574 Most of my physical descriptions of Hilde Benjamin, and some of my descriptions of the former Field-Marshal Paulus, are based on photographs in the Ullstein archive. One description of Benjamin is after a photograph in Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Zeitgeschichtliches Forum Leipzig (Hg.), Einsichten: Diktatur und Widerstand in der DDR (Leipzig: Reclam Verlag Leipzig, 2001), p. 70.
575 Some details of the Red Guillotine’s life derive from Hilde Benjamin’s Stasi file. A few other biographical tidbits are taken from Marianne Brentzel, Die Machtfrau: Hilde Benjamin 1902-1989 (Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 1997).
575 Benjamin’s visit to the commandant with four wristwatches—Some Russian officers did behave this way, but this meeting is entirely imagined. Benjamin herself describes it very differently.
576 Benjamin’s associations with Käthe Kollwitz and Roman Karmen are entirely invented.
576 Description of various versions of the Liebknecht memorial image—After the reproductions and text in Prelinger, pp. 51-56.
577 Benjamin to her mother: “I believe I will be able to help the victims of injustice” —Steding (Sorgenicht), trans. Hau-Bigelow, p. 6 (somewhat altered; not said to her mother).
577 Description of Benjamin’s life and career before 1945—In part from her Benjamin Stasi file, pp. BStU 000001-6; p. 786, [?]taaat1.Komitee für Rundfunk, [?]bt. Monitor, 2.1355 (2.135) [handwritten code; some parts illegible], Karl-Wilhelm-Fricke, DLF 21.40 vom 5.2.77, Porträt Hilder Benjamins.
577 Georg Benjamin “was also Superintendent of Schools in Berlin-Wedding, a working-class quarter”—Steding (Sorgenicht), loc. cit.
577 I have drawn some of my inferences about Benjamin’s role in the Communist legal arena of the 1920s from Hilde Benjamin, “The Struggle of the Working Class for a New Rule of Law and a Democratic Legal System” (1969), in Aus Reden und Aufsätzen (Berlin: Staatsverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1982), trans. for WTV by Pastor Andreas Pielhoop.
578 “The legend”: “In that period, Communist Hilde Benjamin was clear that her most important work was the realization of the Party’s decisions.”—Steding (Sorgenicht), p. 7 (somewhat altered).
578 Description of the courtroom for the Horst Wessel trial—After Benjamin’s Stasi file, p. BStU 000229, Spiegel, Mittwoch, 18.3.59, p. 30 (“SOWJETZONE: Recht: Zwischen Recht und Rot”).
578 Testimony of Horst Wessel’s mother, and Benjamin’s response—My invention.
579 Benjamin to defendants: “I’ve come to recognize that questions of law and justice are at the same time questions of power”—Steding (Sorgenicht), loc. cit. (somewhat altered; not to anyone in particular; an official third-person restatement of her views).
579 Comrade W. Ulbricht “The Communists must be the ones who know Fascist labor law the best”—Benjamin (Pielhoop), p. 4.
579 “The legend:” “She was asked by the commander of the Berlin city precinct Stieglitz…” —Steding (Sorgenicht), loc. cit.
579 “The radical removal of Nazi and reactionary elements was a main focus of her department.” —Ibid., p. 8.
580 “Since East Germany doesn’t even have trade unions yet, our first task will be to complete the bourgeois revolution of 1848”—Somewhat after Gareth Pritchard, The Making of the GDR 1945-53: From Antifascism to Stalinism (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 8.
580 Footnote: Ulbricht’s activities in the Spanish Civil War—Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 411.
580 Same footnote: Comrade Leonhard on Ulbricht: “Being entirely innocent of theoretical ideas or personal feelings…”—Wolfgang Leonhard, Child of the Revolution, trans. C. M. Woodhouse (Whitstable, Kent, U.K.: Ink Links, 1979, repr. of orig. 1957 English ed.; orig. German ed. 1950), p. 288.
580 Same footnote: A. A. Grechko on Ulbricht: “The old one isn’t worth much anymore” —Edward N. Peterson, The Secret Police and the Revolution: The Fall of the German Democratic Republic (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2002), p. 5.
580 Benjamin: “Not creation of the new, but restoration of the old”—Benjamin Stasi file, p. BStU 000010, p. 4.
581 Ulbricht: “This meeting has nothing to do with dismantling”—Leonhard, p. 343. This source also describes the confrontation with Ulbricht regarding abortion; I have reworded his answer somewhat in the imagined conversation farther on in the text, and entirely invented Benjamin’s role.
581 A few descriptions of East German landscapes, and several concepts relating to “socialist legality,” are indebted to Arthur W. McCardle and A. Bruce Boenau, eds., East Germany: A New Germany Nation Under Socialism? (New York: University Press of America, 1984), pp. 52-79 (Horst Krüger, “Alien Homeland: Sentimental Journey Through the GDR-Province,” 1978); and pp. 156-71 (Institut für Theorie des Staates und des Rechts der Akademie der Wissenschaft der DDR, “The Nature of Socialist Legality,” 1975). Krüger concludes (p. 73): “Actually the worst thing across the border was this good behavior which bores you to death.”
582 Some of the events and statistics I cite from here on are from Gary Bruce, Resistance with the People: Repression and Resistance in Eastern Germany, 1945-1955 (Oxford: Row-man & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series, 2003). I am also indebted to Angela E. Stent, “Soviet Policy Toward the German Democratic Republic,” in Sarah Meiklejohn Terry, ed., Soviet Policy in Eastern Europe (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press: A Council on Foreign Relations Book, 1984), pp. 34-41, 47ff.
582 Benjamin: “Law must correspond with the progression of civilization”—Steding (Gotthold Bley, “The Creative Work of Hilde Benjamin in the Formation of the GDR’s Legislation and Legal System”); Hau-Bigelow, p. 12 (abr. and reworded).
582 Most of the various East German trials and sentences are from information in Evans’s Rituals of Retribution, as are a few brief quotations from Hilde Benjamin. From this book I have borrowed, then altered and embellished, various legal phrases and pronouncements to suit the purposes of my American gangsterism. It may be of interest to the reader, as it was to me, to learn that the East German legal system was far, far less lethal than both the Nazi and the Soviet variants. Evans concludes (pp. 864-66) that the GDR executed more than two hundred people, mostly in the fifties. Soviet military tribunals in the GDR executed others. Executions for murder were abolished in 1975; capital punishment was ended entirely a few years later. Evans goes on to call Hilde Benjamin “perfectly capable of mass murder” (p. 869).
582 Sentence of six years for selling eggs in West Berlin—Bruce, p. 227.
584 Benjamin: “Thorough cleansing of the entire public sphere”—Benjamin (Pielhoop), p. 4.
584 “Her legend”: “She showed the ability to continually evolve…”—Steding (Sorgenicht); Hau-Bigelow, p. 8 (abridged and reworded; she actually proposed, still more radically, that “a law at the time of its enactment would correspond with the progression of civilization”).
584 The Red Guillotine: “Since man develops his personality primarily in work…” —GDR: 300 Questions… , p. 62.
585 Benjamin: “The important thing is to apply the laws in a new democratic spirit” —Benjamin (Pielhoop), p. 6.
585 Seventy-eight thousand charged with political crimes in 1950—Binsichten: Diktatur und Widerstand, loc. cit., p. 71. “There were no longer any classes or sections which can live at the expense of others”—GDR: 300 Questions… , p. 42 (tense altered).