We are blessed to have many poignant movies about the Nazis and the atrocities committed in concentration camps. As the years tick by and those who lived through those unimaginable experiences slip between the pages of history, I thank God that history has been preserved in books and film.Because it’s too close to the hearts of those in Hollywood.
In contrast, I find the lack of movies about East Germany (or any country behind the Iron Curtain for that matter) rather telling. It is not for absence of living witnesses or data. It is merely a lack of will to even touch the subject. When the president of the United States snubs the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, maybe it is best to just not go there. Encouraging Americans to think about the mind-boggling amount of resources required to maintain the socialist utopia might cause them to question the entire concept of socialism.
The Hungarian government decided that they would open their border to Austria, taking down their barbed wire section of the Iron Curtain . It permitted east block citizens to simply “walk off the rez” to freedom and away from Marxist-Leninism. Never mind the Marxist-Leninist sympathies they were stepping straight into, and how the failure of Communism would undercut their control fantasies about man, or delusions that in Socialism there is freedom. Morons.
Ordinary Berliners on both sides of the now-derelict Wall were certainly excited over the prospect of unity, but the city's opinion-makers were often blase or even hostile toward the project. It became fashionable among the leftist intelligentsia of West Berlin to condemn the easterners' longing for unification as a lamentable submission to the lure of Western materialism.
East Berlin itself had three Stasi prisons, each of them a hellhole where torture was a regular part of the "reeducation" process. In a report on his incarceration at Berlin-Pankow and Rummelsburg in the early 1970s, Timo Zilli, an Italian-born socialist, described a regimen of daily beatings, weeks of solitary confinement in a windowless cell, and hours of being hanged by his wrists with his feet barely touching the floor. A Jewish prisoner in Pankow who had spent five years in a Nazi concentration camp made the mistake of addressing his guards as "SS-Gestapo" and giving them the Hitler salute. As the guards beat him senseless, they shouted: "You Jewish swine think you can put on such a show because the Nazis let you survive.... We'll finish the job."
GDR-Children of Namibia are a group of approximately 400 black Namibian children that grew up in GDR. During the liberation struggle of SWAPO against South African occupation of Namibia they were relocated from 1979 onwards from various refugee camps to GDR and only came back in 1990 at the onset of Namibian independence. They were mostly unprepared for their return.As recently as 2005, they have appeared on the German media radar. Where some would think that their fate in return would have been impossible, they overlook the nature of traditional German culture of faith and compassion: their transition back to Namibia as young adults was enabled by the ethnic Germans of Namibia.
In autumn 1989, as Germany rejoiced at the end of the country's 40-year division, many of the students at the "High-School of Friendship" in Stassfurt, near Magdeburg, felt their hearts sink.What began as an airlift of refugees was exploited by the East German regime as an opportunity to construct the elite of what they hoped would be a nascent pre-Soviet Namibia colonized by Marxist-Leninism.
For over 400 children and teenagers dispatched to East Germany from Namibia over the previous decade, the collapse of communism meant one thing: an uncertain future in a country they could barely remember.
Erich Honecker's government earmarked what it called "Solidarity Funds" to support the Marxist movement with aid and military supplies, and also hatched a plan intended to be of political and military benefit to both countries. But 1990 marked an abrupt end to the Party-led project to take in and educate Namibian children, with the ultimate aim of creating an elite class to lead the SWAPO liberation movement.Their fate, it seems was mixed.
The self-proclaimed "Ossi" Africans -- referring to the nickname for eastern Germans -- have experienced mixed fates. Some are now working as lawyers and businessmen, while Lucia herself is training as a journalist. Some, though, were less fortunate. And few returned to live in Germany.
East German largesse has been concentrated on Nicaragua, where the revolution last year provided an obvious target of political opportunity. Barely a week after Dictator Anastasio Somoza had fled the country, East German medical and economic assistance teams were in Managua establishing an early foothold. As one East German doctor admitted at the time: "We do not leave political considerations aside." Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Miguel d'Escoto has called the GDR a "natural ally" of the Sandinista revolution,A 1980 Time Magazine article illustrated plainly to an international audience something we had suspected seeing around us: to the Soviets, the DDR was to Europe what the Cubans were to Latin America - only more effective.
Why the East Germans? Originally, Western analysts believe, their ambitious foreign role was motivated by a national inferiority complex, as a denigrated political offspring of the Soviet Union and a poor industrial also-ran compared with West Germany. The emerging countries and the liberation movements thus afforded the "other" Germany its first international acceptance and prestige. The East Germans eventually proved to be more diplomatic than the Soviets, who frequently antagonize their Third World hosts with chafing arrogance, and more efficient than the Cubans, who do not enjoy the same reputation for reliability and know-how. Concluded a U.S. intelligence analyst: "The Cubans provide bodies. The East Germans provide brains."As well they did. What the article didn't touch on was the building or organizing of intelligence apparatus by the Stasi in Yemen, Libya, Nicaragua, Cambodia, and among revolutionary organizations such as the PLO, SWAPO in Namibia, and others.
DFS 904 was a propaganda station from east germany in the cold war. These messages, sent during night, were absolutely nonsense and were intended to pretend it was an underground station operated by banned communists in western germany. On a website I found *exactly* this messages as an example mp3.
