Annerose Matz-Donath

Annerose Matz-Donath (birth name Annerose Göppler ; * 1923 in Leipzig ) is a German journalist and a well-known victim of Stalinism .

Life

According to his own statement, Annerose Matz-Donath spent most of the years of National Socialism apolitical. During the Second World War she began studying journalism, history and German at the University of Leipzig . In 1943 she became the mother of a daughter. After learning more about the concentration camps by chance in the summer of 1944 , she realized that Germany was ruled by “criminals”. She herself later described this as a “shock of knowledge”.

After Germany was liberated from National Socialist rule in 1945, she wanted to play an active part in building a democratic “political and moral new Germany”. The universities were closed immediately after the end of the war and she tried to get a job as a journalist without having completed her studies. A job in which she had already completed internships at Leipziger Neuesten Nachrichten and DENA . At the beginning of 1946 she applied as a people's correspondent in Halle (Saale) , the then capital of Saxony-Anhalt . After several unsuccessful applications, she was able to start as a volunteer in the development staff of the Liberal-Demokratie Zeitung of the LDP Saxony-Anhalt. In practice, she had to work as a full-fledged editor from the start. After the editor-in-chief moved to the West, she became deputy editor-in-chief in autumn 1947. She was responsible for the politics department.

One of their main tasks was to maintain contact with the censorship officers of the Soviet military administration , even though they checked the newspaper for several hours in the editorial office and in the printing plant before every newspaper was issued. In the process, formulations such as “warm west wind” fell victim to their censorship. Critical voices from party meetings of the LDP or even negative opinions on general political issues, problems and events were completely censored. Matz-Donath found that the LPD and its newspaper served the SED only as a democratic fig leaf and that freedom of the press did not exist in the Soviet Zone . At some point she could no longer justify spreading open lies to herself. She was able to have information passed on to General Clay through an acquaintance who was actively involved in the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt during World War II . This should use them in the Allied Control Council against the Soviet administration. She stayed in Halle and the Soviet Zone in the hope of a promised “Germany Conference” by the Allies. According to this, in their opinion, the majority of the population, who did not vote for the SED in the 1946 state parliament elections , but rather the CDU and LDP, should have a journalistic voice. And even if her open writing was impossible, she hoped to be able to offer information and help in life between the lines.

Her husband had been in the West since 1948 and later divorced while she was imprisoned.

Many people noticed her opposition to the SED and she was released in early 1948. The successor turned the newspaper into a pure agitation paper in the sense of the SED, in which all those who think differently were described as "Western capitalists, warmongers and imperialists". Annerose Matz-Donath managed to get her and the old editor-in-chief to be reinstated and her successors to leave the newspaper with the LDP party executive. A few months later, she was arrested early in the morning by the Soviet secret police and the K5 political police, which was being set up by the SED . After several months of inhuman detention and interrogation with torture , she was sentenced on October 23, 1948, to 25 years in a labor education camp for “espionage”. She was first imprisoned in Halle prison , then in the meantime in the Sachsenhausen special camp , before she was locked up in Bautzen prison after another stay in Halle . in the summer of 1950 she was taken to the Hoheneck women's prison . After a hunger strike by the prisoners there in October 1953, she and 52 other women were brought to the Brandenburg-Görden prison as "ringleaders" , from where she was transferred back to Halle in 1956. Even after several amnesty appointments in the GDR penal system, such as in 1953 after Stalin's death and in 1956, when all women convicted of SMT were released except Nazi perpetrators, she remained imprisoned. Although her family and also the federal government in the western part of Germany tried relentlessly to get her release and even Wilhelm Pieck, as President of the GDR, had supported a dismissal proposal, she stayed until October 25th because of a note on the files for which Erich Mielke was at least partly responsible Imprisoned in 1959. To do this, she had to commit herself as a secret employee of the Stasi in prison , which she did, even if only in appearance. She was able to see her daughter, who she last saw when she was three, for the first time.

In 1959 she fled to the West, where she immediately reported on her forced commitment. There she worked for many years at Deutsche Welle in the political program area. At times she was responsible for the Russian program. In addition, she coordinated and led the “Learn German” working group for the production of German courses for foreign countries. Deutsche Welle, the Goethe Institute , the Foreign Office and Deutschlandfunk were involved in the working group

In 1970 she married again.

In 1986 she had to retire early because of the damage to her health caused by the long imprisonment. After her health improved again, she has been researching the fate of persecuted women under the communist dictatorship in German and Russian archives since 1990. She published the results, supplemented by 130 interviews with contemporary witnesses, in 2000 in The Trace of the Red Sphinx . She had also broken down the sociological data of the prisoners there, which, in the later work of the historians Lutz Niethammer and Natalja Jeske , documented for the first time that only a small part of the prisoners were perpetrators during the Nazi era. And even these only as so-called "little Nazis". Most of the detainees had been arbitrarily detained under the RSFSR's Political Article 58 of the Criminal Code .

Annerose Matz-Donath sees the lack of photographic documentation of the suffering in the special camps and prisons of the SMAD and later the GDR as an important reason why society does not see them. She is accused of trying to testify that their suffering was only registered less than that of the concentration camp inmates during National Socialism.

Since 1991 she has been involved in various groups of former prisoners and is available as a speaker. She also helps other former prisoners with their rehabilitation requests.

On June 21, 1993, the Military Prosecutor General in Moscow rehabilitated her for having been "arrested for no reason or guilt" and for having been sentenced for "unlawful political reasons."

During her time in the Soviet Zone, she later said:

“Nothing remains but our dearly paid good conscience. We fought valiantly against the same kind of rape of people and law that had taken place in the Nazi era. And nobody can blame us for having willingly gone along a second time. "

- Annerose Matz-Donath

"The Trace of the Red Sphinx"

Content and origin

Shortly after her release in 1960, Annerose Matz-Donath began to write a biographical book about her experience for the first time. At that time, however, as an unknown former inmate, she had no chance of finding a publisher. In their experience, it was almost impossible to counter the zeitgeist that later showed itself in the 1968 movement , in which it was not opportune to name the crimes of communism.

In 1990 she began to research the Russian archives and German archives opened after the fall of communism on the fate of persecuted women in the Soviet occupation zone and then in the GDR. She also interviewed 130 contemporary witnesses, many of whom, however, wanted to remain anonymous. Printed out the minutes of their interviews resulted in 10,000 pages. The book authentically depicts the imprisonment of thousands of women who were imprisoned by the SMAD in the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp, mostly without a court sentence, and of the 1,300 innocent women convicted in Hoheneck prison during Walter Ulbricht's presidency. The more than 1000 children born there, who were torn from their mothers after birth, are also discussed. The book also describes the fates of around 1000 children aged nine and over who were imprisoned in special camp No. 2 in Buchenwald . Part of the work is devoted to the fate of more than 10,000 innocently imprisoned young people, of whom, according to Soviet files, almost 3,500 did not survive imprisonment. It is described that although there were no planned mass murders in the camps, the camp conditions shortly after the war with hunger, exhaustion and untreated diseases and epidemics organized “living conditions as perfect euthanasia”. The book also deals with the not granted help and compensation for many of those previously innocently imprisoned by the Federal Republic of Germany. The printing of the book was funded by the Federal Foundation to Process the SED dictatorship .

The title of the book refers to a Sphinx statue in Saint Petersburg for victims of the terror under Lenin and Stalin.

Voices on the book

As President of the Bundestag at the time, Wolfgang Thierse wrote that the book “deeply shook him”. There is a face to the suffering that arose at that time. One of Matz-Donath's particular merits is that no bitterness remains and that “reconciliation takes place”.

The Mitteldeutsche Zeitung called the book an important color post-war document that is exciting to read until the end.

Sabine Fröhlich wrote in her review of the book in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that there was no reason to doubt the injustice of the women interviewed as described in the book. She misses the factual discussion and linguistic distance in the book. For Fröhlich, the book relativizes the crimes of communism to those of National Socialism. She finds the comparison itself questionable and the mutual "offsetting" cannot be justified by anything.

Works

• German women before Soviet military tribunals - the trail of the red sphinx , Beltheim, Lindenbaum-Verlag, 2014, ISBN 978-3-938176-53-5
  • The trace of the Red Sphinx - German women before Soviet military tribunals , Schnellbach, Bublies, 2000 ISBN 3-926584-11-4
• Fighters - Politically Persecuted Women in the Soviet Zone of Occupation in Brigitte Kaff: "Dangerous Political Opponents" - Resistance and Persecution in the Soviet Zone / GDR , Düsseldorf, 1995, pp. 45-105
• The woman in advertising. A documentation of the award ceremonies "Black Tail Feather, Golden Egg" , series of the Aktion Klartext eV No. 6, Baden-Baden, 1984

Web links

• Short biography and reviews of works by Annerose Matz-Donath at perlentaucher.de
• Interview with Annerose Matz-Donath
• Annerose Matz-Donath at the memorial library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i} Ulrich Schacht : Annerose Matz-Donath In: Karl Wilhelm Fricke (Ed.): Opposition and resistance in the GDR. CH Beck, Munich 2002, ISBN 978-3-406-47619-8 , pp. 282-288.
2. ↑ Student resistance and political opposition on the archive pages of the University of Leipzig (accessed on June 15, 2015)
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} Eva Ochs: “Today I can say yes”: Camp experiences of inmates of Soviet special camps in the Soviet Zone / GDR , Böhlau Verlag, 2006, ISBN 9783412010065 , pp. 183/184
4. ↑ ^{a b c d} Annerose Matz-Donath on the website of the memorial library in honor of the victims of communism
5. ^ Ernst Zander: Youth behind barbed wire ... and afterwards ...: Bautzen, Buchenwald, Jamlitz, Ketschendorf, Mühlberg, Sachsenhausen, Waldheim , Rainer Hampp Verlag, 2010, pp. 170/171
6. ↑ Bettina Greiner : Special camp? What kind of special bearings? , P. 110 online as pdf ( memento from July 3, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
7. ↑ ^{a b c} Interview by Jörg Fischer with Annerose Matz-Donath
8. ^ Preussische Allgemeine Zeitung : The unknown side of the coin , March 17, 2001
9. ↑ ^{a b} Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: In basement dungeons agonized , November 21, 2000
10. ↑ ^{a b} “The Trace of the Red Sphinx” on the Bublies-Verlag website
11. ↑ DNB 968049559