With the traditional ceremony on the Bernauer Straße, on the street where a piece of the Berlin Wall is still preserved, Germany recently celebrated 32 years since the course of history changed. On November 9, 1989, the Wall collapsed. Thousands of people gathered this year, for another year, at the old outpost to light a candle, celebrate the East German peace revolution, and remember the first torturous years after the collapse of the old regime. . The Bernauer Straße is considered to be the only landmark in Berlin, as during the construction of the Wall the facades of the old houses theoretically belonged to the Soviet-occupied eastern part of the city, but the sidewalk in front of the front door belonged to the western part. Many Berliners managed to escape to the West, jumping or descending with ropes from the East German facade to the West German sidewalk …
Less than a year after the fall of the Wall, Germany celebrated Reunification on October 3, 1990. Decades have passed since then, and hundreds of thousands of people who suffered persecution, torture, and many times economic bloodshed in their time are still seeking their vindication. communist regime. They are what we once called “dissidents”. They are the victims of the SED, the “United Socialist Party of Germany”, which for decades monopolized power and stifled any serious voice of opposition.
“Assistance Fund” for victims
Last June, the German parliament elected, for the first time, a special government mandate for SED victims. This is Evelyn Chupke, a former human rights activist and member of the Friedenskreis Weißensee peace movement. In a speech to Parliament on the occasion of this year’s anniversary of the Fall of the Wall, Evelyn Chupke is trying to raise public awareness, as well as the government, about the victims of the old regime. Many of these people, he points out, face serious financial problems, but also health problems, even in old age. However, when they do their paperwork with the authorities to identify their problem and provide them with financial assistance, the answer is often that they have not sufficiently demonstrated the “causal link” between imprisonment or persecution under the communist regime. and the health problems they face today.
Evelyn Chupke calls for a more generous treatment. “The political prisoners of that time, who now have health problems, do not need to undergo a special examination and experts are asked to draw up memos,” she said. “Once the persecutions they have suffered in the past and the health problems they have today have been found without any doubt, that should be enough. “We must not let these people suffer from bureaucracy.” At the same time, Chupke calls on the federal government to set up a special Relief Fund for the victims of the old regime.
250,000 prisoners in the SED years
There are no exact figures for the number of victims. However, government officials estimate that some 250,000 people were imprisoned as dissidents, and at least 50,000, possibly 100,000 younger, were found in the regime’s reform camps. As a typical “difficult case” that clings to the gears of the bureaucracy, Evelyn Chupke mentions a woman who was imprisoned in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), then released for a sum of money paid by the West German government, studied Dentistry and settled in Bavaria. Suddenly she began to suffer from phobias, which forced her to accumulate debts and close her office. He has been struggling for years to prove that this is a post-traumatic consequence of the persecution he suffered under the East German regime. But he does not succeed …
DW – Giannis Papadimitriou (DPA)
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