Free Republic

In 1974, a Trabant -- an old East German car -- was chugging through the Thuringian countryside, a province in the communist German Democratic Republic.In its passenger seat sat Professor Joseph Ratzinger and at the wheel was Father Joachim Wanke, then an assistant at a local seminary -- the only one in the GDR.The two priests, writes Rainer Erice, a journalist for the German radio station Mitteldeutsche Rundfunk Thüringen (MDR), were on a harmless sightseeing tour, taking in the historic cities of Jena and Weimar. It was a moment of relaxation during Father Ratzinger's short visit to East Germany, the...

For a profession as covert as theirs, you might have thought the Stasi would kit out their spies with an inconspicuous wardrobe to aid them in their secretive work. However far from blending in, a new exhibition has revealed that operatives from the secret police of former East Germany looked astonishingly like, well, spies. Dodgy fashion secrets of the Stasi show how they seem to have taken a leaf out of the book of many a Hollywood screen spy.

President Barack Obama has appointed a far left labor unionist to a security sensitive U.S. trade post. Bob King On February 16, 2011,  Obama  announced the appointment of United Auto Workers president Bob King to the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations. As U.S. trade positions and data are always  key targets of foreign intelligence services, one would think that appointments to such a body would be subject to thorough scrutiny. Either this was not done in King's case, or affiliation with far left organizations, is no longer considered any sort of danger to national security in today's Washington....

Obama File 110 hereStanley Kurtz's new book "Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism", finally proves that Barack Obama attended the Democratic Socialists of America - run Socialist Scholars Conferences in 1983 and 1984. He also reveals how some of the marxists participating in those conferences would influence Obama's career in later years. In this post I look at the 10th annual Socialist Scholars Conference held at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in April 1992. One panel in particular was important: "Towards a New Party", with Elaine Bernard, Arthur Lipow, Kurt Stand and Judy Page. The...

The diaries of the journalist who helped expose the Soviet Terror Famine in the Ukraine are now on display in Cambridge. At the time of his writings he was denounced as a liar by Soviet sympathizers including Walter Duranty of the New York Times. Had he not died in suspicious circumstances he would no doubt have been pleased to see that the truth of his accounts is now accepted, although he would perhaps be disappointed to see that one of the outlets for his writing, the Guardian (then the Manchester Guardian), frequently publishes articles explicitly and implicitly supportive of totalitarian...

from Christianity Today, 1 October 2009 A Lost Generation Mainline churches in East Germany rediscover a sense of mission. Susan Wunderink | posted 10/01/2009 10:02AM http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/october/12.11.html Twenty years after.... But some formerly liberal church leaders have a newfound interest in evangelism.... .... Uwe Siemon-Netto, director of the Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life, says the German Protestant church recognized the fall of the Berlin Wall as a miracle. "Then," he said, "it flipped back and returned to its goofy liberal ways." To many East Germans, the social gospel preached from many Protestant pulpits sounded very much like a successor...

Nov 10, 2009 — When the Berlin wall fell 20 years ago, Dorothee Hubner first dared to think, “Are we allowed to leave and finally be free?” Her story and that of her parents Gerhard and Gertraude, scientists trapped in East Germany, was told by Andrew Curry, a freelance writer, in Science.[1] Dorothee was 23 years old in 1989. Her parents, also biochemists, “had spent decades struggling to do research in East Germany without compromising their personal ideals with allegiance to the ruling Communist Party.” By not pledging allegiance to the ruling Communist Party, the Hubners faced a life of...

Many believed. So many were disappointed. 9 minute video, halfway down the page. Excellent encapsulation of life in East Berlin from the '50s to the fall of the Berlin Wall, including indoctrination of children, MEDIOCRE leaders, secret police and of course the wonderful architecture of East Germany. "Thomas Hoepker's photos chronicle 40 years of strange, sad, vicious and sometimes hilarious life in East Berlin.

For many in the GDR, the fall of the Berlin Wall and unification meant the loss of jobs, homes, security and equalityOn 9 November 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down I realised German unification would soon follow, which it did a year later. This meant the end of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the country in which I was born, grew up, gave birth to my two children, gained my doctorate and enjoyed a fulfilling job as a lecturer in English literature at Potsdam University. Of course, unification brought with it the freedom to travel the world and, for...

The Berlin Wall anniversary is a reminder that people smugglers were once regarded not as the scum of the earth but as heroes. Hartmut Richter was one. He fled East Berlin five years after the wall was built by swimming across one of the canals that separated the city. He then helped another 33 people escape by smuggling them across the border in his car. Twenty years on, he worries about what is called Ostalgie - nostalgia for the old East Germany. The former German Democratic Republic has largely been romanticised in film, fashion and design. But Mr Richter warns...

Noting tomorrow’s 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Sunday’s Today show, former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw claimed East Germans were “still adjusting to the harsh economic realities” of life after communism. But a recent poll of former East bloc countries by the Pew Research Center actually discovered that the people of what was East Germany are actually the biggest enthusiasts of the shift to capitalism, with 82% approving, higher than any other ex-communist country. Brokaw did note, however, that the current “center-right” Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, was “born and raised in East Germany,”...

BERLIN — Harald Jaeger was a loyal East German border guard — respected and trusted to command a crossing point to the west on Berlin's Bornholmer Strasse. So when his checkpoint was swarmed on the evening of Nov. 9, 1989, as East Germany announced the border was being opened after 28 years, Jaeger felt ashamed as he let the thousands pass through.

Cold War: The White House has announced our absence at ceremonies marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Meanwhile, Russia has been practicing a nuclear invasion of an abandoned Poland. The Berlin Wall has been a famous backdrop for American presidents sounding the battle cry of liberty in the struggle against tyranny. It was there that John F. Kennedy expressed our solidarity with the encircled residents of that outpost of freedom with his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner." And it was there that Ronald Reagan, with a defiant "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," voiced our...

iccardo Ehrman, a veteran Italian foreign correspondent, and Peter Brinkmann, a combative German tabloid reporter, both claim they asked the crucial questions at a news conference on Nov. 9, 1989, that led East German Politburo member Günter Schabowski to make one of the biggest fumbles in modern history.

[excepts] Did East Germans originate from apes? Impossible. Apes could never have survived on just two bananas a year. " The ubiquitous Trabant or Trabi, East Germany's legendary plastic car with its clattering two-stroke engine, was a favorite butt of jokes as well. Like this one: "A new Trabi has been launched with two exhaust pipes -- so you can use it as a wheelbarrow." The jokes gave insights into what ordinary East Germans were thinking about their regime and about current events. The Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 spawned a new proverb, for example: If the farmer falls off...

The defeat of communism 20 years ago was the most liberating moment in history. So why don't we talk about it more? On August 23, 1989, officials from the newly reformed and soon-to-be-renamed Communist Party of Hungary ceased policing the country's militarized border with Austria. Some 13,000 East Germans, many of whom had been vacationing at nearby Lake Balaton, fled across the frontier to the free world. It was the largest breach of the Iron Curtain in a generation, and it kicked off a remarkable chain of events that ended 11 weeks later with the righteous citizen dismantling of the...

(English-language translation) GERMANY - On the 48th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall, this capital today remembers all of its victims and protests against minimizing the history of the defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR). The victims were remembered during a ceremony at the Chapel of Reconciliation in Berlin, which Mayor Klaus Wowereit and government delegate Marianne Birthler (the latter in charge of the documents of the GDR's Stasi secret political police) attended. In the simple chapel located on Bernauer Street where the Wall stood, a candle burned in memory of the dead and a floral arrangement was placed....

The past can never be predicted, and perhaps never more so than when it comes to the German left. Two years ago, we learned that Nobel Laureate Günter Grass -- the literary scourge of all things fascist, especially America -- had himself been a member of the Waffen SS. Now comes another zinger that casts the radical political and social upheavals of the late 1960s in new and revealing light. The historical surprise concerns a turning point whose ripple effects were felt in Europe and beyond. On June 2, 1967, a West German policeman fatally shot an unarmed, 26-year-old literature...

East German Spy Shot West Berlin Martyr The name of Benno Ohnesorg became a rallying cry for the West German left after he was shot dead by police in 1967. Newly discovered documents indicate that the cop who shot him may have been a spy for the East German secret police. It was one of the most important events leading up to the wave of radical left-wing violence which washed over West Germany in the 1970s. On the evening of June 2, 1967, the literature student Benno Ohnesorg took part in a demonstration at West Berlin's opera house. Mohammad Reza...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged people Tuesday not to forget the brutality of Communist East Germany when she visited the former prison of the Stasi secret police in eastern Berlin. In the year that Germany marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Merkel said it was crucial for young people to gain a sense of how human rights were violated in Stasi prisons. "This memorial makes clear in an authentic setting in what brutal ways the dignity of human beings was damaged, and how lives were destroyed and torn apart for trivial reasons," Merkel said during...

Where have all the cowboys gone? We never thought we would see it happen. Thanks to the greatest president of my lifetime. He spent his life fighting the greatest evil of the 20th Century. HERE IS A SHORT YOUTUBE VIDEO THAT MEMORIALIZES THE EVENT

In the past few weeks, I have listened to Barrack Obama's speeches. I have also talked to many people who believe Obama's plans or changes for this country is what we need. This is wrong. For 32 years I lived in East Germany. I didn't have a choice. For four years, I suffered as a political prisoner in a Russian East German Prison Camp. They tried to re-educate me by forcing me to read Marx, Engels, and Lenin and the communist manifestoes. When I hear Obama speaking, I hear Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Please, the people should listen to what...

WorldNetDaily staff reporter and columnist Jerome Corsi's book "The Obama Nation" contributed to a decision by Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga not to accept Sen. Barack Obama's invitation to attend the Democratic National Convention, according to a prominent Kenyan newspaper. "The cancellation of the trip by Mr. Odinga comes hot on the heels of the publication of a book that is being used to attack Mr. Obama in which the PM [Prime Minister] features," wrote Kenya's Daily Nation. "The book, The Obama Nation, by Jerome Corsi depicts Mr. Obama as a covert sympathizer of radical Islam and communism." "In the...

Holidaymakers feeling nostalgic for the Cold War can now tour what was once a top secret bunker in the former East Germany. Opened to the public for the first time on Friday, it was meant to house the ruling Communist elite in the event of a nuclear attack.Something some visitors said they were relieved was no longer a concern:“What goes through my mind is that it is quite nice to stand around here, look at the bunker and talk to each other peacefully,” one man said.Close to the size of a football field, the bunker was designed to function...

Gelsenkirchen, Germany - German police said Thursday they are seeking a man, believed to be a neo-Nazi, who beat up a US national because he was speaking English in a McDonald's restaurant. The victim, 54, was taken to hospital with serious injuries after the incident on Saturday, which has not previously been reported. The victim had been talking to his female partner in English in the fast-food eatery in the industrial city of Gelsenkirchen when the stranger interrupted and demanded they speak in German. The girlfriend replied that her partner only knew a little German. The assailant, described as having...

E. Germans drew blueprint for Cuban spying A once-jailed Cuban exile's research reveals how East Germany exported its repressive Stasi security system to Cuba, where it lives on today. MICHAEL LEVITIN BERLIN -- In the cavernous underground jail once run by East Germany's notorious Stasi security agency, Jorge Luís Vázquez leads a visitor into a dank, tiny, pitch-black cell, then slams the iron door shut. The world vanishes into darkness. Moments later, the door swings open and light returns. ''Well, how was it?'' asks Vázquez, a Cuban exile who was jailed in one of these very Stasi cells in 1987,...

East Germany's ex-leaders always denied they had ordered soldiers to shoot people trying to flee across the Berlin Wall, even though hundreds were killed. Now the discovery of a written order to open fire on men, women and children has reawakened fading memories of the regime's brutality. It was always obvious that East Germany's border guards were ordered to shoot at people trying to flee to the West. Had no such order existed, they wouldn't have killed an estimated 1,100 defectors making desperate bids for freedom across the Berlin Wall or the minefields of the 860-mile border between East and...

BERLIN (Reuters) - Nearly two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall a German company plans to give the Trabant, a stinky two-cylinder car that became the symbol of communist East Germany, a new lease of life. The new Trabants will no longer have tiny engines, noxious fumes and plastic bodies but will retain the iconic design of the original -- like Volkswagen's new Beetle or the new Mini. The Trabant was the most common vehicle in the former East Germany and was produced without major changes for nearly 30 years. Known in the West as a "spark plug...

BERLIN — Researchers have discovered a Cold War “shoot-to-kill” order in what amounts to the clearest evidence yet that East German troops were given a licence to fire on people fleeing to the West, the Times of London reported. The written order, issued to Stasi secret service agents, states: “Don’t hesitate to use your weapon even when border breaches happen with women and children, which traitors have often exploited in the past.” It was found by a researcher in a regional archive of Stasi documents in the city of Magdeburg.

BERLIN _ The agency that manages the records of former East Germany's dreaded secret police has uncovered an order for border guards to fire on escaping citizens that is far more explicit than others on record, an official said in remarks published Saturday. Though the official East German border regulations said use of a firearm was to be considered an ''extreme measure in the use of force,'' the Oct. 1, 1973 order to border guards from the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, is much less reserved, Magdeburg's Volksstimme newspaper reported. ''Do not hesitate with the use of a firearm,...

The Diary of Anne Frank was displayed on the judge's desk A suspected German neo-Nazi has admitted publicly burning a copy of Anne Frank's diary, at the start of his trial with six others.The suspects are accused of inciting racial hatred and disparaging the dead. Prosecutors in the eastern German city of Magdeburg said Lars Konrad, 25, threw the book onto a bonfire during a summer solstice party in June 2006. Anne Frank wrote her diary while she and her family hid from the Nazis in an attic in Amsterdam during World War II. The indictment says the public...

MARKUS WOLF was modern history’s most brilliant spymaster, and, because his working life was devoted to the cause of communist oppression, also its most dangerous. For 34 years he led the East German secret intelligence service, the HVA (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, or main directorate of intelligence), a KGB clone that ran thousands of agents in the West (and some in Africa and Asia) and exploited similar numbers of reliable “sources” — individuals, but not agents, some knowingly communist contacts, others unaware of the real identity of the men and women to whom they slipped information, views and documents. They in turn...

Markus Wolf, known as Cold War spymaster, dies at age 83 By Jeffrey Fleishman Los Angeles Times Former East Germany spy chief Markus Wolf is seen in front of Berlin's Brandenburg Gate in this 1995 photo. WARSAW, Poland — Markus Wolf, the spymaster who epitomized Cold War espionage as head of the brutal and inventive East German foreign-intelligence service, died Thursday at his Berlin home. He was 83. The cause of death was not announced. Suave and elusive, Mr. Wolf was such an enigma that Western intelligence agencies didn't know exactly what he looked like during tense decades when a...

Markus Wolf, the sinister East German spymaster who spun his web across Western Europe, has died peacefully in his sleep — taking with him some of the darkest secrets of the Cold War.A solitary red rose was deposited by a sympathiser yesterday on the doorstep of his Berlin apartment block. But few tears were being shed for the 83-year-old Stasi general who dispatched some 30,000 agents to seduce Nato secretaries, buy up politicians, vacuum up secrets and train terrorists. Normally voluble politicians contacted for comment yesterday refused to utter a word, as if Mr Wolf were a demonic presence. “Let...

“There can be no peace without honestly and maturely confronting the past.” --Joachim Gauck[1] It’s the middle of May, and I’m having breakfast at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin.[2]  I’m in Germany with other journalists on a visit sponsored by Atlantik-Brücke, a Berlin-based organization that promotes German-American friendship.   This morning I’m speaking with Dr. Helmut Holl, former state secretary for Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany.  Dr. Holl and I discuss the German Democratic (sic) Republic (sic) (GDR), which subjugated eastern Germany from 1949 to 1990 after National Socialist subjugation from 1933 to 1945.   A short walk from the Adlon is...

Polish Prime Minster Jaroslaw Kaczynski said Sunday he has cleared the air with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and they would meet again in Berlin on Oct. 30. He told reporters in Helsinki that a short meeting between the two was "very nice" and had allowed him to explain misunderstandings, which he claimed had been created by false media reports. "We've managed to clarify some issues that were just a matter of misunderstanding. I noticed that the chancellor had learned something from the press that was complete nonsense." He was referring to media reports that junior coalition partner — the League...

On Wednesday, a former government spokesman said black visitors to Germany should be careful where they go in the country. His remarks have drawn criticism -- and support. It doesn't take much to try Germany's patience in the weeks leading up to the World Cup soccer championships. Nerves are especially raw when it comes to comments and incidents that cast doubt on the country's hospitality and its openness to the millions of international guests expected to descend on the country in June. On Wednesday and Thursday, that sensitivity was laid bare for all to see. A former government spokesman on...

THE career of President Vladimir Putin of Russia was built at least in part on a lie, according to US researchers. A new study of an economics thesis written by Putin in the mid-1990s has revealed that large chunks of it were copied from an American text. Putin was labelled a plagiarist yesterday after a pair of researchers at the Brookings Institution, a Washington DC think tank, established that the Russian president’s academic credentials were based on a dissertation he had lifted in part verbatim from the Russian translation of a management study written by two professors at the University...

WASHINGTON -- Most people have probably forgotten that there was ever such a place as East Germany, which is possibly why plans to tear down its onetime parliament have evoked a "who cares?" moment. The formal name of the building in the former East Berlin _ yes, there was such a place _ was the Palace of the Republic, although it wasn't a palace and East Germany certainly wasn't a republic. It was a communist dictatorship that was as nasty as it was inept. East Germany was the Soviet Union's share of the spoils after the Third Reich was crushed,...

Exodus of 'Ossie' women following Mrs Merkel west Rob Hyde in Saxony-Anhalt AND Colin Freeman (Filed: 27/11/2005) For years, the east German male has been the butt of jokes over his poor dress sense, outdated haircuts and glum outlook on post-Communist life. Now the old stereotype's days may be numbered - not because he has changed his ways, but because of a lack of women willing to marry him. New figures show men now outnumber women by three to one in some eastern regions, following an exodus of women in search of a better life - and husbands - in...

Secret police spied on pope 02/10/2005 13:59 - (SA) Berlin - The East German secret police spied on the man who would become Pope Benedict XVI for 15 years, targeting him as one of the Vatican's fiercest opponents of communism, according to a report published on Sunday. From April 1974 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the feared Ministry for State Security kept close tabs on the then theology professor Joseph Ratzinger, according to documents from the so-called Stasi archives printed in the weekly Bild am Sonntag. "Ratzinger is seen at the Vatican as one of...

Implant May Save Vision, Lives People with eye cancer face the prospect of losing their eyesight and even their lives. But a new procedure could keep them alive and their vision intact. Bill Grieb, a husband of 37 years and a grandfather of six, first noticed something wrong with his vision on the golf course. The avid golfer suddenly couldn't focus on the ball. "It looked like when someone would take a flash photo of you," said Grieb. "It was the bright flash in your eye. … And I thought it was the reflection of the sun off my glasses."...

It's been 15 years since Germany's reunification, and the once communist east of the country is still in the economic doldrums. But it could be here that the next general election - just a week away - could be decided. The statistics are bleak. Germany's 'Aufbau Ost' - the rebuilding of Eastern Germany - has cost an estimated 1.25 trillion euro (£843bn, $1,550bn) so far. Despite the capital injection, the East's unemployment rate is still 18.6% - in many regions it tops 25%. The economy grows by about 5.5% a year, but from a very low base - and that...

SPIEGEL ONLINE - May 19, 2005, 06:18 PM When the Communist East Germany Was Still American By Ronald Heinemann in Jena In the spring of 1945, British and American troops pushed far into eastern Germany. The German population was relieved to avoid Soviet occupation. Soon, however, the Red Army took over, unleashing a flood of refugees heading west. DPA After years of fighting against the German enemy, American and Soviet soldiers finally meet up. The closer the Americans and the British came, the better Klaus Kaschlik understood the snippets of news reports he heard on the BBC. At night, he...

On the surface there would seem to be little to unite the Aryan racialists of the neo-Nazi movement with the terrorists of radical Islam. To the neo-Nazis, Muslims are almost all members of ``inferior`` races; and to the Islamic terrorists, the neo-Nazis are almost without exception either atheists or members of fringe quasi-Christian sects. But the reality is that there has been close cooperation between Muslim extremists and Fascists ever since the founding of the Nazi movement in the 1920`s. For all of their differences, Muslim extremists and Nazis have always been united by a common group of beliefs and...

If I were Pope - and no, don't worry, I'm not planning a mid-life career change - but, if I were, I'd be a little irked at the secular media's inability to discuss religion except through the prism of their moral relativism. That's why last weekend's grand old man - James Callaghan - got a more sympathetic send-off than this weekend's. The Guardian's headline writer billed Sunny Jim as a man "whose consensus politics were washed away in the late 1970s". Is it possible to have any meaningful "consensus" between, on the one hand, closed-shop council manual workers demanding a...

If I were Pope — and no, don't worry, I'm not planning a mid-life career change — but, if I were, I'd be a little irked at the secular media's inability to discuss religion except through the prism of their moral relativism. That's why last weekend's grand old man — James Callaghan — got a more sympathetic send-off than this weekend's. The Guardian's headline writer billed Sunny Jim as a man "whose consensus politics were washed away in the late 1970s". Is it possible to have any meaningful "consensus" between, on the one hand, closed-shop council manual workers demanding a...

Pope John Paul II's 1981 attacker, Mehmet Ali Agca, has alleged that Vatican prelates helped him carry out the shooting in St. Peter's Square - a claim that was dismissed yesterday by Cardinal Roberto Tucci, a former organizer of papal trips. Agca has given conflicting reasons for the attack, and his motives remain unclear. "Without the help of priests and cardinals, I would have not been able to carry out that action," he was quoted as saying in an interview with the Italian daily La Repubblica. "The devil is within the Vatican." But in an apparent contradiction, he said that...

GERMANS ‘MISS’ BERLIN WALL 29.3.2005. 13:46:22 Almost 15 years after German re-unification, one in four western Germans wishes the Wall was still standing, a poll has shown. The survey, carried out by Berlin's Freie Universität and Forsa polling institute, showed that 24 percent of western Germans would rather have their country divided into separate East and West German states. Only 12 percent of eastern Germans said it would be better if the country was still divided. Only 11 percent of respondents in western Berlin wanted the Wall back, and 8 percent of those in the eastern part of the city...

Many Germans Want Berlin Wall Back, Study Finds Mar 26, 8:30 AM (ET) BERLIN (Reuters) - Nearly a quarter of western Germans and 12 percent of easterners want the Berlin Wall back -- more than 15 years after the fall of the barrier that split Germany during the Cold War, according to a new survey.The results of the poll, published Saturday, reflected die-hard animosities over high reunification costs lowering western standards of living and economic turmoil in the east.The survey of 2,000 Germans by Berlin's Free University and pollsters Forsa found 24 percent of those living in western Germany want...