III
Twenty-four years before: Berlin-Lichtenberg, German Democratic Republic
February 1984
‘We’re talking about children here. We are talking about children here, aren’t we?’ Major Georg Drescher’s question hung in the smoke-laden air. Everyone remained silent while a young woman in a Felix Dzerzhinsky Watch Regiment uniform came in with a tray laden with a coffee pot and cups.
The Ministry for State Security — the MfS — of the German Democratic Republic, commonly and resentfully known by the population it purportedly served as the Stasi, occupied an entire city block in the Lichtenberg district of East Berlin. The huge room in which Major Georg Drescher sat was on the first floor of the main Headquarters building on Normannenstrasse. The impressive conference room was dressed in oak panelling with a large map of Germany — East and West — dominating one wall. Next to the map was a large mounted escutcheon of the Ministry seal, the motto of which promised that the Stasi was ‘the sword and shield of the Party’. Like an aircraft carrier in a dry dock, a vast oak conference table dominated the centre of the room. A small bust of Lenin stood in the corner and, mounted on the opposite wall, portraits of General Secretary Erich Honecker and Minister of State Security Erich Mielke glowered disapprovingly at the assembly gathered around the table.
This was the Ministry’s conference chamber: a room for talking, for deciding strategies and planning tactics. This was where the world’s most successful secret police schemed against its enemies abroad. And against its own people.
The Stasi had other rooms. Rooms in this complex and, just a couple of kilometres to the north, at Hohen-schonhausen. Rooms where things other than talking were going on. Storerooms were stacked high with underwear stolen from the homes of potential dissidents: names and numbers tagged to each item so that, if ever the need arose, the Stasi’s specially trained tracker dogs would have a scent to follow. In other rooms, listening devices and special weapons were designed and constructed, poisons and serums developed and tested, while elsewhere countless hours of secretly taped conversations were transcribed, thousands of photographs developed, kilometres of clandestine film and videotape examined. Whole floors of the Stasi headquarters were devoted to the vast archive of files on citizens of the GDR. No state had ever amassed so much intelligence on its own people: information collected through the Stasi’s network of ninety-one thousand operators and three hundred thousand ordinary people who ‘informally cooperated’ with the Ministry for the good of the State, for money or for promotion at work. Or simply to stay out of prison themselves. One in fifty of the East German population spied on neighbours, friends, family members.
And then, of course, there were the other rooms. The rooms with the thickly padded soundproofed walls. The rooms where pain was an instrument of the State.
But this was a room for talking.
Drescher knew the man who sat at the top of the table: Colonel Ulrich Adebach was in uniform, as was the boyish-looking lieutenant who sat to his left smoking, with an open red pack of Salem cigarettes in front of him. Adebach was a heavy-set man in his fifties, greying hair brushed severely back and sporting an inadvisably Walter Ulbricht-type goatee. His shoulder boards showed he carried the rank of colonel. Major Georg Drescher, on the other hand, wore a sports jacket and flannels with a polo-neck sweater, all of which looked of suspiciously non-domestic design and manufacture. But, there again, as an officer of the Stasi’s HVA foreign-intelligence service, he enjoyed a level of contact with the West denied to almost all of his countrymen.
Drescher didn’t know the male officer sitting to the left of the colonel nor the older woman dressed in civilian clothes and Adebach had made no effort to introduce them. Drescher guessed that the young lieutenant whose uniform collar hung loose around his thin neck was Adebach’s adjutant. The air in the conference room was tinged blue with cigarette smoke and Drescher noticed that the young adjutant lit another Salem as soon as he had stubbed one out.
While everyone waited for the young female Watch Regiment officer to finish serving the coffee and leave the room, Drescher contemplated the lugubrious face of Minister of Security Erich Mielke as he scowled from his portrait. If General Secretary Honecker was East Germany’s Tiberius, then Mielke was its Sejanus.
Drescher suppressed a smile. Humour and imagination were not attributes appreciated in a Stasi officer. And a sense of inner silent rebellion certainly wasn’t. Drescher concealed all these aspects of his character whenever he was in the presence of his superiors. Whenever he was in the presence of anyone. But Drescher’s unique way of rebelling consisted of composing in his head caricatures that he would never commit to paper: imagining his superiors naked and in humorously compromising situations.
The female Watch Regiment soldier finished serving the coffee and left the conference room.
‘What are you saying? Are you telling me that you have moral objections to this operation?’ Colonel Ulrich Adebach asked, shattering Drescher’s mental picture of short, fat, joyless Erich Mielke naked except for a ballerina’s tutu and giggling like a schoolgirl while being spanked by General Secretary Honecker.
‘No, comrade colonel, not moral — practical. These girls all seem very young. We are talking about taking immature girls and setting them on an immutable course… sending them out on dangerous and complex assignments completely isolated from any form of direct command structure.’ Drescher grinned bitterly. ‘I have three nieces of my own. I know how difficult it can be to get them to tidy their rooms, far less carry out hazardous missions.’
‘The age range is between thirteen and sixteen years of age.’ Adebach didn’t return Drescher’s smile. ‘And they will not be deployed in the field for several years yet. Maybe I should remind you, Major Drescher, that I was fighting fascists when I was exactly the same age as some of these young women.’
No, you don’t have to remind me, thought Drescher, you’ve told me every time you’ve seen the slightest chance to lever it into the conversation.
‘Fifteen,’ continued Adebach. ‘I was fifteen when I fought my way through the streets of Berlin with the Red Army.’
Drescher nodded, but wondered what it had been like to kill fellow Germans; to stand aside while countless German women were raped by your comrades-in-arms. Or maybe not stand aside. ‘With respect, comrade colonel,’ said Drescher, ‘these are young girls. And we are not talking about combat. The heat of battle.’
‘Have you read the file?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then you will know that we have very carefully selected these twelve girls. They all meet a consistent set of criteria. Each of these young women displays athletic or sporting ability, they are all of above-average intelligence and they all have, for one reason or another, displayed a certain disconnectedness in terms of their emotions.’
‘Yes. I saw that in the file. But that disconnectedness, as you put it, has for the most part come about from some psychological trauma in their pasts. I have to say that one could describe them as, well… disturbed. These are problem children.’
‘None of the girls is mentally disordered.’ It was the older woman who responded this time. Drescher was not surprised to hear her speak German with a Russian accent. ‘Nor are they truly sociopathic. But through experience or simply by nature they are emotionally less responsive than their peers.’
‘I see…’ said Drescher. ‘But surely that on its own is hardly a qualification for what we expect of them. I mean… how can I put this
… I know we live in the ideal society of gender equality and opportunity, but there is no doubt that the male… well, the male is more aggressive. Men are more inclined to violence. Killing comes more naturally.’