Reader Report: A legacy of shame and terror in Leipzig

LEIPZIG, Germany — From its outward appearance, the stately 102-year-old building in this city’s “Mitte,” or central district, provides no clues to the roles it played during World War II and the Cold War.

But when my wife, Ludie, and I ascended the wide marble stairway into the “Runde Ecke” or “Round Corner” building, so named because it lies on a round corner, and its distinctive front façade is cylindrical, its legacy as a center of shame and terror was soon revealed.

Built in 1913 as the office of a large insurance company, the Round Corner today is a city-owned museum exhibiting the crimes of Nazi Germany and, during the Cold War, the East German Secret Police, or “Stasi.”

The first exhibit we came upon when we entered the main hall in the company of a dozen German Navy midshipmen was an original issue of the U.S. Army’s “Stars and Stripes” newspaper, dated April 15, 1945, displaying the Page One headline, “Leipzig Falls to the First U.S. Army.

Other WW II displays featured photographs and newspaper articles of Adolf Hitler reviewing his troops in Leipzig before its capture and the city in flames and ruins after bombings by U.S. and British aircraft, which caused the deaths of more than 5,000 Leipzigers and the destruction of an estimated 15,000 buildings and factory sites.

Following Hitler’s suicide and Germany’s surrender in early May 1945, the building that had been a Gestapo conference center during WW II was occupied by the U.S. Army. When the Allies subsequently divided the defeated Germany into U.S., British, French and Soviet zones, the Round Corner building, which, like Leipzig, lay in the Soviet zone, became the local headquarters of the Soviet secret police or NKVD and, later the regional headquarters of communist East Germany’s Stasi.

The museum’s 40,000 chilling exhibit pieces, which serve as its permanent collection, pay particular reference to the Stasi and the intelligence agency’s dehumanizing dirty tricks and tools of oppression used to control and spy upon the citizens of Leipzig and East Germany.

Many of these are outlandish, and even comical, such as the glass jars containing pieces of yellow felt used by Stasi operatives to swab the chairs, which suspected anti-communists had sat upon during interrogations, in order to capture the smells from their sweat and body odors.

Special Stasi “sniffer” dogs were then pressed into service to match the scents to anti-communist pamphlets and other “treasonous” and “subversive” materials that might be discovered during future investigations.

During our museum visit, a stop during our trip to European WW II and Cold War sites in Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic, we also saw displays of briefcases containing quick-change clothing outfits and preposterous, clownish makeup kits that held fake rubber noses of all sizes and shapes, hair dyes, mustaches, beards, wigs, a galaxy of eyeglass frames and forged license plates and passports worn and utilized by Stasi operatives during their undercover assignments.

The exhibits also feature collections of Stasi false stomachs that hid tiny cameras, microphones and tape recorders; shirts and coats with minuscule holes for camera lenses; and deep pockets that hid camera shutter release cables.

The Stasi, we learned, developed the first camera with a silent shutter, making it easier to spy in secret.

Not amusing was a squalid cell that had held Stasi prisoners who were isolated, starved and beaten to elicit confessions against their children, husbands, wives, other family members, friends, neighbors, school and university classmates, teachers, professors, employers and fellow employees.

The Stasi tapped telephones, secretly filmed and tracked people’s daily movements, bugged homes, offices, classrooms and hotel rooms, and opened the mail and telegrams of those it believed were agitators, anti-communists or probable defectors to the West.

It maintained 91,000 full-time agents and 190,000 informers across East Germany, and in its vaults here at the Round Corner building — and other Stasi headquarters in East Germany — accumulated 39 million file cards and 1.9 million photographs containing the names and images of those it suspected of disloyalty to the regime, paying special attention to journalists, artists, musicians, athletes and religious leaders.

The palatial Round Corner structure, nevertheless, served a commendable purpose during the final days of the East German regime and the Cold War.

In early December of 1989, an estimated 70,000 peaceful, candle-carrying civilian demonstrators marched en masse to the building and occupied it. A few weeks later, the national government fell.

In short order, democratic elections were held, the USSR and its Communist bloc nations disintegrated, and East and West Germany reunited to become the Federal Republic of Germany.

Leipzig, once the home of Bach, Wagner, Mendelssohn (Hitler had Mendelssohn’s statue in Leipzig torn down because he was Jewish), Schumann, Goethe, Nietzsche and Martin Luther, is today one of Europe’s growing economic, intellectual and cultural centers. One hopes that Nazism and communism have been buried forever.

Newport Beach resident DAVID C. HENLEY is a longtime foreign correspondent and a member of the board of trustees of Chapman University.