Securitate

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The Securitate (officially Departamentul Securității Statului , German Department for State Security) was from 1948 in Romania at the same time intelligence service and secret police . When it was dissolved in 1990, there were an estimated 40,000 official and 400,000 unofficial employees.

history

The system of repression in Romania until 1989

It was founded by Decree No. 221/30 on August 30, 1948. According to the decree, the official task of the service was “to protect the democratic achievements and guarantee the security of the Romanian People's Republic against all external and internal enemies”. The members were primarily recruited from Romanian communists, initially many agents of the former Royal Secret Police DGPS (Direcția Generală a Poliției de Siguranță) were included. Under the rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu , children from orphanages were also recruited for service in the Presidential Guard. The head of the Securitate was initially the NKVD Lieutenant General Gheorghe Pintilie (real name: Panteleimon Bondarenko ). His deputies, the NKVD Major General Alexandru Nicolschi (real name: Boris Grünberg) and the Soviet officer Vladimir Mazuru (real name: Vladimir Mazurow) had the upper hand in all decisions.

Over time, the organization developed a great deal of brutality. For example, an experiment was carried out in a prison camp in Piteşti that induced inmates to torture and murder their cellmates. A general mood of fear was created in waves of purges, deportations , re-education measures and show trials . The repression has killed an estimated 200,000 people.

After Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej came to power , the Securitate was also used for internal cleansing . Nicolae Ceaușescu then had the secret service oriented strictly nationally and "cleared" it of Soviet agents . Through a connection between the organization and the Ministry of the Interior and the party, it developed into an omnipresent control body that no longer acted with overt terror , but rather acted subtly against individuals or groups. The way in which opponents of the regime were brought to so-called “ psychiatric institutions ” was notorious .

In 1990 the Securitate was dissolved, the successor organization is the Romanian Information Service (SRI, Serviciul român de informații). What role the organization played in the revolution in December 1989 and the later protests of the Romanian miners, the so-called Mineriades , is still unclear. According to Romanian newspaper reports, there were a large number of Ceaușescu opponents within the service. This part of the Securitate had apparently prepared an elimination of Ceaușescu, which could not be implemented according to plan due to the precipitous events surrounding the Timisoara pastor László Tőkés and the Romanian Revolution in 1989 .

The investigation of the acts and crimes of the Securitate began very slowly in democratic Romania, in contrast to other Eastern European countries. It was not until the Emil Constantinescu government that a law was passed that, similar to the principle of the German authority of the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR , allows citizens to inspect the files of the secret service.

According to estimates by Romanian scientists, 500 to 2000 employees of the former Romanian secret service have so far been living undisturbed in Germany (as of 2010). The Nobel Prize for Literature Laureate Herta Müller criticizes the failures of the German law enforcement authorities in this regard. She herself was repeatedly the target and victim of harassment, threats and investigations by the Securitate.

structure

organization structure

  • Counter-Espionage Directorate
  • Prison Directorate
  • General Directorate for Technology
  • Homeland Security Directorate
  • National Visa Commission
  • Directorate of the Security Forces
  • Militia Directorate
  • Directorate V (Personal Protection)

Social structure

In February 1949, of 3,553 Securitate employees, 64 percent were workers, 28 percent civil servants, 2 percent intellectuals, 4 percent peasants and 2 percent professional revolutionaries. In terms of political affiliation, 95 percent were members of the Communist Party, 5 percent were non-party. According to gender, 88 percent were men and 12 percent women. Regarding ancestry, 83 percent of all cadres were Romanians, 10 percent Jews, 6 percent Hungarians, and 1 percent other minorities. Of 60 officers, 63 percent were Romanians, 25 percent Jews, 5 percent Hungarians, 3.5 percent Ukrainians, and 3.5 percent Armenians and Czechs. The proportion of Jewish members in the Securitate was relatively high in relation to their percentage of the total population (only 2 - 2.5 percent).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ clubuldeistorieregelecarol (PDF file, 212 kB), Instaurarea regimului comunist în România: tranziţia spre totalitarism
  2. ↑ www.stiftung-hsh.de ( Memento from October 29, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), event from May 30, 2012 at the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial
  3. ↑ swr.de , Interview of the ARD Report Mainz with the author from January 19, 2010
  4. ↑ edoc.ub.uni-muenchen.de (PDF file; 1.8 MB), Daniela Oancea: Myths and the past. Romania after the reunification. Inaugural dissertation from the Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich 2005, p. 62.