Wolfgang Welsch (escape helper)

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Wolfgang Welsch in April 2010 in Trier

Wolfgang Welsch (born March 5, 1944 in Berlin ) was a political prisoner in the GDR and then an escape helper . In 1981 the former GDR dissident and resistance fighter against the SED dictatorship barely survived several assassinations by agents of the Ministry for State Security . Today he works as a publicist and political scientist.

Life

Welsch grew up in a bourgeois Christian family in East Berlin . During school he took acting lessons and worked a. a. with Wolf Biermann at the Berlin Workers' and Student Theater (bat). After graduating from high school and completing an acting training with Marie Borchardt , he got engagements at DEFA and the Deutsches Theater , as well as a sponsorship contract with the German television broadcaster .

Resistance fighters in the GDR

After an unsuccessful attempt to escape from the GDR near Boizenburg on May 22, 1964, Wolfgang Welsch was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment and served this in the Stasi prison in Berlin-Pankow, in the Bautzen prison and in the Brandenburg prison . There he was mistreated by members of the Ministry for State Security and then by other prisoners in Bautzen. On the initiative of the lawyer Wolfgang Vogel , Welsch was released early from prison in 1966. He turned down the offer to travel to the Federal Republic because he was planning a film about his experiences and the GDR system. Working title 'Discite moniti'.

He began working as an assistant at DEFA and, at the same time, with two friends, shooting a documentary against the SED regime. He used his own records from his imprisonment, which he was able to smuggle out of prison through his mother. Welsch was arrested again after treason. Since the Ministry for State Security had not yet found out that he had started filming, Welsch was only convicted of preparing a " Hetz film". The sentence was five years imprisonment for high treason.

After his second arrest came by his own admission in addition to torture and to isolation and to a mock execution to make confessed to the prisoners. In addition, he survived eight days and nights wearing only underwear in an "ice cell" in freezing temperatures. In the courtroom, after the verdict was pronounced, Welsch accused the public prosecutor of methods from the Third Reich that had turned a GDR citizen who no longer wanted to live in the GDR into a resistant public enemy.

In 1971, Nova was one of the political prisoners at the initiative of Willy Brandt ransomed were. He studied political science and sociology at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen and received his doctorate in 1977 with a dissertation on the Ministry for State Security (MfS). The title of the dissertation is "Working method, task and objectives of the Ministry for State Security of the GDR", Helge Pross was a doctoral mother.

Help to escape and attempted murder

At the same time, Welsch began to set up a refugee organization which, according to his list, helped 220 people to escape from the GDR . He attached great importance to people with highly qualified professions such as doctors, scientists, etc. The like. To do so as much damage as possible to the GDR at the same time. As a result of his escape assistance activities, he was again targeted by the Stasi. There followed assassinations on Welsch, which had been ordered by Erich Mielke .

First, a bomb was placed in his car in West Germany. The explosive device exploded, Welsch survived injured. After this attempt failed, his now good friend Peter Haack, who was specially assigned to Welsch by the Stasi, lured him to England, where a sniper shot him while driving on the motorway. At that moment, however, Welsch leaned down to pick up his dropped pipe, causing the bullet to just miss him. There is a photo in which Welsch and Haack then stand perplexed in front of the completely splintered windshield of their delivery van.

After all, while on vacation in Israel in 1981 , Haack was supposed to kill Welsch's family with thallium , a rare, tasteless and odorless poison. He administered it in a multi-fatal dose in homemade meatballs while eating together while camping. Welsch's daughter hardly ate anything, and his wife vomited extensively that evening and was therefore unharmed. Welsch only barely survived after a month-long period of extreme pain, which is characteristic of thallium poisoning. West German toxicologists , after searching in vain for the cause, initially thought him to be a simulator and finally sent him home. They only recognized the poisoning during a subsequent laboratory examination. Haack disappeared after this event. He sent another postcard from Argentina , written with scrawly letters , that said he was feeling bad. It was only after the fall of the Berlin Wall that Welsch found out the truth about his alleged friend through his Stasi files , that it was the IM "Alfons" who had been assigned to him by the Stasi and that he was now living under a false name in the Federal Republic of Germany.

The case of Bernd Moldenhauer , in which - as in Welsch's case - a close confidante of the victim became a murderer on behalf of the Stasi proves that Stasi employees actually successfully implemented killing plans in the West .

Welsch's wife at the time, who helped him with his escape aid activities, made extensive statements to the Bulgarian authorities after her arrest during an escape aid operation and revealed important details and names.

After the fall of the wall

In 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall , Welsch pushed through the prosecution. His alleged friend Haack was convicted of a poison bomber and sentenced in 1994 to six and a half years in prison for attempted murder. His former Stasi officer in charge, Heinz Fiedler, hanged himself on December 15, 1993 in pretrial detention in Moabit prison , which meant that the actual commanding officers - including MfS Minister Erich Mielke - could no longer be held accountable for lack of a main witness.

Because of serious death threats, Welsch went abroad from 1992 to 1994, including to Costa Rica . Wolfgang Welsch lives as a freelance author and journalist in Sinsheim .

Welsch's book Ich war Staatsfeind Nr. 1 was filmed in 2004 under the title The Sting of the Scorpion and directed by Stephan Wagner . However, the book was also criticized: In some cases, the handling of not unimportant details is rather lax, or the events he describes could not have happened or are at least very unlikely. However, Welsch said he had heard similar critical statements from journalists in his book shortly after the fall of the Wall when he wanted to publicize the story of the poison attack described above. Journalists at Spiegel magazine , for example, would have described him as implausible and a fantasy because the Stasi would not have done anything like that.

Awards

Publications

  • Repression and torture of MfS detainees on remand. In: Lothar Mertens & Dieter Voigt (ed.): Victims and perpetrators in the SED state. Duncker and Humblot, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-42809-4220 , p. 110 ff.
  • Resistance and Stasi in the SED state. Consequences and consequences. Schmidt-Pohl, Schwerin 1999, ISBN 3-93440-602-5
  • Legal action. Poems against the dictatorship. Schmidt-Pohl, Schwerin 2000, ISBN 3-934406-03-3
  • I was public enemy number 1. Escape helper on the Stasi death list. Eichborn, Frankfurt 2001, ISBN 3-8218-1676-7 ; 4th revised edition: The Sting of the Scorpion. I was Public Enemy No. 1. Piper, Munich / Zurich 2004, ISBN 3-492-24281-2
  • The transfigured dictatorship. The repressed resistance against the SED state. Helios, Aachen 2009, ISBN 978-3-938208-93-9
  • In the mirror of time. Readers Digest 655, Stuttgart, Zurich, Vienna 2002, ISBN 3-87070-982-0
  • Radiations in Dark Time. Edited by J. Schmidt-Pohl, Schwerin 2002, ISBN 3-934406-05-X
  • The forgotten victims of the wall. Ed. H. Knabe, List, 2009, co-author, ISBN 978-3548608839
  • In the vicious circle of trauma in: Trauma & Violence. Edited by Seidler / Freyberger / Maerker, 2009
  • Unbearable trivialization, in: Komma, Magazin f. christl. Culture. Hg MM, Aachen 2009
  • Trouble with the truth. Remscheid 2009, ISBN 978-3-86870-127-2
  • My resistance against the SED state. 2nd DVD, History TV / OEZ, Berlin 2010
  • I was public enemy No. 1. Acting, commissioned by Theater Trier, world premiere in 2010
  • From a distant land, poems. Remscheid 2011, ISBN 978-3-86870-402-0
  • The state as a violent criminal in: Psychoanalysis, texts on social research. Volume 16, H2 (29) 2012
  • I was Public Enemy No. 1. Audiobook at Audible / Amazon, 2013
  • Peaceful revolution and democracy. Edited by Jesse / Schubert, Ch. Links Berlin, 2015, co-author, ISBN 978-3-86153-834-9
  • I was Public Enemy No. 1. 9th edition Piper Munich, Zurich 2015, ISBN 978-3-492-26167-8

literature

  • Paul Gerhard Klussmann & Frank Hoffmann (eds.): The victims of the SED dictatorship. Powerlessness and protest. Institute for German Research at the Ruhr University Bochum, 1998, ISBN 3-93422-700-7 (documentation of a colloquium with Welsch as a participant)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www.merkur.de/lokales/dachau/dachau/wolfgang-welsch-staatsfeind-berichtung-dachauer-schuelern-ueber-sein-martyrium-1481242.html
  2. ^ Escape helper and Stasi victim Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Welsch visiting the A ( Memento from May 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ http://www.gymnasium-wasserburg.de/de/unterricht/geschichte/projekte/2013welsch/
  4. ^ Search for contemporary witnesses: Dr. Wolfgang Welsch accessed on www.ddr-zeitzeuge.de on January 14, 2014
  5. ↑ Homepage of Dr. Wolfgang Welsch ( memento from June 20, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) accessed on www.wolfgang-welsch.com on January 14, 2014
  6. ^ Klaus Marxen , Gerhard Werle : Criminal Justice and GDR Injustice. Volume 6, De Gruyter Recht, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-89949-344-3 , p. 224.
  7. ↑ a b Bayern3: Wolfgang Welsch, GDR public enemy no. 1. (No longer available online.) November 5, 2009, formerly in the original ; Retrieved November 25, 2009 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.br-online.de
  8. ↑ With credibility problems - The trained actor as a self-promoter, review by Detlef Kühn in the FAZ, May 21, 2001
  9. ↑ public enemy no. 1 review of Joachim Nawrocki in time, no. 34/2001
  10. ^ RNZ Nachrichten: Wolfgang Welsch receives the Robert Schuman Medal
personal data
SURNAME Welsch, Wolfgang
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German political scientist, journalist, former escape helper and resistance fighter against the SED dictatorship, target of assassinations by the GDR state security
DATE OF BIRTH March 5, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin