Commemoration of June 17, 1953

To commemorate the events of June 17, 1953, interested people, schoolchildren, contemporary witnesses and representatives of the city as well as city council members paid tribute today at the memorial in Gerbergasse. Lord Mayor Dr. Thomas Nitzsche gave a speech, which is reproduced here:

"The memory of the popular uprising on June 17, 1953 shaped the consciousness of this city for the following decades, not officially on the part of the GDR government, but in the memory of the people.

Thousands marched through the city to Holzmarkt. There were riots and devastation in public buildings, which could only be stopped by the deployment of Soviet tanks. Arrests were made and Alfred Diener was shot by summary execution the following day.

Even though the GDR regime had prevailed, both sides, the people and those in power, were aware of what was possible and what threatened to happen if the repression became too strong.

The events in Jena were part of GDR-wide processes. These, in turn, were also the result of the bloc disputes after the end of the Second World War. It is important to place the uprising at the beginning of the 1950s in the context of the extremely hardened camp confrontation between East and West, which escalated dramatically not only on the Korean peninsula. It also led to the brink of war in the middle of Europe, the battlefields of which would undoubtedly have been the two German states.

At the end of the 1940s, diplomatic efforts to achieve unity failed over the question of what conditions had to be created in order to conclude a peace treaty with Germany. The basic consensus on how to deal with the militarily defeated and occupied German Reich, which had been painstakingly negotiated by the victorious Allied powers in Yalta and Potsdam, finally collapsed.

In order to force the Allied Control Council to resume its work, Soviet troops blocked access to the three western occupation zones of Greater Berlin in 1948, which led to the solidarity of a large majority of the West German population with the Western Allied troops and institutions, which they had previously met in many places with distance, even as "enemy powers".

In view of the directly perceived threat to their freedom from "the Russians", most West Germans and West Berliners now saw the Western occupiers as protecting powers.

However, the integration into the Western European economic area and, in the short term, into a European Defense Community and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization pursued by the first federal government under Konrad Adenauer (CDU) found notable critics both in the CDU and among politicians from the largest opposition party, the SPD, as well as in the non-parliamentary sphere. It was striking that no member of parliament from the Chancellor's party disagreed with the CDU's Ernst Lemmer when, in an emphatic speech, he described 1952 as "the date for the historical division of Germany".

From this, Lemmer drew the logical conclusion that the people in the GDR would pay the price for the Westward integration of the Federal Republic.

Washington supported Adenauer's course. The American administrations under Presidents Truman and Eisenhower pursued a dual strategy in the heart of Europe between 1950 and 1953. On the one hand, they publicly advocated the restoration of German unity through free elections in the whole of Germany; on the other, the CIA acted on GDR territory.

The US foreign intelligence service prepared terrorist attacks, which has been proven since 2013, among others by Frank Döbert, who published an article in "Gerbergasse 18" about the infiltration of so-called "sleepers" by the CIA against the backdrop of June 17.

These "stay-behind groups" formed a paramilitary secret organization that had over 550 agents throughout the GDR at the beginning of 1953, including eight groups in Thuringia alone. One V-man group operated in the Jena area under the cover name "Wiesel". In the event of war, they were supposed to carry out acts of sabotage in the rear of the Russian troops, including assassinations.

The Soviet hegemonic power in Central Eastern Europe had over half a million soldiers stationed in the GDR in 1952. In April, Stalin declared that the "pacifist period" was now also over for East Germany. The Soviet Union supplied the GDR with heavy weapons and imposed an ambitious armaments program, which also included the construction of submarines and bombers.

At the beginning of the 1950s, the GDR spent more than 8% of its national income on its own armaments and on the costs of occupying and stationing Russian troops. In the Federal Republic of Germany it was hardly less.

The immensely rising costs of re-equipping the national economy for the energy sector and heavy industry tore large holes in the state budget of the GDR. These were to be shifted onto the shoulders of the working population in urban and rural areas by turning the tax screw, concealed price increases in the state trade organization HO and reductions in real wages.

Subsidized ration cards were withdrawn from GDR citizens with businesses or jobs in West Berlin as well as all self-employed people and their families. For those affected, the cost of food increased by up to 120 percent. There were around two million people who from then on had to rely on the more expensive and at the same time inadequate range of goods in the HO stores.

Income and trade taxes were increased and the self-employed and freelancers were excluded from the general state health insurance scheme.

In the countryside, the few remaining large family farms were liquidated and small and medium-sized farmers began to join together in agricultural production cooperatives with varying degrees of coercion. Between 1952 and June 17, around 15,000 farmers left the GDR.

Assets amounting to 335 million marks were confiscated from private wholesalers and the non-state transportation industry.

Moscow did not fail to notice that workers in the GDR companies were complaining about the persistently low wages and rising cost of living and that local strikes had been flaring up repeatedly since the fall of 1952. The Soviet leadership made concessions to the SED leadership in April 1953, but this did nothing to change the general course of forced rearmament and militarization of East German society and the formation of a camouflaged army. This was because the barracked People's Police, which had been set up in the summer of 1952, already had a strength of 113,000 men in the early summer of 1953.

In this tense situation, the SED leadership decided in May 1953 to increase working standards in state-owned industry by 10%. Performance wages were to be introduced in all branches of industry considered important for national defense.

Many workers feared that this would be a cold way of reintroducing piecework wages. At the same time, their experience told them that production disruptions were the order of the day due to the constant shortage of energy and materials. This made any fair calculation of performance wages an illusionary undertaking from the outset.

The state's misguided wage policy provided the fuel that caused the GDR powder keg to explode. Even the change of course ordered by Stalin's successors could not change this. The easing of various restrictions and coercive measures, such as the withdrawal of standard increases on June 11, came too late to defuse the explosive situation.

Jena formed a center of the swelling mass protests in Thuringia. On June 17, 1953, columns of workers marched in a disciplined and unified manner from the Zeiss-Südwerk and the Jena glassworks in Otto-Schott-Straße to Holzmarkt, chanting: "Goatee, belly and glasses - are 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. At midday, up to 25,000 demonstrators are said to have gathered on the Holzmarkt.

After a state of emergency was declared, several hundred demonstrators were arrested. Of these, 110 defendants received long prison sentences. The Jena employee representatives Walter Scheler and Herbert Bähmisch were each sentenced to 25 years in a labor camp. The locksmith Alfred Diener was sentenced by a Soviet military tribunal without a defense in summary proceedings. He was shot in Weimar on June 18, 1953.

The nationwide social protests by industrial workers, farmers, tradesmen and craftsmen in the summer of 1953 forced the communist rulers in Moscow to make significant concessions in order to stabilize the SED regime.

On January 1, 1954, the Soviet Union waived its reparations payments and returned the Soviet joint-stock companies to the GDR, which in 1951 generated a quarter of its total industrial production. In addition, the high occupation costs were reduced.

In addition, the workers' uprising in the southern and central districts, such as here in Jena, despite its suppression and the numerous victims of terror in the aftermath of June 17, demonstrated the limits and illegitimacy of the ruling regime.

It was the first spontaneous mass uprising against the apparatuses of exploitation and oppression in East Central Europe, which took on grassroots democratic traits in some large companies - such as the Jena glassworks.

On an international scale, June 17 ushered in a wave of rebellion by workers and employees, which spread to 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 Gdansk, right up to October 9, 1989 on the Leipzig Ring.

Matthias Domaschk and the events listed here have rightly been inscribed on one of the symbolic boxes at the "Memorial to the Politically Persecuted in the Soviet Occupation Zone and in the GDR between 1945 and 1989".

"To all those whose human dignity was violated, to the persecuted who stood up for democracy and human rights against communist dictatorship." - is the inscription on the metal plate here in front of the memorial.

Thank you for gathering here today. It is and remains important that we commemorate the specific events here on the ground, the individual fates of the people, which are conditioned and framed by events on a larger scale.

June 17th is always an opportunity for us to keep in mind that the democratic freedoms and constitutional guarantees that we enjoy today cannot be taken for granted.

The fact that people continue to come to this memorial regardless of commemoration days - be it participants in themed city tours, study groups or relatives or friends of victims who lay flowers here or light an eternal light - shows that the memory of and the confrontation with the period of the GDR dictatorship are not over.

In memory of the victims of the popular uprising on June 17, 1953, I ask you to observe a minute's silence together."

Gedenken an den 17. Juni 1953 - Oberbürgermeister Dr. Thomas Nitzsche spricht zu Interessierten, Zeitzeugen, Schülerinnen und Schülern und Vertretern der Stadt © Stadt Jena