ That a Soviet military court, rather than a GDR one, should
have tried them is a measure of Stalin’s and Beria’s absolute control over
institutions in the easternpart of Germany,even three years after the founding
of the GDR. However, the secrecy is at least partly due to uncertainty, as a
result of Stalin’s lack of control over communists on an all-German level, as
to whether show trials would be tolerated. As happened to Kurt Muller, a
prominent (non-Jewish) West German communist, individual communists
from the Western zones might be brought to East Berlin and then arrested,
27 In 1984, Dr Peter Kirchner stated that there were 3,900 people in East Berlin recognized as
having been persecuted by the Nazis, but only 200 members of the Jewish community. What the
figure in 1950 might have been is not known, but it would undoubtedly have been much higher
than 3,900. See Ostow, Jews, p. 16.
28 ‘Aus der Erklarung des Zentralkomitees und der Zentralen Parteikontrollkommission der
SED: Zu den Verbindungen ehemaliger politischer Emigranten zu Noel H. Field, 24. August
1950’, in DDR: Dokumente zur Geschichte der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik 1945-1985,
ed. Hermann Weber (Munich, 1987), pp. 177-9.
2y Hodos, Show Trials, pp. 123. 127.
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312 Paul O’Doherty
but it was impossible to maintain absolute control over the Western party by
means of terror.
In early 1951, acting under Soviet orders, the SED began a search for
‘Social Democrats, cosmopolitans and objectivists’ in its ranks.30Just five
years after the forced amalgamation of the KPD and SPD, the authorities
decided to root out the Social Democratic half of the Party. Large numbers
of people were expelled in an action which finally put an end to the idea that
the unified party was to be anything other than Marxist-Leninist.
In East Germany the Jewish element in the 1950 and 1951 campaigns of
arrest does not appear to have been of any significance, despite the fact that,
certainly by 1951, Stalin’s break with Israel was all but complete. This was
the start of a campaign to bring the party in the GDR firmlyunder his control.
The targets seemquite clearlyto have been SocialDemocrats and ‘Westerners’
(i.e. those who had been in exile in the West), amongst whom there were
significant numbers of Jews. It would have been odd, indeed, if no persons
of Jewish descent had been among those arrested, given their prominence in
the party and amongst those who had been in the West, especially Mexico.
However, it was not until after the Slhnskj Trial of November 1952 or,
arguably, after the ‘discovery’ of the ‘Doctors’ Plot’ in Moscow in January
1953,that an anti-Semitic campaign got under way in the GDR.3’
In the Slanskj Trial in Prague, three of the Jewish defendants named Paul
Merker as a Trotskyist. Merker, who had been expelled from the party in
1950 in the wake of the ‘Fieldist’ charges, was immediately arrested. In
January 1953 he was accused of abandoning the ‘correct’ Marxist-Leninist
position on the national question and of being petit bourgeois for considering
the Jews a national minority in Germany.32Specifically, the accusation was
made that Merker had written, while in exile in Mexico, ‘insupport of a Jewish
nationalhome and continued thissupport after he returned toGermany’.33The
Orwellian nature of these charges is illustrated not only by Stalin’ssometime
support for a Jewish Soviet republic, to be called Birobidzhan, but also by
the fact that as late as 1948 Gromyko, as we have seen, had supported the
UN partition plan for Palestine, i.e. the creation of a Jewish national home.
In 1955, Merker was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment for being an
agent of the American and French secret services, of the Gestapo, and ‘des
Weltjudentums’, but was rehabilitated in 1956.34
NJ Ibid. 122.
” In Israel und die Deutschen (Cologne, 1991). p. 187, lnge Deutschkron claims that Erich
Mielke ordered the East German State Security Service to start keeping precise records of Jews
and ‘half-Jews’in the GDR, as well as whether they had been in exile in the West, as early as
Jan. 1952. Yet her narrative makes it clear that she regards this as having happened after the
SIBnsky Trial in Prague, and in the same month that Julius Meyer left for West Berlin. She must,
in fact, mean Jan. 1953.
’*Hodos, Show Trials, p. 124.
’’Anon, ‘E. Germans in Disgrace’. The Times, 5 Jan. 1953, p. 6.
Walter Janka, Schwierigkeiten mit der Wuhrheif(Berlin, 1990). p. 14.
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The GDR in the Context of Stalinist Show Trials 313
Nevertheless, in the immediate aftermath of the Slansky Trial, the SED
merely called for ‘self-examination’ by its members, whilst also attacking
Zionism. Under Soviet orders, it set up committees to investigate the pasts
of party members,35a sure sign that the undesirable categories listed above
were to be weeded out. The main accusations against Merker and others were
not made public until January 1953, and those accused included Kurt Muller,
who was lured to East Berlin and then arrested on the accusation of ‘having
become a Trotskyist while in Russia when the Nazis were in power, and of
being a “Trotsky-Titoist” when he returned after the war’;36the CDU Foreign
Minister of the GDR, Georg Dertinger, a non-Jew whose ‘crime’ may have
been contact with Otto Fischl, one of SlanskJi’sco-defendants, who in 1951
had been the Czechoslovak representative in East Berlin; and Peter Florin, a
Jew, who was reported on the same day as Dertinger as having been replaced
in his function as head of the department for Russia and the ‘people’s
democracies’.37
January 1953 was the month of the so-called ‘Doctors’ Plot’ in the Soviet
Union. Rabbi Peter Levinson’s appeal to Jews in the GDR to leave for the
West in order to escape the anti-Semitic atmospherein the East was broadcast
the day after the announcement of the plot by TASS, which had emphasized
the Jewishness of most of the defendants. The very next day Julius Meyer
and a number of other prominent East German Jews arrived in the West.
Meyer had good reason to leave. Although a loyal party member, he had
been head of the social welfare section of the SED in 1946 and had thus, of
necessity, had contact with Joint. By this stage, at the height of the Cold War,
such earlier contacts with an American organization had become a liability,
and, in the case of Joint, the basis for both ‘Imperialist’ and ‘Zionist’ charges,
as events in the Sianskf Trial, widely reported in the GDR media, had shown.
By the end of the month, an estimated 400 or more had left.38Nevertheless,
it is worth observing that in January 1953 one of the highest figures for all
refugees from the GDR was recorded. In all, more than 20,000 people left
the GDR for the West, of which the Jewish proportion was only very small.
In total, and taking into account the differing estimates given by a number of
sources as to the Jewish population of the GDR at various stages between
1945and 1955, it can be estimated that something in the region of 25 per cent
of the membership of the GDR’s official Jewish community left for the West
in the first few months of 1953. This, of course, represents a proportion of
the Jewish community which is much, much higher than the proportion of the
population as a whole that left. Nothing even approaching the figure of 25
per cent of the population as a whole ever left the GDR. However, it is worth
recalling that probably only a small proportion of people of Jewish descent
35 Anon, ‘Self-Examination in E. Germany’, The Times, 2 Dec. 1952, p. 6.
16 Anon, ‘E. Germans in Disgrace’, The Times, 5 Jan. 1953, p. 6.
37 Anon, ‘Arrest of Minister’, The Times, 17 Jan. 1953, p. 6.
3” Anon, ‘ScientistsWarned in E. Germany’, The Times, 24 Jan. 1953, p. 5.
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314 Paul O’Doherty
were members of the Jewish communities (some estimates say one in ten), so
that this figure represents a much smaller proportion than 25 per cent of the
entire Jewish population of the GDR, though still a higher percentage than
of the general population.
The SED Central Committee resolution of January 1953, which denounced
Merker in the wake of the SlhnskyTrial, also denounced three of his comrades
in Mexican exile, all of them Jewish: Alexander Abusch, general secretary of
the Kulrurbund; Erich Jungmann, editor of a party newspaper; and Leo
Zuckermann, an aide to State President Pieck. All were expelled from the
party. Abusch and Jungmann lost their positions, while Zuckermann fled to
West Berlin.39
The case of Abusch is one of the most interesting. His official biography,
as printed in 1975,gives only the faintest hint that there may have been a gap
in his career, stating that from 1946 to 1953 he was ‘Bundessekretar des
Kulturbundes zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands’, and from 1954
to 1956‘Stellvertreter desMinisters fur Kultur’. Abusch went on to be Minister
for Culture (1958-61) and even a Deputy Chairman of the Ministerrut(1961-
71).@There is no mention that he was accused of having espoused ‘Zionism’
during his exile in Mexico, although his editorship of Freies Deutschlund, the
journal he had supposedly turned into a Zionist organ, is freely mentioned,
and he is even credited with having published an essay in 1953 with the very
(neo-)Stalinist title ‘Von der Wissenschaft und der Kunst der Sowjetunion
schopferischlernen’. Despite the gravity of the charges Abusch was back in
asenior position within eighteen months. Stalin had died and the East German
leadership was able to admit that the charges were entirely unfounded. Of
course, it did not do so explicitly-it merely reinstated Abusch.
The May 1953 resolution on the evaluation of the January 1953 resolution
[sic]reiterated most of the charges above, as well as the 1950‘Fieldist’charges.
It repeated the Imperialist/Zionist charges against Paul Merker as follows:
‘Erstdie Entlarvung der Rolle der Zionisten als einer imperialistischenSpionagezentrale
fuhrte zur volligen Demaskierung Merkers als eines Agenten des
USA-Imperialismus ...’.4’It also criticised Fritz Dahlem, a nonJew who had
been in exile in France and was now the secretary for the training of party
cadres, and removed him from this position, and from the Central Committee
and the Politburo. It was announced the same day that Hermann Axen,
a (non-practising) Jew and concentration camp survivor, had taken over
responsibility for training party cadres,” a promotion which would tend to
support the conclusion that the primary aim of the trials was not anti-Semitic.
y, Eschwege, ‘Die jiidische Bevolkerung’, p. 94.
Meyers Taschenlexikon:Schriftstellerder DDR, ed. Kurt Bottcher et al. (2nd edn, Leipzig,
41 ‘Ausdem BeschluS: Uber die Auswertungdes Beschlusses des ZK der SED zu den “Lehren
aus dem ProzeS gegen das Verschworerzentrum Slansky”, 14. Mai 1953’. in Weber, DDR, p.
196.
1975), pp. 11-13.
42 Anon, ‘E. Zone Leader Arrested’, The Times, 15 May 1953, p. 7.
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The GDR in the Context of Stalinist Show Trials 315
During this time the claim to Jewish nationality became a liability. Helmut
Eschwege, a Jewish historian in the GDR and member of the SED until 1953,
relates how he lost his job as section director in an East German museum for,
amongst other things, reading and distributing Yiddish newspapers, for being
on the Board of the Dresden Jewish community, and for having been in
emigration in Palestine. A few days later he was expelled from the SED,
primarily because of ‘ideological unclarity’, because he regarded himself as
being of Jewish nationality. As a consequence of this he lost his status as a
Kumpfer gegen den Faschismus, one of the few members of the Jewish
communities to have been regarded as Whilst the accusations which
cost Eschwege his job appear entirely false, the accusation of ‘ideological
unclarity’ is one which would seem to be entirely consistent with communist
practice the world over, although thoroughly insensitive in the context of
Jewishness in Germany so soon after 1945.
Two other events that fall broadly within this period are worth noting. One
is that at the annual conference of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Hanover in
September 1952, it was claimed that ‘800 members of the community had
been arrested by the state security service in the Soviet zone, of whom 710
had been sentenced’.u Whilst the figures themselves are unconfirmed, it is
the case that on 5 September 1950 the Sect of the Jehovah’s Witnesses
was banned in the GDR, amongst other things for supposedly organizing a
‘systematischeHetze gegen die bestehende Ordnung und deren Gesetze unter
dem Deckmantel religioser Veran~taltungen’.~~All this representsa campaign
on a much larger scale than anything directed against the GDR’s Jews. The
reason may have been that Jehovah’s Witnesses, unlike practising Jews, held
their faith to be entirely incompatible with support for the institutions of a
Marxist state. Throughout the history of the GDR, Jehovah’s Witnesses went
to gaol rather than do military service in the East German Army. Membership
of this religious group thus represented a direct challenge to the authority of
the state, in a way that mere membership of the Jewish communities did not.
The other is that, in January 1953, three East Germans were given prison
sentences for spreadinganti-Semitic propaganda and, in one case, for publicly
welcoming ‘the Fascist terror against the Jews’.* The sentences were in
accordance with Article VI of the GDR’s constitution, and the heaviest
sentence was two years’ imprisonment. Whilst this could be regarded as a
cynical attempt to reassure those Jews who might have been thinking of
leaving, it was a much more concrete, indeed constructive measure than
Czechoslovakia’s attempts to show itself as an opponent of anti-Semitism.
During the Slansky Trial, AndrC Simone, a Jewish defendant, was forced to
43 Eschwege, ‘Die judische Bevolkerung’, pp. 98-9.
+1 Anon, ‘Case of Dr Linse’, The Times, 29 Sept. 1952, p. 4.
45 Statement of the GDR Interior Minister, Dr Steinhoff, on 5 Sept. 1950, quoted in Peter
46 Anon, ‘RussianConcern at Refugee Exodus’, The Times, 30 Jan. 1953, p. 4.
Fischer, Kirche und Christen in der DDR (West Berlin, 1978), p. 58.
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316 Paul O’Doherty
end his ‘confession’with the followingwords: ‘1have committed every possible
crime against the Jews. I worked for Britain and the United States, where
anti-Semitismis growing, and also Fascism. And 1worked against the USSR,
where there is no racial discrimination. My right place is on the gall ow^'.^'
Conclusions: Soviet Zone/GDR 1945-55
The anti-Semiticnature of the purges in Eastern Europe has been outlined in
some detail above. The year 1952had seen a strengthening of the GDR and
its institutions as separate from West Germany, and it was by then firmly
within the Soviet Bloc, if not yet a member of the Warsaw Pact. The show
trials have been demonstrated to have been orchestrated largely by Soviet
personnel in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and other countries, even if the
instrument was often the native security services. East Germany could thus
not expect to escape a similar campaign.
Nevertheless, the East German campaign seems to have been both the
shortest and the least thorough of any of the countries concerned, with the
possible exceptions of Bulgaria and Albania, the reasons for which have been
discussed above. In Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, what started as
Stalinist purges of the ranks of the communist parties developed into fullblown
anti-Semitic campaigns with a national momentum of their own. That
many non-Jewsalso fellvictim is a testimony to the ultimately arbitrary nature
of the campaigns once they had developed. They then operated on the
principle that the more people were arrested, the less likely it was that anyone
‘guilty’ would escape. And yet, as we have seen, some prominent Jews,
especially in Hungary and Poland, managed to avoid falling victim by themselves
organizing the campaigns.
The picture in East Germany is, in many ways,similarlyconfused. Undoubtedly,
many Jews escaped arrest only by fleeing to the West. Of those who
remained, a significant number lost their jobs, were expelled from the party,
and, in one or two cases, were imprisoned. Yet the GDR authorities seemed
to delay this campaign as long as possible, and it would appear that the
Doctors’Plot in Moscow, rather than the Slanskj Trial, was what forced their
hand. Unlike Czechoslovakia, the campaign was not systematic, for only four
months after the initial charges, in May 1953, a Jewish party member,
Hermann Axen, was given responsibility for training party cadres, replacing
a nonJew in the process. Also, if we accept the claims of the West German
Jehovah’s Witnesses, then the campaign against the Jews cannot have been
nearly as systematic as that against the former. I have suggested above that
the explanation for this lies in the different political standpoints attached to
each religion. It also seems that in the GDR, unlike the other three countries
mentioned, the Jewish victims of the purges were all party members, and the
remaining victims were other party members (and some members of the
47 Anon, ‘Slansky’s Editorial “Crime”’, The Times, 24 Nov. 1952, p. 5.
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The GDR in the Context of Stalinist Show Trials 317
Blockparteien) rather than other Jews. The conclusion that the show trials
were primarily about a Stalinist power struggle rather than anti-Semitism
seems inescapable.
What distinguishes the GDR is the speed with which the campaign came
to an end. One or two trials dragged out beyond 1953, in particular that of
Paul Merker (the Janka Trial in 1957, on the other hand, despite Merker’s
appearanceasawitnessfor the prosecution, wasa different matter altogether),
but the middle of 1953 seems to be the point at which the GDR authorities
decided to put an end to the victimizationof Jewish citizens. As we have seen,
Alexander Abusch was rehabilitated within eighteen months. Stalin died in
March 1953, Beria was arrested in June of the same year, and the SED does
not appear to have had the stomach to continue with what many of the leading
members undoubtedly regarded as a particularly obscene aspect of the purges.
Nevertheless, as with most Stalinists and neo-Stalinists, they were not averse
to purges per se, so that there were to be more show trials in the future. And,
of course, an admission that they had got it wrong, except in one or two cases
of individual ‘rehabilitation’, was almost never forthcoming.
As relations between the SEDand the Jewishcommunityhad been excellent
for a long period after 1945, the change in attitude seems quite clearly, to
many Jewish and non-Jewish observers, to have been a consequence of the
GDR’s obligation to toe the Soviet line. The Times,quoting an estimation of
2,600 Jews in the entire Soviet zone, including East Berlin, stated that if the
reports of anti-Semitism were true, ‘itcan be little more than theoretical antiSemitism,because
scarcelyanyJews are left in east Germany’. It then summed
up the nature of the purges which were to follow thus: ‘. ..and a drive by
German Communists to oust Jews becomes in practice only an ingratiating
gesture to Moscow’.48‘Ingratiating’ is the wrong word, because it implies
choice. In fact, by January 1953 the East Germans finally had no option but
to follow Staiin’s and Beria’s orders.
Anon, ‘East German “Purge”’, The Times, 9 Jan. 1953, p. 4.
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