Josef Kneifel

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Josef Kneifel (born November 15, 1942 in Weißig , Lower Silesia ) is a former dissident and political prisoner in the GDR . On March 9, 1980, he bombed the memorial of a Soviet T-34 tank in Karl-Marx-Stadt to protest against the continuing Soviet occupation. The occasion was the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan . Kneifel was sentenced to life imprisonment for this attack on the memorial. He suffered serious damage to his health as a result of harassment and abuse while he was in detention.

Life

Kneifel grew up with foster parents in Saxony , completed an apprenticeship as a butcher , later as a lathe operator and worked at VEB Erste Maschinenfabrik Karl-Marx-Stadt . He became a member of the FDJ and the volunteer helpers of the People's Police . Later he applied for a teaching Fleischer in 1960 at the Stasi - Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment , was rejected because of kidney weakness.

After the crackdown on the Prague Spring by the Warsaw Pact armies in 1968, Kneifel put up protest posters. In 1972 Kneifel submitted several applications to leave the country . After comments critical of the system about the SED, the bloc parties, the GDR trade unions and the Soviet Union with their gulags during a brigade discussion at his company, he was sentenced to ten months in prison on August 28, 1975 after six months of pre-trial detention for “defamation of the state”. He spent it in Haldensleben, six months of which in a 7.5 m² cell with three serious criminals. After he was detained, he was not allowed to return to his company and found a new job in a small metal company.

Attack in Chemnitz

In December 1977 Josef Kneifel and his friend Horst K., a former tank commander in the NVA , had started the preparations. The bomb with a load of 11.5 kg was self-made from freely available components, completed in autumn 1979 and hidden in the strawberry settlement in nearby Niederlichtenau . They also carried two self-made revolvers with ammunition and eight self-made stick grenades with them: "They shouldn't get us alive," said Kneifel in an interview in 2005.

Before carrying out the act, Kneifel and Horst K. considered that the demolition could result in personal injury. They chose a Sunday evening with sleet and television thriller as the time of the crime, when fewer drivers or walkers were expected on the street.

On March 9, 1980 at around 9 p.m. Kneifel drove in a Trabant with false license plates to the Panzerdenkmal (official name: Memorial for the liberation deeds of the Red Army and their services in smashing Hitler's fascism ) with a Soviet T-34 tank on a pedestal that was taller than a man was standing. The memorial was located on the corner of Frankenberger Strasse and Dresdner Strasse.

At about 9:30 p.m. he placed the bomb under the tank with a time fuse . At around 10 p.m. the bomb exploded, damaged the left-hand chain and hurled a 250-kilogram roller of the tank 50 meters onto a nearby People's Police area. Window panes in the area broke, there were no injuries.

The reason for the act was the invasion of Soviet troops in Afghanistan . Kneifel later declared his act as a sign against a "symbol of Stalin imperialism". He understood the resistance action as a “liberating act”, with which he “threw the burden of complicity from his shoulders through silence and tolerance”.

After lengthy and extremely extensive, but unsuccessful, investigations by the police and state security , the perpetrator was identified by wiretapping a pastor in the young community of Josef Kneifel's son and arrested on August 18, 1980. This was made possible because the pastor had told his superiors in confidence that he knew about the perpetrator but was bound by the confidentiality of confession and therefore asked for advice. The conversation between the pastor and his superintendent was bugged by the State Security.

Sentencing and imprisonment

On March 9, 1981, Kneifel was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Karl-Marx-Stadt district court. Kneifel responded with the exclamation: “Enough of the people's name misused, you lackeys!” His accomplice Horst K. was sentenced to twelve years in prison. His wife Irmgard, who had agreed to the tank detonation, received two years in prison for failing to report a crime , and his son received a suspended sentence.

Kneifel sat by its own account until 1987 in solitary confinement , from 1984 in the basement of the arrest penal institution Bautzen I in a four-square-meter cell with no windows and natural light. While in custody, Kneifel immediately started a hunger strike and was force-fed for 14 months and sent to the Meusdorf Detention Hospital. Because he did not report himself as a “prisoner” but as a “political prisoner of the Honecker gang”, he was mistreated several times. He wanted to be understood as a political prisoner and felt branded a criminal by wearing the prison clothing. He tore the yellow stripes off the prison clothing, wrote sneering slogans on the cell walls, splashed the guards with blood or urine and was repeatedly punished for this with further tightening measures. His wife protested for years to authorities and public authorities about her husband's detention conditions. In 1985, Amnesty International joined demands for an end to solitary confinement.

Life After Release

On August 6, 1987, Kneifel was deported as part of an exchange of agents and dissidents between the Federal Republic and the GDR. The previous negotiations were conducted by Klaus Gysi , the then GDR State Secretary for Church Affairs, and Johannes Hempel , the Saxon regional bishop from 1971 to 1994 .

Since he had endangered human life in his attack, he was not rehabilitated according to the criminal rehabilitation law after the fall of the Wall . He received compensation as a political prisoner . In 1990 he filed criminal charges against prison staff, but the proceedings were all dropped.

In July 1991 the tank memorial was removed by resolution of the Chemnitz city council, the tank is now in the Bavarian Army Museum in Ingolstadt.

On March 9, 2005, Kneifel gave a lecture at an event organized by Chemnitz University of Technology , the Saxon State Center for Political Education and the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi documents under the motto When the tank shook at its attack. The event was organized by the historian Eckhard Jesse .

Kneifel lives in Nuremberg. He is on dialysis because of a kidney disease .

Contacts to the right-wing extremist scene

Josef Kneifel maintains close contacts with the German neo-Nazi scene . On March 18, 2006 he took part as a member of the annual general meeting of the right-wing extremist aid organization for national political prisoners and their relatives (HNG) in Dillstädt .

On April 7, 2007, Kneifel gave a lecture at an event organized by the right-wing extremist IG Chemnitz town history in the Ratskeller Chemnitz. On August 13, 2011, Kneifel gave a lecture at an NPD event in the National Center in Leipzig on the topic of Russian tanks taken from their pedestals! .

In an interview with the Sächsische Zeitung in 2006, he stated that he did not see himself as a neo-Nazi, but as a justice fanatic.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Karl Wilhelm Fricke: On the human and fundamental rights situation of political prisoners in the GDR. Verl. Wiss. u. Politics, 1986, p. 28
  2. ^ Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk : History of the opposition in the GDR. (PDF; 490 KB) In: Biographical Lexicon. Resistance and Opposition in Communism 1945–91. Federal Foundation for Work-Up , 2016, accessed on May 2, 2019 .
  3. ↑ http://www.bstu.bund.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/Archiv/Pressemitteilungen-2002/premi_02_mai_02.html
  4. ↑ https://www.jugendopposition.de/chronik/145559/chronik-des-jahres-1980?_y=1980&_m=03&nid=146950#nid-146950
  5. ^ Siegmar Faust :  Josef Kneifel . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
  6. ↑ a b c d e f g An exit could only suit us - the case of the East German dissident Josef Kneifel . Der Spiegel, 40/1992
  7. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Bernhard Honnigfort: The tank sprinkler. Frankfurter Rundschau , April 15, 2005.
  8. ↑ a b c d e f Bernhard Honnigfort: Who did not want to submit. Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger , April 17, 2005
  9. ^ A b c Josef Kneifel: Josef Kneifel in: Rüdiger Knechtel, Jürgen Fiedler (ed.): Stalins DDR, Reports politically persecuted , Leipzig 1991, ISBN 3-86151-010-3 , p. 95
  10. ↑ Neue Zeit of July 15, 1991 p. 19
  11. ↑ a b Press office of the TU Chemnitz: When the tank shook. Press release of March 8, 2005.
  12. ↑ a b c d e Thomas Schade: Better to die than give in. Sächsische Zeitung , March 9, 2006.
  13. ↑ Ehrhart Neubert : History of the Opposition in the GDR 1949–1989 , pp. 337–338
  14. ^ Leonore Ansorg: Political prisoners in the penal system of the GDR, p. 286
  15. ↑ Jens Gieseke : The Mielke Group: the history of the Stasi 1945-1990, p. 167
  16. ↑ Torsten Diedrich, Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk : Founding a state on installments? Effects of the popular uprising in 1953 and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 on the state, the military and society. der DDR, p. 292
  17. ↑ Irmgard Kneifel: Irmgard Kneifel in: Rüdiger Knechtel, Jürgen Fiedler (Ed.): Stalins DDR, Reports politically persecuted , Leipzig 1991, ISBN 3-86151-010-3 , p. 126f
  18. ↑ GDR Germany. Reporting period January 1 to December 31, 1987. German Democratic Republic. ( Memento of the original from November 11, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Amnesty International (ed.): Annual report 1988. Fischer Taschenbuch 1988.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.amnesty.de
  19. ↑ Favor of the hour . In: Der Spiegel 34/1987, August 17, 1987.
  20. ↑ The tank . Sächsische Zeitung, March 9, 2006.
  21. ↑ René Römer: The blown life: the bomber of Karl-Marx-Stadt. Sachsenspiegel Reportage , MDR , October 26, 2005.
  22. ↑ a b The brown conspiracy . In: Frankfurter Rundschau, November 22, 2011.
  23. ↑ Patrick Limbach: Leipzig city administration allows Nazi meetings - politicians are outraged. Zeit Online , November 25, 2011.
  24. ↑ Christian Fuchs: NPD invites right-wing extremist speakers from SPIEGEL-Online, November 27, 2011.
personal data
SURNAME Kneifel, Josef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German GDR opposition and political prisoner of the GDR
DATE OF BIRTH November 15, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH Weißig , Lower Silesia