BERLIN CALENDAR: KILLING YOUR HEROES - THE KIDNAPPING & DEATH OF WALTER LINSE
Today in Berlin: 8 July, 1952
On this day at around 7.30 AM legal practitioner and jurist from Chemnitz, Walter Linse, left his flat at Gerichstraße 12 in Berlin-Lichterfelde, only to be stopped by a man asking him for a match:
He wanted to have a smoke but had nothing to light his cigarette with. Second later half-conscious but still resisting Linse was dragged into a waiting Opel and spirited away into the East German territory.
Walter Linse was abducted by the Stasi. As one of the leading men in the West-Berlin Association of Free German Jurists, an organisation said to have focused on following and uncovering violations of human rights in the DDR, he was an enemy. But he was also an East German enemy - Linse, born in 1903 in Chemnitz, spent the Second World War and the first years after its end working in the city and only fled to the West in 1949.
In East Berlin the car carrying the abducted and his kidnappers (hired straight from an East Berlin prison) headed for the U-Boot - the notorious interrogation prison of East German Ministry for State Security (better known as the Stasi). There he spent the following half a year, before being passed into the always eager hands of the Soviet MBG (short for Министерство государственной безопасности, Soviet pendent to the Stasi and soon to be replaced by the KGB), residing in Berlin-Karlshorst.
There he was put before a military court and pronounced guilty of espionage, sabotage and generally acting in a way harmful to the state interests of the DDR and the USSR. Walter Linse’s German Association of Free German Jurists was established and financed by the CIA.
And for that there was just one sentence. Death.
The next stop for Linse was the notorious Lubyanka prison in Moscow (the HQ of Stalinist persecution). It was there that on December 15, 1953 he heard his death sentence confirmed. On the same day Walter Linse was brought to another dark Moscow prison commonly known as Butyrki and immediately executed. Linse’s body was then cremated and the ashes buried in a mass grave.
A man who became a heroic figure in the fight against the Communist regime. A man who deserved to have his name and his deeds commemorated. And so in 1961 the street where he lived and where the drama began to unfold on July 8, 1952 - Gerichtstraße - was re-named in his honour.
In 2007 the Hohenschönhausen Stasi-Gedenkstätte, now no longer a scene of horrors but a memorial site, decided to name a new award after him as well. And that’s when the Truth raised its ugly head.
Historians and researchers had already been digging into Walter Linse’s past. They had good reasons for it. Many other capable civil servants and active members of all sorts of bodies and organisations, previously considered de-Nazified and trustworthy, turned out to have thrown a shade of a much deeper hue of brown that expected.
Like Linse’s close co-activist within the Association, Horst Erdmann. Erdmann, according to the declassified CIA papers “the head of the West Berlin agents’ Center ‘Investigation Committee of Free Lawyers’1, turned out to have lied about practically every single thing about his past, including his place of birth, date of birth, education, as well as the fact that joined the NSDAP on 1 August 1937 (membership number 3,925,549), was Hitler Youth Stammführer, and a general busy-body within the complex structures of Nazi administration. Fast forward nearly two decades and he would also commit fraud and embezzle quite a sum of money.
Linse himself joined the NSDAP in 1940 but already since 1938 he worked hard at the office for „Bearbeitung von Entjudungsvorgängen“ (“Processing of Systematic De-Judaization”, responsible for - here another hateful Nazi word - “Aryanization” of Jewish estates.
In Chemnitz during the war Linse worked - fully aware of what it was that he was doing - within a system which stole Jewish property prior to its owners’ planned extermination. Stealing by putting Jews under pressure and even denouncing the unwilling to the Gestapo. He remained in his office position even after the war had ended - obviously with a different scope of work, but undeterred and not much burdened by his conscience.
The latter might have been due to the fact that he allegedly helped some Jewish people avoid the fate of their brothers and sisters. One person vouched for him in the summer of 1945, claiming he had been active in a resistance group called “Ciphero” - historians are still to find any traces of the said group and might never do so. It would not be the first or the last time one person equips another with a “Persilschein” (Persil is a popular washing powder brand famous for its cleaning power, especially for white textiles - a Schein stands for a certificate) - a phenomenon so widely spread after the war that it became part of the German language.
Another witness vouched for Linse from the US: his life was saved thanks to Linse’s intervention at the KZ Buchenwald - the notorious concentration camp just outside picturesque little city of Weimar (about which you can now read in Katja Hoyer’s excellent book called “Weimar”). Since no evidence for a similar rescue could be found, Linse even left the Liberal Party he had joined in the hope of building up a political career.
The latter is not to say that Walter Linse’s tragic fate should not be looked at with grief or empathy. But it is crucial to remember that most heroes are artificial constructs built of legends, persistent repetition of preferred interpretation, of manipulating facts to soften the spotlight and of willing suspension of disbelief.
Looking closer, we might suddenly find ourselves facing a dark, disturbing image. It takes courage, too, to admit it is there.
Hohenschönhausen Stasi-Gedenkstätte decided to abandon the idea of naming an award after Linse. The street, the old Gerichtstraße in Berlin-Lichterfelde, still bears his name.
For more declassified CIA material on Linse incident go to CIA’s archive page (the “sanitized” text might be of special interest).
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For more declassified CIA material on Linse incident go to CIA’s archive page (the “sanitized” text might be of special interest).
Herzlichen Dank.
A nuanced and sensitive treatment of a very important topic.
What an story, B!