Light (secret operation)

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Licht or Aktion Licht was a secret operation carried out by the Ministry for State Security of the GDR in 1962 and from which Stasi employees confiscated or confiscated valuables and documents in financial institutions, archives and museum depots across the country. The GDR sold a considerable part of these on the western market for the purpose of procuring foreign currency . The Licht campaign marks the beginning of the MfS's systematic search for valuables with the aim of utilizing them. Recipients rated the action as criminal and robbery.

description

planning

The SED commissioned the Ministry for State Security with the planning and implementation of the light campaign . Erich Mielke , Minister for State Security, thereupon ordered in a letter of December 20, 1961 the identification and seizure of "previously improperly registered valuables that are public property". To plan the details of the action, Mielke invited the heads of the Stasi district administrations to a meeting on January 3, 1962. He also informed them that the action had been coordinated with Erich Honecker . MfS employee Heinz Volpert was also significantly involved in the planning of the campaign . The preparations of the action, it was one that Mielke in coordination with the SED leader Walter Ulbricht , the banking secrecy abrogated.

First stage

The action was initially on the weekend 6./7. Performed January 1962. At night, Stasi employees in former and current bank and savings bank buildings opened and searched them - sometimes under the pretext of an inspection - such safes and safe deposit boxes that had remained untouched since the end of the Second World War . In order to gain access to the buildings, lockers and safes, the Stasi employees picked up the key holders of the banks from home without giving any reason and asked them to open. The Stasi employees requisitioned jewelry and paintings, partly from the property of refugees from East Germany , as well as Jews derive, in the era of National Socialism had fled and killed. They also took away documents and files from that time. On that weekend, the Stasi searched around 3,000 financial buildings throughout the GDR and removed the contents of tens of thousands of lockers and safes.

Second stage

After Mielke had judged the operation to be successful in view of the looted objects and documents, he ordered the continuation and expansion of the light campaign . In a second stage, all the places where valuables from the period up to 1945 were probably kept had to be searched. On January 9, 1962, Mielke ordered that all measures should be carried out with "operational prudence and prudence, with constant adherence to the conspiracy". Stasi employees were then asked to use special tools to break into safes and safes that could not be opened so far, and to include bank buildings in the search that had been used for other purposes since the Second World War or were in a ruinous condition. Mielke also ordered objects to be searched whose ownership structure was unclear; these include objects belonging to the Deutsche Post, the Deutsche Reichsbahn, former large companies, old palaces, castles, museums and the residences of former company managers, landowners, National Socialists and war criminals ; underground facilities such as buried tunnels in former mines. In addition, religious sites such as churches and monasteries should also be searched. Among the buildings to be searched included the hunting lodge Augustusburg , where earlier the Gauführerschule the NSDAP had its headquarters.

Looted items and documents

Mielke's preliminary final report on the campaign was dated July 11, 1962 and went to Walter Ulbricht and GDR Finance Minister Willy Rumpf , among others . The total value of the valuables was provisionally estimated at DM 4.1 million, but the documents found are not mentioned. In autumn 1962 the looted items were handed over to the safe management of the GDR Ministry of Finance . The handover protocol is dated October 13, 1962 and lists the type and quantity of items on over 100 pages. A first subset of the booty was immediately released for sale. According to the handover protocol, objects with a total value of 2.37 million DM were looted during the campaign light . At around 1.4 million DM, jewelry and precious stones make up the largest part of it in terms of value. The items also included postage stamps with a value of approx. DM 0.6 million as well as paintings, graphics, cutlery, coins, plaques, glass and porcelain goods. It also contained over 1000 savings books from the Nazi era. During the action, documents about former National Socialists were also found, including NSDAP party books and awards, personnel files on functionaries and informers from the NSDAP and the Gestapo .

On February 23, 1971, the MfS noted in writing about the result of the light campaign :

“The confiscated items were both private property and assets of the fascist state. Here the possibility is not excluded that foreign property, stolen by fascist institutions, got into the confiscated mass. "

- Ministry of State Security

Aftermath in the GDR

Even before the Aktion Licht , Erich Mielke had attracted the attention of the SED party leadership through investigations against former National Socialists and war criminals . For Walter Ulbricht, the success of Aktion Licht was ultimately the decisive factor in transferring sole responsibility for the "operational processing" of the National Socialist past to Erich Mielke.

Until the 1980s, the State Security strictly ensured that, apart from the few initiated, no one found out about the scope of the Licht campaign . After the Stasi discovered in 1971 by chance that a bank in Schwerin had consignment notes on which the transfer of found objects from the Licht Aktion to the MfS 1962 is noted, in 1971 they checked the files in all the financial institutions that they had in 1962 as part of the action had visited.

reception

In a recommendation for a resolution in 1993, an investigative committee of the German Bundestag assessed Aktion Licht as a “forerunner of the exploitation of art and antiques in western foreign countries on a state basis” and thus also as a forerunner of the Kunst und Antiquitäten GmbH founded in 1973 , which belonged to the area of commercial coordination . The lawyer Ulf Bischof summarized the campaign Licht 2003 as “the first large-scale search by the MfS for valuables for the purpose of subsequent utilization” and called it a night-and-fog campaign . In an article for the magazine Horch und Guck (2003), the author Reinhard Dobrinski judged Aktion Licht as a raid and a kind of state crime. The creators of the action had given it "a semblance of legality" by emphasizing "its origins from the time of fascism or the property of 'long dead people'". In his book Schatzräuber (2000), the journalist Andreas Förster expressed his conviction that those responsible in the GDR had committed a “clear violation of the law” with the campaign light , also because by selling the stolen items they violated the 1953 ordinance passed by the GDR would have violated for the protection of German art possessions.

On September 1, 2017, a two-year research project on the loss of cultural property in the Soviet occupation zone and in the GDR began at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarian Research at the TU Dresden . The scientific processing of Aktion Licht forms the central content of the project.

literature

Further:

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Felber et al .: Stasi raid 50 years ago , BStU , approx. 2012, accessed on July 30, 2017
  2. ↑ a b Förster 2016, p. 13 f.
  3. ↑ Bischof 2003, p. 350 f.
  4. ↑ Förster 2016, pp. 13-16
  5. ↑ Bischof 2003, p. 352 f.
  6. ↑ a b c Bischof 2003, p. 353
  7. ↑ Förster 2016, p. 16 f.
  8. ↑ Förster 2016, p. 23 f.
  9. ↑ Förster 2016, p. 24
  10. ↑ Förster 2016, p. 25
  11. ↑ a b Förster 2016, p. 31
  12. ↑ Förster 2016, p. 21 f.
  13. ↑ Förster 2016, p. 30 f.
  14. ↑ Bischof 2003, p. 354
  15. ↑ Third partial report on the practices of the area of ​​commercial coordination in the procurement and utilization of works of art and antiques , German Bundestag , 12th electoral period, printed matter 12/4500 of March 15, 1993, p. 11, accessed at [1] on Sep 29 . 2017
  16. ^ Bishop 2003, p. 360
  17. ↑ Dobrinski 2003, p. 56
  18. ^ The MfS campaign “Light” 1962. (No longer available online.) Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism , September 11, 2017, archived from the original on October 6, 2017 ; accessed on October 6, 2017 . 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. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.hait.tu-dresden.de