Gisela Gneist

Gisela Gneist (born Dohrmann; born January 11, 1930 in Wittenberge ; † March 22, 2007 in Hamburg ) was a SMT convicted and later chairwoman of the victims' association Arbeitsgemeinschaft Lager Sachsenhausen eV, former inmate in special camp No. 7 Sachsenhausen .

Life

Gisela Dohrmann was born in Wittenberge. During the Second World War she lived there with her grandparents and attended high school. Shortly before the end of the war, she moved to the countryside in Plau am See in Mecklenburg to stay with her mother to avoid the bombing raids. She experienced the end of the war there, but her first contact with Soviet soldiers was marked by the fact that one of them ransacked her apartment and mistreated a refugee woman who lived in the house.

In May 1945 she had to report to the employment office and was obliged to do farm work on an estate. Like the other thirty young people who had been forced to do so, she was watched by Soviet soldiers with rifles and urged to work faster. After a few weeks she was surprisingly released from duty after she had objected to being called a “German pig” by former Soviet forced laborers.

At the end of June 1945, she and her mother visited their grandparents in Wittenberge, where they met almost all of their previous friends. Some time later she moved back to Wittenberge, where, after teaching at schools again from October 1, 1945, she continued to attend grammar school. The new beginning was a change, as many teachers had been changed. In the school an attempt was made to teach the pupils in line with the dictatorship of the proletariat . This autumn, attempts were also made to organize the parties as an anti-fascist-democratic unity bloc and the young people were pressured at school to actively participate in anti-fascist youth groups . When she first entered the office of the so-called Antifa , it was headed by a former Hitler Youth leader. After several young people from Wittenberg had been arrested in October 1945, their decision was made not to join any communist organization.

In a private apartment she had signed a list in which she expressed her will to found a democratic party. She didn't know what communism was. She had been annoyed by Soviet soldiers who had set up a brothel above their apartment. She was not aware of the dangers of advocating for free expression.

Several members of the party formation list were arrested around Christmas 1945. Gisela Dohrmann was picked up on December 30th at 5:30 a.m. by German police officers and taken to the Wittenberg prison. The Soviet secret service suspected Gisela Gneist of belonging to the fascist sabotage group Werwolf . There she was interrogated and verbally abused for a day before she was handed over to the NKVD and taken to Perleberg that evening . From January 5, 1946, she was interned in Brandenburg an der Havel . She describes the hygienic conditions there as inhuman and the wasteland of employment in a place where even the stub of a pencil was severely punished as unbearable.

On February 5, the hearing against the Wittenberg group was opened before the Soviet Military Tribunal (SMT). In night-long interrogations involving torture and mistreatment, what had been said was used to construct an accusation against Dohrmann and the other Wittenbergers for the formation of a counter-revolutionary group under Article 58 of the RSFSR's Criminal Code . Of the defendants, nine were sentenced to death , one to seven years and nineteen (including Dohrmann) to ten years in a labor camp. She was first imprisoned in Altstrelitz prison before she was transferred to special camp No. 7 Sachsenhausen on the site of the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp in September 1946 .

On January 21, 1950, she was released and went back to her grandparents in Wittenberg, who had not heard from her for years because of the ban on contact with camp inmates. She could not take up the training offered to her as a teacher because she refused to join the SED .

Then she decided to flee to the Federal Republic. After she was advised not to flee from the emergency reception center in West Berlin , she traveled to Hamburg with false papers. There she initially lived in a barrack camp without further support; later she found a job in the Valvo radio tube factory . She married and worked in the factory until the birth of a son in 1958. After her divorce in 1968 she was again looking for work. She was denied retraining because she did not have a vocational or school qualification due to her imprisonment. After working for some time at the social welfare office in Hamburg, she switched to the University of Hamburg as Johannes Kleinstück's secretary on September 1, 1969 for the rest of her professional life .

In the Federal Republic of Germany, she was initially rejected when she applied for compensation for the injustice she suffered. This was justified by the fact that she could have received teacher training by joining the SED and was thus to blame for her economic circumstances.

Since the founding of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Lager Sachsenhausen 1945–1950 eV , Gisela Gneist was also active there as chairwoman to remember the many who died innocent as a result of inhumane treatment in the communist camps. In 1995 all members of the Wittenberg group were rehabilitated by the Public Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation. On October 3, 2006, she received the Cross of Merit on ribbon for her commitment .

Gisela Gneist died on March 22, 2007 after a short serious illness at the age of 77 in Hamburg. She was buried in the state-owned cemetery Heerstraße in Berlin-Westend .

On the occasion of Gneist's planned honor by renaming the street in Oranienburg, her memorial activity in 2020 came under criticism; accordingly, as chairwoman of the association, she is said to have questioned the number of victims of the Nazi concentration camps and equated the Soviet camp system with the Nazi extermination camps .

Works

• Gisela Gneist, Günther Heydemann : At most, you can be sent to a retraining camp for half a year , Leipzig, Arbeitsgemeinschaft Lager Sachsenhausen 1945–1950, 2002 (second revised and expanded edition), ISBN 978-3-00-011007-8 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Günter Fippel: Democratic opponents and arbitrary victims of the occupying power and SED in Sachsenhausen (1946 to 1950): The Soviet special camp Sachsenhausen - part of the Stalin camp empire , Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2008, p. 79, note 79, ISBN 978-3-86583- 251-1 ( limited preview in Google Book search)
2. ↑ Reinhard Dobrinski (Ed.): The processing of GDR state criminality and judicial crimes . Forum for Enlightenment and Renewal, 2004. P. 150, ISBN 3-00-013013-6
3. ↑ Ernst Zander: Youth behind barbed wire ... and afterwards ...: Bautzen, Buchenwald, Jamlitz, Ketschendorf, Mühlberg, Sachsenhausen, Waldheim , Rainer Hampp Verlag, 2010, p. 109–112 ( limited preview in Google book search)
4. ^ Anne Applebaum : Der Eiserne Vorhang , Siedler, 2013, p. 144
5. ↑ ^{a b} Forgotten victims of fascism , Andreas Fritsche, Neues Deutschland , June 11, 2020
6. ↑ Ernst Zander, p. 114 ( limited preview in the Google book search)
7. ↑ Ernst Zander, p. 115 ( limited preview in the Google book search)
8. ↑ Ernst Zander, pp. 116/117 ( limited preview in the Google book search)
9. ↑ Ernst Zander, p. 215 ( limited preview in the Google book search)
10. ↑ Stefan Reinl, p. 146 ( limited preview in the Google book search)
11. ↑ Press release ( memento from September 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) from the Citizens Office (Verein)
12. ↑ Ernst Zander, p. 114 ( limited preview in the Google book search)
13. ↑ Liberty Bell, Berlin, December 2009, Volume 59, No. 686, p. 18
14. ^ Oranienburg: Dispute over new street names: A woman causes offense , Maritta Tkalec, Berliner Zeitung , June 15, 2020