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Former East Germans ousted from homes fight for redress

When Marie-Luise Troebs looks at the doll's sideboard on her kitchen windowsill, her eyes fill with tears.

Published: 25 June 2023 11:42 CEST
Marie-Luise Troebs shows old photos featuring the house where she used to lived, and herself (C) and her brother on their first schooldays, as she sits in her home in Erfurt, eastern Germany
Marie-Luise Troebs shows old photos featuring the house where she used to lived, and herself (C) and her brother on their first schooldays, as she sits in her home in Erfurt, eastern Germany, on April 25, 2023. In 1961, when she was just ten, Troebs and her family were evicted from the rural border town of Geisa by communist authorities. Photo by Claire MORAND / AFP)

It’s one of the few mementos she has left from her childhood home in the former East Germany.

In 1961, when she was 10 years old, Troebs and her family were evicted from the rural border town of Geisa by the Communist authorities.

They were sent to live in the city of Erfurt, 130 kilometres (80 miles) away.

More than six decades on, Troebs finally sees “a glimpse of hope” in her battle for compensation from the government.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s party, the Social Democrats (SPD), wants to widen the pool of former East Germans classed as “victims” of injustice at the hands of the Communists — and who are therefore entitled to compensation.

There were two major waves of resettlement of former East Germans from the border area towards the centre of the Communist-run DDR, in 1952 and in 1961.

The authorities justified the displacements by saying they needed to make way for infrastructure along the border and remove people considered a threat to order and security in the border area.

Altogether, some 12,000 people living along the border were forcibly relocated.

Around a thousand of them are still alive.

On the morning of October 3, 1961, Troebs and her family came home from church to see several trucks and armed police outside their house.

They were given just a few hours to pack their suitcases.

‘Suddenly we had nothing’

“They led us into the street in front of everyone, as though we were criminals,” a tearful Troebs told AFP.

“My father dwelt until the day he died on what it was we could have done wrong.”

Marie-Luise Troebs sits at her kitchen table at home in front of old family photos and documents in Erfurt, eastern Germany, on April 25, 2023. (Photo by Claire MORAND / AFP)

Inge Bennewitz, 82, was a student in Potsdam when her parents were expelled from the village of Doemitz on the banks of the Elbe.

The trauma left “a scar that never healed” in their lives, she told AFP.

In their new home further west in Zoelkow, “there were only two small rooms, no kitchen, and the toilet was in the yard”, she said.

“All of a sudden we had nothing.”

Her family was described as “incorrigible” by a local newspaper.

“I never went to the town centre because I was afraid they would spit in my face,” said Bennewitz, who runs a research group on forcibly displaced people.

“Society must repair this trauma or we’ll never find peace,” said Troebs, who heads an association of former East Germans fighting for compensation.

She is campaigning for reparations of 20,000 euros ($21,780) each for the victims.

‘Hurry up’

Germany has been compensating victims of injustices committed under the former East German government since 1992.

These include former prisoners, forced labourers and people separated from their children.

But it does not cover people who were forcibly displaced.

READ ALSO: Germany agrees compensation for Kindertransport refugees

Because they have not been named as a specific group, the process of applying for compensation has been laborious and demands a high burden of proof.

“The events of 1952 and 1961 were a long time ago and the documents from the time are incomplete,” said Evelyn Zupke, the government’s top official in charge of atoning for the injustices of the Communist dictatorship.

Forcibly displaced people have also been excluded from a monthly pension — currently worth 330 euros — paid since 2007 to victims of political persecution in East Germany.

Elected to the post in 2021, Zupke is working with MPs and associations to broaden the scope of the compensation laws.

“I would stress to the politicians that we really must hurry up and honour those displaced persons who are still alive,” said Zupke.

She welcomes the SPD’s initiative and is calling for a bill to be tabled before the end of the year.

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DISCOVER GERMANY

Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

With thousands of years of history in Germany to explore, you’re never going to run out of museums to scratch the itch to learn about and fully experience the world of the past.

Published: 5 April 2024 10:46 CEST
Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

Here are eight of our favourite museums across Germany’s 16 states for you to discover for yourself. 

Arche Nebra

Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt

One day, around 1600 BCE, local Bronze Age peoples buried one of their most precious objects – the Nebra Sky Disk, a copper, gold, and bronze disk that acted as a calendar to help them plant crops. This was a matter of life and death at the time. 

Over three thousand years later, in 1999, it was uncovered by black market treasure hunters, becoming Germany’s most significant archaeological find. 

While the Sky Disk itself is kept in the (really very good)  State Museum of Pre- and Early History in nearby Halle, the site of the discovery is marked by the Arche Nebra, a museum explaining prehistoric astronomy and the cultural practices of the people who made it. 

Kids will love the planetarium, explaining how the disk was used. 

Atomkeller Museum

Halgerloch, Baden-Württemberg

From the distant to the very recent past – in this case, the Nazi atomic weapons programme. Even as defeat loomed, Nazi scientists such as Werner Heisenberg were trying to develop a nuclear bomb. 

While this mainly took place in Berlin, an old beer cellar under the town of Halgerloch, south of Stuttgart, was commandeered as the site of a prototype fission reactor. 

A squad of American soldiers captured and dismantled the reactor as the war ended. Still, the site was later turned into a museum documenting German efforts to create a working reactor – one that they could use to develop a bomb.

It’s important to note that you don’t need to be a physicist to understand what they were trying to do here, as the explanatory materials describe the scientist’s efforts in a manner that is easy to understand. 

German National Museum

Nuremberg, Bavaria

Remember that scene at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, where an unnamed government official wheels the Ark of the Covenant into an anonymous government warehouse? This could possibly be the German equivalent – albeit far better presented. 

The German National Museum was created in 1852 as a repository for the cultural history of the German nation – even before the country’s founding. In the intervening 170 years, it’s grown to swallow an entire city block of Nuremberg, covering 60,000 years of history and hundreds of thousands of objects. 

If it relates to the history of Germany since prehistoric times, you’re likely to find it here.

Highlights include several original paintings and etchings by Albrecht Dürer, the mysterious Bronze Age ‘Gold Hats’, one of Europe’s most significant collections of costuming and musical instruments, and a vast display of weapons, armour and firearms. 

European Hansemuseum

Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein

In the late Middle Ages, the political and economic centre of the world was focused on the North Sea and the Baltic German coasts. 

This was the domain of the Hanseatic League, one of the most powerful trading alliances in human history. Centuries before the Dutch and British East India Companies, they made in-roads to far-flung corners.

The European Hansemuseum in the former Hanseatic city of Lübeck tells the story of the league’s rise and eventual fall, its day-to-day operations, and its enduring legacy.

This museum is fascinating for adults and kids. It uses original artefacts and high-tech interactive elements to tell tales of maritime adventure. Younger visitors will also be enchanted by the museum’s augmented reality phone app that asks them to help solve mysteries. 

Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum

Augsburg, Germany

The Hanseatic League was not the only economic power in the late Middle Ages. The Fugger and Welser families of Augsburg may have been the richest in the world until the 20th century.

From humble beginnings, both families grew to become incredibly powerful moneylenders, funding many of the wars of the 16th century and the conquest of the New World.

The Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum not only explains the rise of both patrician families but also the practices that led to their inconceivable wealth—including, sadly, the start of the Transatlantic slave trade. 

The museum also documents the short-lived Welser colony in Venezuela, which, if it had survived, could have resulted in a very different world history.

This museum has many high tech displays, making it a very exciting experience for moguls of any age.

Teutoburg Forest Museum

Kalkriese, Lower Saxony

Every German child learns this story at some point: One day at the end of summer 9 AD, three legions of the Roman army marched into the Teutoburg forest… and never came out. 

Soldiers sent after the vanished legions discovered that they had been slaughtered to a man.

Arminius, a German who had been raised as a Roman commander, had betrayed the three legions to local Germanic tribes, who ambushed them while marching through the forest. 

Today, the probable site of the battle – we can’t entirely be sure – is marked by a museum called the Varusschlacht Museum (Literally ‘Varus Battle Museum’, named after the loyal Roman commander). 

The highlights here are the finds – made all the more eerie by the knowledge that they were looted and discarded from the legionaries in the hours following the ambush. 

German Romanticism Museum

Frankfurt, Hesse

The Romantic era of art, music and literature is one of Germany’s greatest cultural gifts to the world, encompassing the work of poets such as Goethe and Schiller, composers like Beethoven and artists in the vein of Caspar David Friedrich.

Established in 2021 next to the house where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born, the German Romanticism Museum is the world’s largest collection of objects related to the Romantic movement. 

In addition to artefacts from some of the greatest names in German romanticism, in 2024, you’ll find a major exhibition exploring Goethe’s controversial 1774 novel, ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, and another on the forest as depicted as dark and dramatic in the art of the period. 

Gutenberg Castle

Haßmersheim, Baden-Württemberg

Sometimes being a smaller castle is a good thing. The relatively small size and location of Guttenburg Castle, above the River Neckar near Heilbronn, protected it from war and damage over eight hundred years – it’s now the best preserved Staufer-era castle in the country.

While the castle is still occupied by the Barons of Gemmingen-Guttenberg, the castle now also contains a museum, that uses the remarkably well-preserved castle interiors to explore centuries of its history – and the individuals that passed through it.

After you’ve explored the museum—and the current exhibition that uses Lego to document life in the Middle Ages —it’s also possible to eat at the castle’s tavern and stay overnight!

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