Karl Wilhelm Fricke

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Karl Wilhelm Fricke in his study, 2011

Karl Wilhelm Fricke (born September 3, 1929 in Hoym ) is a German publicist and editor of several standard works on resistance and state repression in the GDR . He is one of several hundred people who were forcibly abducted to the GDR by the Ministry for State Security (MfS). At Deutschlandfunk , Fricke was the editor for East-West affairs and had a major impact on the political program “ Background ” .

Life

The father

At the age of only sixteen he saw the NKVD of the Soviet occupying power arrest his father, Karl Oskar Fricke, in June 1946. He worked as a teacher, journalist and photographer and had worked in the small town of Hoym during the time of National Socialism as head of the press office and deputy head of propaganda for the NSDAP local group, was also in the Nazi teachers 'association and wrote articles in its teachers' newspaper. Karl Oskar Fricke was arrested in the Soviet occupation zone in 1946 and sentenced to twelve years in prison in 1950 as part of the Waldheim trials . He died in 1952 in Waldheim prison from the consequences of a dysentery and flu epidemic.

This experience shaped his son, Karl Wilhelm Fricke. He refused to join the SED- controlled Free German Youth , which made the chances of studying difficult. For a short time he worked at the school where his father had already taught, as a substitute teacher for Russian. By denouncing a colleague that he had SED been critical, Karl Wilhelm Fricke was born on February 22, 1949 arrested . However, he was able to escape from police custody and flee across the inner-German border to the West. After his escape he studied political science in Wilhelmshaven at the University of Labor, Politics and Economics until 1953 . Then Fricke went to West Berlin to continue his studies at the Free University and began to work as a journalist. His contributions to the press and radio, in which he processed information from the combat group against inhumanity and the investigative committee of liberal lawyers , were mainly devoted to the persecution of opposition members in the GDR by their judicial organs.

kidnapping

The MfS observed Fricke's publications very closely and classified them as extremely harmful to the GDR and decided to kidnap him in a secret operation to East Berlin . As part of his journalistic research, Karl Wilhelm Fricke came across the supposed journalist "Kurt Maurer", who as a communist had been brought to a concentration camp by the Gestapo and imprisoned by the NKVD in the Sachsenhausen special camp after the war . Fricke was interested in this complex biography and therefore kept loose contact with the supposed GDR connoisseur and critic. On April 1, 1955, he was lured by Maurer and his wife into an apartment in the Schöneberg district that was supposedly hers. In reality, the MfS had hidden the apartment. Maurer's wife offered Fricke a glass of “Scharlachberg Master Brand” in which she had previously dissolved sleeping pills. Fricke felt uncomfortable, wanted to call a taxi, lost consciousness and was taken into custody. Kurt Maurer had not lied Fricke about his own biography, but the name changed: His real name was Kurt Rittwagen and the Stasi led him as an employee IM "Fritz". Fricke, then 25 years old, ran under “Student” at the MfS.

Three days before the kidnapping, an “Hptm. Buchholz "recorded the decisive assessment in a memo from the MfS:

"Re: Fricke. The hostile activity of Fricke consists in the fact that he receives documents and material about leading functionaries of the party, economy and administration from people from the GDR. [...] Furthermore, Fricke writes articles for the West German press. The arrest of Fricke is intended to enable us to learn to recognize the methods of our enemies with which they partially succeeded in obtaining the material described above. "
Arrest warrant against Fricke, 1955, signed by Erich Mielke

Secret process

This was followed by 15 months of interrogation in the central remand prison of the MfS in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen . Karl Wilhelm Fricke spent most of the time in a single cell of the submarine without natural light in the building's basement. In a secret trial in July 1956, the Supreme Court of the GDR sentenced him to 15, then to four years in prison for " war and boycott agitation ", which he had to spend in solitary confinement in the Brandenburg-Görden penitentiary and the Bautzen II special prison .

Journalistic career

After his release from prison in 1959, Fricke went to Hamburg and resumed his work as a freelance journalist and publicist. When he moved to Cologne in 1970 (until 1994) he became the chief editor at Deutschlandfunk. The MfS continued to watch him. An internal paper from 1985 stated:

“Fricke is the head of the East-West editorial team at Deutschlandfunk. In his contributions and comments, he slandered and distorted the political conditions in the GDR (party and state leadership, justice and the penal system). His books on the MfS aim to discredit the socialist security organ of the GDR internationally. "
Fricke with his book File Inspection , 2011

Today, Fricke's books are regarded as standard works in the areas of resistance and opposition in the GDR, criminal justice and state security. The GDR researcher Johannes Kuppe, a student of Peter Christian Ludz and later Frickes' colleague at Deutschlandfunk, called Fricke the

“Pope for resistance and opposition and repression. In fact, Fricke alone covered the issue of repression in the GDR. Fricke published what was to be said. "

In the 1990s, Fricke worked as an expert on two parliamentary enquête commissions , which dealt with the history and consequences of the SED dictatorship in Germany on the one hand and overcoming the consequences of the SED dictatorship in the process of German unity on the other . For many years Fricke was chairman of the advisory board of the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial Foundation and of the advisory board for social reappraisal of the federal foundation for coming to terms with the SED dictatorship .

Awards and honors

In 1996 the Free University of Berlin awarded him an honorary doctorate for his contributions to the history of the resistance in the GDR . In 2001 he received the Federal Cross of Merit, 1st class. In 2010 he was honored with the Hohenschönhausen Prize by the Friends of the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial .

Karl Wilhelm Fricke Prize

In June 2017, Karl Wilhelm Fricke received the Karl Wilhelm Fricke Prize , which was awarded for the first time by the Federal Foundation to Cope with the SED Dictatorship in Berlin ; it is endowed with 20,000 euros and received by his daughter. The prize was donated by Burkhart Veigel , a longtime escape helper for GDR citizens.

Fonts

Broadcasts by Karl Wilhelm Fricke in the Deutschlandfunk background

Web links

Commons : Karl Wilhelm Fricke  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Over 700 people were from the western part of Berlin in the eastern part abducted , see Falco Werkentin: Law and Justice in the SED state, 2nd edition, 1998, ISBN 3-89331-344-3
  2. ↑ See Karl Wilhelm Fricke in an interview with Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk . In: Karl Wilhelm Fricke: Obliged to the truth , Ch. Links, Berlin 2000, pp. 13-115. Excerpts available online in history concerns us 1/2006, PDF, 267 kB .
  3. ^ BStU files ZA, AOP 22/67, vol. V, sheet 207 of March 28, 1955
  4. ↑ BStU, MfS, ZA, HA II / 13-322, p. 30.
  5. ↑ Compare e.g. B. Eckhard Jesse : Democracy in Germany: Diagnoses and analyzes . Edited and introduced by Uwe Backes and Alexander Gallus, 2008, ISBN 978-3-412-20157-9 , p. 156, or: Torsten Diedrich , Hans Ehlert , Rüdiger Wenzke (eds.): In the service of the party. Handbook of the armed organs of the GDR . Ch. Links, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-86153-160-7 , p. 412.
  6. ↑ Interview by Johannes Kuppe, quoted by Jens Hüttmann: GDR history and its researchers. Actors and economic trends in West German GDR research , Metropol, Berlin 2008, p. 257, ISBN 3-938690-83-6 . Kuppe particularly refers to Fricke's publication up to 1990.
  7. ↑ Peter Sturm: Persevering . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of May 30, 2017, p. 8.
  8. ↑ memorial . Archived from the original on February 13, 2015. Retrieved October 19, 2013.
  9. ^ Karl Wilhelm Fricke Prize . Information from the Federal Foundation for Processing of the Prize and the Prize Winner, accessed on August 20, 2018
personal data
SURNAME Fricke, Karl Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German author and kidnapping victim
DATE OF BIRTH September 3, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Hoym