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Table of Contents 2/2013
Essays:
- Paul Maddrell: In the Crosshairs of the Stasi: Western Espionage in the GDR. The Files of Department IX. [
 Abstract]- open access content - Jürgen Kilian: The Wehrmacht, Partisan Warfare and Crimes During the Retreat on the Northern Eastern Front in Autumn and Winter 1943. [Abstract]
- Christian Schemmert and Daniel Siemens: Journalist Training in Leipzig During the Ulbricht Era. [Abstract]
- Markus Eikel: No Reprieve. The Crisis Management of the Federal Government and the 1976 Entebbe Hi-jacking. [Abstract]
Memo:
- The Seventh Aldersbach Practical Writing Seminar. Organised by the Institute of Contemporary History and Oldenbourg Publishers (9 to 13 September 2013) - open access content
- Reviews online (January - March 2013) - open access content
Abstracts
Paul Maddrell: In the Crosshairs of the Stasi: Western Espionage in the GDR. The Files of Department IX.
Line IX of the East German Stasi had the job of interrogating arrested spies and preparing their trials. It reported via its central office to the Minister of State Security and the KGB on these interrogations every month from October 1955 to October 1989. This article analyses these thirty-four years′ worth of reports. It concludes that the reports are largely reliable and that Line IX took care to prove that an arrested person was guilty of spying. It argues that the Line′s understanding of these cases of spying was not distorted by Marxism-Leninism because spying is not a political activity; it is just a form of theft. Moreover, communications and other equipment are essential to spying; the Line realized this and made great efforts to obtain physical evidence of espionage. Using these records, it is possible to analyse the character of Western espionage throughout this period and to estimate the number of spies. Although all the main Western intelligence services recruited important spies in the GDR during the Cold War (and particularly the early part of it), the most successful were those of the United States. Spies provided political, economic, scientific and, above all, military intelligence. In the early Cold War, there were important sources in the GDR′s economic bureaucracy. The records become less valuable as of 1965, when Line IX assumed a less prominent role in the Stasi′s counter-intelligence operations. Abstracts / Top of page
Jürgen Kilian: The Wehrmacht, Partisan Warfare and Crimes During the Retreat on the Northern Eastern Front in Autumn and Winter 1943. A lot has been written about the Wehrmacht´s war of annihilation in the east, however research has concentrated mostly on the early phase. Less known are the courses of action of the conquerors after the turnaround of the war in 1943. What role did the general orders of the supreme command play? How did the leeway of the local commanders, who represented the operational apparatus at the local level, shape things? These questions are examined via the example of the rear area of the 18th Army. Although no specific decimation of the inhabitants occurred there, nevertheless it becomes obvious that their needs were always only afforded a minor significance. In the course of the preparations for the retreat of Army Group North, mass deportations, recruitments to compulsory labour and excessive raids were finally the catalyst for the unprecedented escalation of the war against the partisans. The economic exploitation of the land now reached its quantitative culmination in the course of the scorched earth strategy prescribed by Hitler. The Red Army thus entered a devastated and mostly depopulated land. Abstracts / Top of page
Christian Schemmert and Daniel Siemens: Journalist Training in Leipzig During the Ulbricht Era. Immediately after its foundation, the University of Leipzig Faculty for Journalism developed into the central academic training centre for journalists in the GDR. However many aspects of its history have hardly been researched so far. To date, the faculty has mostly been described as a propaganda institute which trained by drill, with a squad of Stalinist hard-liners at its pinnacle who drummed the communist classics into the cadre of students. The present article, which concentrates on the early history of Leipzig journalism till the end of the 1960s, takes a different route: The authors advocate a double contextualisation which takes into account both the different degrees of leeway available to functionaries, lecturers and students within the walls of the faculty as well as considering their interdependency with other relevant institutions such as the Stasi and the Agitation and Propaganda departments of the Central Committee of the SED. In this way, the article analyses the genesis of the cognitive control system which contributed to the formation of the thought patterns and behaviour routines required in later daily editorial work. In accordance with the wishes of the SED to bring all communication in society under unified control, the primary goal of this form of education was the disciplining of the consciousness of future journalists. Abstracts / Top of page
Markus Eikel: No Reprieve. The Crisis Management of the Federal Government and the 1976 Entebbe Hi-jacking. The hostage drama in Entebbe/Uganda in June/July 1976 has mostly been remembered due to the Israeli rescue mission, Operation Thunderbolt. It is also notable, however, that this hi-jacking was a joint West German/Palestinian terrorist commando operation to force the release of prisoners in Israel and the Federal Republic. The participation of two members of the Revolutionary Cells and the demand for the release of German terrorists of the Red Army Faction and the Movement 2 June confronted the Federal Government with a further challenge in their conflict with militant German leftist terrorists. On the basis of a comprehensive analysis of Federal German governmental documents, Markus Eikel describes the actions of and alternatives available to the Federal Government during the Entebbe hostage drama. During the course of the crisis, especially in the German Foreign Office, it was taken into consideration to give up the generally intransigent stance towards the terrorists′ demands in order to achieve a unitary position with the Israeli and French alliance partners. The Israeli rescue operation saved the Federal Government from having to choose between these principles. [German language only] Abstracts / Top of page
http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/vfz_1_2012.html?&L=1
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