YOUNG PEOPLE IN THE PENITENTIARY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP78-02771R000100300017-7
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 9, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 3, 1998
• Sequence Number: 17
• Publication Date: April 20, 1959
• Content Type: OPEN

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Die Welt (Hamburg) 20 April 1959
YOUNG PEOPLE IN TI PENITENTIARY
by aeinert
In the trial of five students of the Technical High School in Dresden,
sentences were pronounced over the weekend. The accusation was treason
against the State and the court considered the case as proved. The dis-
trict attorney had asked for penalties of a total of 36 years in prison,
but the court increased the sentence of two of the young accused by another
l years on account of the alleged "danger to society" they represent. It
took the court three days of deliberation, as if the decision had been par-
ticularly difficult in this case! Actually, the trial produced nothing
that had not been clear in advance: the opposition of the five students
against the East German state. For a judgment of the procedure this is
the cardinal issue.
The average age of the accused was 20 years. Thus they grey up and
were raised under the political system of the Zone and more or less knew
the practices of the SED. That these practices are not exemplary is not
the fault of the students. And if it is true that these young men wanted
to procure weapons and explosives with the object of preparing a forceful
overthrow of the existing order in Last Germany, this is merely the result
of the educational work of the Sty; for it has repeatedly declared that
one cannot dispense with armed force for the accomplishment of political
aims. It was the SED which sat in the prisoners dock in Dresden.
Even the most adroit functionaries of the DDR will find it difficult
to see a threat to the state in a lone little group of "counterrevolutionary'
students, unless the state is rotten through and through. And this is not
the case. But this state is rotten and false through and through. Conse-
quently, it was easy to claim that the accused students tried to material-
ize their plans with the help of test Berlin "underground organizations.''
The official report states that the arrested were guided by the West Berlin
agency of the All-German Ministry and by the since-dissolved Fighting Group
against Inhumanity.
Not a word of this is true. The testimony of witnesses in the trial
proved that the students receive? neither advice, let alone weapons, from
Western agencies. But anybody who is not enlightened on the methods of
the East German authorities was bound to come to the conclusion on the
basis of filtered trial reports that the condemned students were criminals
bent on bombing bridges and that their plans included the murder of a
fellow student, who wanted to leave the group, by means of "poisoned air-
rifle bullets." By a conscious resort to detective story methods, the
court attempted to create an uncanny atmosphere and tried to picture West
Berlin as the seat of all crimes against the Soviet Zone state.
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This moved ideological considerations connected with the Soviet Lone
state completely into the background. The 16-point program of the Dresden
students was only casually touched. pion during the trial, and in the re-
ports of Soviet Zone trial observers for their party papers and radio
stations it was suppressed. The de.nds of the program for the admission
of West German parties in Central Germany, for a decrease in the predomi-
nance of the SDD, for the dissolution of the Secret Police, and for the
dissolution of the agricultural cooperatives were almost anxiously kept
secret by the press reports. And there was no mention whatever of the
fact that the condemned students intended mainly to adopt the Yugoslav
idea of a "third road to socialism."
Apparently, the Soviet Zone state lives in constant fear of its own
youth which it trains and against which it knows no other way of protect-
ing itself than by sending them to prison if it is not satisfied with the
result of their training. It could not even occur to them to blame them-
selves for the reasons, though it is about time for that: The 16-point
program of the Dresden students is merely a continuation of other programs
formulated earlier by other "counterrevolutionary" groups, by students
from the universities of Halle and Leipzig, and by individuals, such as
young progessor iiarich and the agrarian expert Vieweg.
All of these landed in prison also. The trial of the Dresden stu-
dents demonstrated even more clearly than former student trials how much
is resorted to in the way of subjunctives. The terms "had", "could",
"would", ''were", "if", "eventual", were constantly used. Even the re-
porters spoke of the immaturity of the accused, of irrational dreams, of
half-hatched and unfermented ideas. For with the exception of a single
copy of a pamphlet, deposited in a hidden place, and of a letter to a
Western radio station, the Dresden students had done nothing. Nothing -
but the Soviet `Lone state ran wild.
On the day when the party organ "Neues Deutschland" published the
sentencing of the five Dresden students to 37- years in the penitentiary,
the paper told its readers that the 't?est German prosecuting authorities
in Dortmund had made the "monstrous proposal" to condemn eleven former
members of the Communist party, who continued to work for it despite its
illegality, to a total of 15 years and three months in prison. And the
paper had the nerve to call this a "criminal design of the Adenauer
justice on Patriots." But anybody who dares to call the Dresden sen-
tences terror judgments is an instigator and stirrer-up of the cold war,
a person who tries to obstruct any kind of approach between the two
German states.
The Dresden sentences are terror sentences of the grossest sort.
The representatives of the Soviet Lone state responsible for them are
the instigators, as is evidenced by the comparison of the trial reports
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from Dresden and Dortmund. The ConY1unist Gustav von Wangenheiin has
written a "students comedy" which was performed in Dresden simultane-
ously with the trial. tiiould it be asking too much to advise hia to
write a "students tragedy" now based on the data from the Dresden trial?
All that can be expected from the Coninunists who are in command in the
Zone and who are trying to extend their power to West Germany are
tragedies written in blood.
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