Commemorating the Events of June 17, 1953

Speech by Mayor Dr. Thomas Nitzsche

Ladies and gentlemen,

I am delighted that you have gathered here today to commemorate the popular uprising of June 17, 1953. Seventy-three years have passed since tens of thousands of people in Jena and throughout East Germany rose up against the SED regime.

We are gathered here at the “Memorial to the Politically Persecuted in the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ) and in the GDR between 1945 and 1989.” We always gather on this day, the day of the 1953 popular uprising, the only day of remembrance for the crimes committed between 1945 and 1989 in our city’s calendar of commemorations. But this monument also always gives us an opportunity to look beyond June 17, 1953.

For after Germany’s liberation from National Socialism, the Soviet-occupied zone by no means entered a period of freedom. The sought-after “dictatorship of the proletariat” was linked to the suppression of dissidents and to the restriction and undermining of human rights.

The memory of the popular uprising on June 17, 1953, shaped the consciousness of this city for decades to come—not officially on the part of the GDR leadership, but in the memories of the people.

The state’s misguided wage policy had provided the spark that set off the powder keg that was the GDR. Even the change in course ordered by Stalin’s successors in the course of 1953 could no longer alter this. 

The easing of various restrictions and coercive measures—such as the reversal of the quota increases on June 11—came too late to defuse the explosive situation.

At the time, Jena was a center of the swelling mass protests in Thuringia. On June 17, 1953, columns of workers marched in a disciplined and uniform manner from the Zeiss South Plant and the Jena Glassworks on Otto-Schott-Straße to the Holzmarkt, chanting slogans such as: “Goatee, potbelly, and glasses—that’s not the will of the people!”

Their democratic demands for the resignation of the SED government, free elections, and the release of all political prisoners filled the public space. By noon, up to 25,000 demonstrators are said to have gathered at the Holzmarkt.

After a state of emergency was declared, several hundred demonstrators were arrested. Of these, 110 defendants received lengthy prison sentences.

The Jena workers’ representatives Walter Scheler and Herbert Bähmisch were each sentenced to 25 years in a labor camp. A Soviet military tribunal tried the locksmith Alfred Diener in a summary trial without a defense. He was shot on June 18, 1953, in Weimar.

Nevertheless, the nationwide social protests by industrial workers, farmers, business owners, and craftsmen in the summer of 1953 forced the communist rulers in Moscow to make significant concessions in order to stabilize the SED regime. Effective January 1, 1954, the Soviet Union waived its reparations payments and reduced the high costs of occupation.

The workers’ uprising in the southern and central districts of the GDR had, despite its suppression and the numerous victims of the terror that followed June 17, exposed the limits and illegitimacy of the existing power structures. 

It was the first spontaneous mass uprising against the apparatuses of exploitation and oppression in East Central Europe, which took on grassroots democratic characteristics in some large factories—such as the Jena Glassworks. 

On an international scale, June 17 ushered in a wave of worker and employee uprisings that spread from Poland and Hungary in 1956, Prague in 1968, the strike movement on the Polish Baltic coast in December 1970, the founding of the independent trade union Solidarność ten years later in Gdańsk, and finally to October 9, 1989, on Leipzig’s Ring.

Today, I would like to say a few more words about the uprising in Hungary 70 years ago and its impact here in Jena as well. As a result of the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU and the de-Stalinization process initiated in May 1956, reform-oriented communists in Hungary gained momentum at the expense of the Stalinists. The intellectual centers of the reform movement were the Petőfi literary clubs, where social issues were also debated. 

On October 23, a student solidarity rally in Budapest in support of the Polish October reform movement was joined by numerous citizens. When shots were fired at the demonstrators from the radio building, the crowd stormed the building.

That evening, 200,000 people gathered in front of the Parliament in Budapest, demanding free elections, freedom of the press, and the return of the ousted reformist communist Imre Nagy. The next day, the uprising spread to other cities.

One of the first official acts of Imre Nagy, who had just been appointed prime minister, was to dissolve the hated secret police. This was followed by the formation of a multiparty government, the “Hungarian Revolutionary Workers’ and Peasants’ Government,” the lifting of press censorship, and negotiations with the Red Army regarding the withdrawal of troops. 

When Hungary declared its neutrality and withdrew from the Eastern Bloc’s military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, the Red Army occupied Hungary on November 4 and installed János Kádár, who was loyal to Moscow, as prime minister.

During the fighting, which lasted until November 15, 2,500 Hungarians were killed, along with 720 Soviet soldiers, according to official figures. Despite the promise of immunity from prosecution that had been given to Imre Nagy, he was sentenced to death and executed.

The Hungarian uprising was also closely and hopefully watched in the GDR by those eager for reform. In Berlin, students at Humboldt University expressed solidarity with the Hungarian people. However, the SED leadership under Ulbricht quickly put an end to all reform efforts. 
Wolfgang Harich was arrested in November and Walter Janka in December; both received long prison sentences.

There were also reactions to the uprising in Hungary in Jena. The ballroom of the student cafeteria on Philosophenweg, where the Physicists’ Ball took place on November 30, 1956, had been decorated in the Hungarian national colors. 

During the cabaret performance at the ball, in front of an audience of about 400, the performers alluded to the suppression of the uprising. For example, an actor referred to a leash used to lead a dog onto the stage as a “bond of friendship.” The SED used precisely this term to describe the relationship between the GDR and the Soviet Union. The trained dog dropped a piece of paper into a ballot box—which was meant as an allusion to the local elections that had taken place on October 10, 1956.

The chanted slogan “Freedom for GDR citizens!”—which the SED had issued on behalf of imprisoned GDR citizens in the Federal Republic—took on a meaning undesirable to the SED due to its double entendre.

The physicists’ evening caused quite a stir within the SED party apparatus. Party officials at the university had watched the program and, rather than intervening, had applauded. Numerous reports, disavowals, and declarations of loyalty followed. After demands were made to expel the responsible students from the university, professors also sided with the ball’s organizers. 

Although students at the Chemists’ Ball were reprimanded for a less offensive skit, the physicists were not. In this situation, the SED refrained from taking disciplinary action. One eyewitness described this as the birth of solidarity-based civil courage.

Nevertheless, the Physicists’ Ball had legal repercussions in the trials against, among others, the members of the Eisenberg Circle in 1958—a regime-critical alliance from the 1950s. Students from Jena who were part of this circle described, among other things, freight cars bearing anti-communist slogans following the Hungarian Uprising and were convicted for this, as well as for their participation in the Physikerball. There were 24 arrests and convictions totaling 114 years in prison.

A reformist socialist circle, which had formed in Jena in 1956 around Werner Nöckel and Günter Zehm at the University’s Institute of History and Institute of Philosophy, supported a 10-point program calling for greater democracy and political liberalization within the FDJ and the SED. They, too, drew inspiration from the reform movements that year in Hungary. After the group was crushed by the State Security, Zehm was arrested in 1957 and sentenced to four years in prison; Nöckel received a sentence of three and a half years.

The Soviet-aligned communist regime in Hungary had asserted itself in 1956, just as the GDR regime had done in 1953. 

Yet it was clear to both sides—the people and those in power—what is possible when one stands up courageously and resolutely for one’s own rights, and what is at stake when oppression becomes too severe. Time and again, resistance flared up over the following decades until the communist regimes collapsed in 1989.

The people’s uprising on June 17, 1953, required courage and determination, without which the Peaceful Revolution of 1989 would not have been possible either. A box here at the memorial symbolically commemorates that uprising. We also find boxes here bearing the inscriptions:

1956 Hungary
1954 Eisenberg District
November 30, 1956 Physicists’ Ball
December 6, 1956 Walter Janka
Werner Nöckel

Each of the boxes here at the memorial represents resistance in very different forms against the communist regimes in the GDR, Hungary, and other Eastern European countries. They stand for courageous people who stood up for freedom without regard for personal reprisals.

The fact that people continue to visit this memorial—regardless of commemorative dates—whether they are participants in themed city tours, study groups, or relatives and friends of victims who lay flowers here or light an eternal flame—shows that the process of remembering and coming to terms with the era of the GDR dictatorship is not yet complete.

Let us keep these memories alive and take them as a reminder and an example for our political actions today, for our commitment to a civic, liberal democracy in which respect for human rights is firmly anchored.

“To all those whose human dignity was violated, to the persecuted who stood up courageously for democracy and human rights against the communist dictatorship”—so reads the inscription on the metal plaque here in front of the memorial.

In memory of the victims of the popular uprising on June 17, 1953, the uprising in Hungary 70 years ago, and the other victims of the communist dictatorship, I now ask you to join me in a minute of silence.