Who is Markus Wolf?
The following exchange between Jeffrey Herf and Markus Wolf sheds light on two important issues: First, East Germany's repression in the early 1950s of Jewish communists and communists who stressed solidarity with the survivors of the Holocaust and with the state of Israel; and second, the subsequent course of East German foreign policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict. Both phenomena have received insufficient attention in the debates about Germany and its many-sided struggle with the past. Markus Wolf was the director of the foreign intelligence branch of East Germany's Ministry of State Security, or the Stasi, as it was known. He was the model for John Le Carre's The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.
After the fall of East Germany in 1989, he was arrested and charged with treason. Wolf's father, Friedrich Wolf, was an important communist intellectual in the Weimar Republic and a highly regarded playwright. During World War II he waited out the war in the Soviet Union. Markus grew up there and went to East Germany as a young man to help build the first (and last) communist state on German soil. He was intimately involved with the making of foreign policy in East Germany, in particular in regard to spy activities in West Germany.
Although the Middle East was not his political specialty, he was certainly aware of the direction that East German foreign policy was taking as Israel and its Arab neighbors clashed diplomatically and militarily after 1948. In every vote of the United Nations, the GDR (German Democratic Republic) sided with those states who opposed Israel's policies toward the Palestinians. The GDR also openly supported. Iraq, Syria, and Egypt in their fight against Israel.
Although Wolf insists that the contacts between the Stasi foreign intelligence service and the PLO were minimal and were intended to moderate PLO terrorism, he does admit that there were contacts between the East German intelligence services and the Palestinian secret services in regard to training Palestinians for the "armed struggle." Wolf's comments make it clear that the East Germans were aware that helping train the Palestinians would make them accomplices to terrorist attacks on Israel, as well as bombings and hijackings in other parts of the world.
The issue that Herf and Wolf debate is to what extent the East German commitment to the political and military struggle of the Palestinians stood in contradiction to the proclaimed stance of East Germany as an anti-fascist state that kept alive the memory of the Holocaust and fought to serve justice to the surviving Jews of the world. In the following exchange, these and other important issues are presented from two very different perspectives, one the historical actor who had to struggle with difficult choices from a particular standpoint, the other a historian who seeks to understand the intersection of politics and the Jewish question in both German states after 1945.
I leave it to the reader to draw his or her own conclusions.
A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing?
In the course of writing a history of politics and memory in the two Germanies after 1945, I have been working in the archives of the East German Communist or Socialist Unity Party, using materials from the Stasi archives dealing with secret political trials, and reading the public record. So it was with great interest that I read Tikkun's interview with Markus Wolf (January/February 1994.) I was especially struck that the editors were impressed with his "absolute refusal to repudiate socialist ideas." I was also impressed with his ability to pull the wool over your eyes and make you look very foolish. He probably recognized your interviewer as an easy mark.
It may be that Markus Wolf joined the Stasi to hunt down former Nazis. In fact, as Wolf must know, in the 1950s, the Stasi spent much of its time hunting "counterrevolutionary" and "extremely right-wing" groups of Social Democrats, many of whom had entered the Socialist Unity Party in the late 1940s with the illusion that it was going to build a German Democratic Republic. Nothing was more devastating in postwar East Germany than to be labeled a "Nazi" or a "fascist," and many democratic socialist opponents of the East German regime were dispatched to prison in just this way.
For a journal devoted to Jewish concerns, your interviewers display a distressing lack of knowledge of the anti-Semitic purges within East Germany in the 1950s, and the suppression of communists, Jews and non-Jews, who thought East Germany should be a friend to Israel and extend its emotional and financial support to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, That Wolf tells you that "in retrospect" he can now see that anti-Semitism did exist in the Communist Party is grotesque. Government-encouraged anti-Semitism was apparent to Jews and non-Jews, at the latest, in the winter of 1952-1953. The denunciation and arrest of Paul Merker, a veteran communist and non-Jewish leading member of the SED Central Committee who spoke out on behalf of Jewish concerns, was a matter of public record at that time. Wolf did not mention the SED's campaign against Merker as an American, Zionist, and international Jewish agent that was featured in the pages of Neues Deutschland, or the flight of leading Jewish communists from the DDR in early 1953, especially Leo Zuckermann, the head of the office of East German President Wilhelm Pieck, and Julius Meyer, the leader of the Jewish community in East Berlin.
This former Stasi general also did not mention the Stasi interrogations of Merker, and the secret political trial waged against him in the East German Supreme Court in March of 1955 which resulted in a sentence for eight more years in prison on charges of being an agent of the Americans, the Israelis, and international Jewish organizations. Does Wolf think Stasi interrogators were fighting Nazism when in March 1953 they asked Merker, a life-long communist, if he "was now or had been a member of any Jewish or Zionist organizations" and when they denounced him as the "king of the Jews" and an agent of "Zionist monopoly capitalists" because during World War II he had written in support of reparations payments to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust?
By the time of Merker's arrest, and Zuckermann and Meyer's flight in January 1953, it was clear to all of the leading Jewish communists in East Germany, including presumably Markus Wolf, that the entry ticket for Jews to the political elite in the DDR was to keep your mouth shut about the Holocaust, never say a good word about Israel, and to lead in the campaign of denouncing Nazis in West Germany. How could the editors of a Jewish magazine sympathetic to socialist ideas be so abysmally ignorant of the East German suppression of communists, Jews and non-Jews, who spoke up for Jewish interests?
In time, we will see if Wolf was telling the truth when he said that "our East German intelligence operation never operated against Israel or targeted Israeli intelligence." The Stasi archives are there and historians will get at them--unless Stasi officials succeeded in shredding and burning them in the last hectic days of the DDR regime. Many documents were, in fact, destroyed. Given the well-documented involvement of the Stasi with West German terrorists, and the long-standing close ties between the East German government and Israel's most radical and violent enemies at any given time--Nasser's Egypt, the PLO, PFLP, Syria, Iraq, Sudan--Wolf's claim must be taken with more than a grain of salt. The PLO had an office in East Berlin from the 1960s on. Presumably PLO representatives were not there primarily to read Marx and Engels in the original German. There were persistent reports, the validity of which we will be better able to judge after archival research, of financial support and weapons training by the East German military of Palestinian and Arab terrorists. If, as he claims, the Stasi intelligence services were not engaged in these activities, does Wolf really want to say that all of that was "not in my department?" Why didn't your interviewer press Wolf to discuss what he knew about the anti-Israeli campaigns of the East German defense and foreign ministries?
A great deal of such activities, however, are not new discoveries. For anyone who can read German, the East German diplomatic campaign against Israel is a matter of public record. The editors of a Jewish magazine should be familiar with the already public documents of East German foreign policy from the 1950s to the 1980s. Those documents depict an unending, unwavering, and fierce hatred for Israel and Zionism, and a no less consistent public, diplomatic support for every anti-Israeli resolution to come before the United Nations. Why is it that editors of a Jewish magazine did not ask the former intelligence chief of the Stasi how he, now a Jewish-identified communist, could justify this virulent campaign against Israel? You might have asked him what would he have done if the policies of the government he loyally served had succeeded in their goal and the PLO, in its most radical and terrorist phase, had been able to translate diplomatic triumphs in the UN into tangible victories on the ground? Would he have sent his Stasi agents to the rescue? You might have asked him what business a German communist government had attacking a Jewish state after the Holocaust? What did attacking Israel and refusing to talk about the Holocaust have to do with socialist ideas? But you let the opportunity slip by.
Markus Wolf presents himself as unfamiliar with East German history, and perhaps assumes his interviewer to be equally unfamiliar with it, when he says that he "began to recognize that there was something wrong in the Stasi only in the 1970s when repression was directed against intellectuals, writers, actors, and dissidents." The repression against those sorts of people--as well as perks for the politically correct--defined the regime from the outset. Jews were especially vulnerable to the dreaded accusation of "cosmopolitanism." Any communist, Jew and non-Jew, whose commitment to socialist ideas included a focus on the Jewish catastrophe and support for the young Jewish state knew that he or she had to reckon with the surveillance of the Stasi. It strains credulity that a man such as Markus Wolf did not know this--and was not influenced by it.
The "anti-fascism" of the East German dictatorship, Markus Wolf's discovery of his Jewish identity notwithstanding, went hand in hand with anti-Semitism in the guise of anti-Zionism. Thank goodness it is gone, and thank goodness the Stasi apparatus of terror, blackmail, and character assassination is gone with it. The government Markus Wolf served so loyally never faced up to the Holocaust. Living in some political dream world and acting as if it was not composed of Germans, the DDR regime made a major contribution to the Soviet and Arab international campaign of defamation of the Jewish state--long before Likud came to power.
Though there were some Jewish communists in leading positions in the Central and East European communist governments after World War II, they were few in number and by no means a dominant political force. The image of the avenging Jew as communist secret policeman was a staple of anti-Semitism in post-1945 Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. For anti-Semites of the Right it confirmed the Nazi image of "Jewish Bolshevism." For Stalinist anti-Semites, it was an effective means of dispensing with political rivals and diverting popular anger toward the regimes onto familiar hate objects. In fact, in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe the security services were filled with tough, working-class, overwhelmingly non-Jewish, old-line Stalinists. (On the small percentage of Jews in the communist security services, see statements by Michael Checinski and Daniel Goldhagen in the "Correspondence" section of The New Republic, February 14, 1994). In East Germany, during the Merker affair, the Stasi was the loyal handmaiden of the SED's purge against that minority of communists who thought "socialist ideas" were incompatible with continued hostility toward Jews and toward Israel.
It is humanly understandable that, in your words, some "communists and Jews thought that Germany needed some heavy-handed cleansing in the decades after the Holocaust." They were wrong. Between 1933 and 1945, Germany had given the world more than enough heavy-handed cleansing. Germany needed to restore the rule of law and liberal justice, not "heavy-handed cleansing" through Stalinist political justice, conducted in public and in secret. Since the 1950s West German historians, journalists, intellectuals, and politicians, without the assistance of the Stasi, detailed the shortcomings--and some accomplishments--of West Germany's legal efforts to prosecute those accused of Nazi war crimes, and to root ex-Nazis out of prominent positions. Given the DDR's history, Markus Wolf should be asked to look more critically at his own house before throwing stones at the West Germans. Your effort to turn Markus Wolf into a persecuted victim betrays a depressingly familiar reluctance to face the dark side of the really existing communist regimes of postwar Europe. What is that if not, in your words, a product of "Cold War sloganeering?"
Elliot Neaman is assistant professor of history at the University of San Francisco.
Source Citation: Herf, Jeffrey. "A wolf in sheep's clothing? (Who is Markus Wolf?)." Tikkun 9.n4 (July-August 1994): 45(3).