Gerhard Lauter
Gerhard Lauter was a former senior officer of the East German People's Police.
On 1 January 1989 Lauter started a new job, joining the Interior Ministry as deputy head of the department responsible for the registration of citizens and for the issuance of passports and identity cards. The transfer to the ministry had come as a surprise, and the transfer away from the detective work, at which he evidently excelled, was unwelcome, but it would have been unusual to turn down a government job offer. Rapid promotion within the department ensued. In November of that year he played a central role in the events that led to the ending of the East German one-party dictatorship: one headline writer identified him in 2015 as "the "ghost-writer" Fall of the Berlin Wall".
Provenance and police career
Early years: early opportunities
Gerhard Lauter was born in Dresden in 1950. Hans Lauter, his father, was a respected party official and a university lecturer in Marxism–Leninism who had spent more than nine of the twelve Hitler years in state detention, reflecting his time before 1933 as a Communist Party activist. Gerhard Lauter's grandparents, similarly, had come from "humble backgrounds" and been politically active as Communists or Socialists, thereby attracting persecution from the National Socialists. In Communist East Germany, it was a politically impressive pedigree.As a school boy who longed to travel, he was thrilled by reports and documentary films about the vast Neft Daşları oil fields that had been created beneath the Caspian Sea during the 1950s. Permission to travel abroad was a privilege not automatically available to comrades, but Lauter had a particular aptitude for Chemistry, and he formulated a strategy to study Petrochemistry in Baku. Events took an unexpected turn, however, in around 1967, when he was invited to a meeting with the head of the security department at the Leipzig regional party leadership headquarters. He was informed that a career plan had already been devised for him, and it did not involve studying petrochemicals in the Soviet Union. The Ministry for State Security would recruit him as a counter-intelligence officer: in return he would be excused from Military service and would have the opportunity to study Law at the university, supported by a "Karl Marx scholarship". Many years later, when he came to publish his autobiography in 2015, Lauter would recall his strongly positive reaction, at the age of 17, to being picked out by the party for the "honour and duty" to be a "party sword- and shield-bearer".
University
Lauter was enrolled in 1969 at the prestigious Karl Marx University in Leipzig, and studied Jurisprudence. In 1971, as a third year student, he was elected a delegate to the regional conference of the FDJ, scheduled for December of that year. After he graduated the offer of a career as a Stasi officer seemed to have been withdrawn. He later speculated that this might have been because his father had fallen out of favour with the local party leadership, although there is nothing obvious in his father's own career trajectory as a university lecturer at the university to suggest any significant conflict with the party hierarchy locally or nationally. Lauter was instead assigned to legal-administrative work at the Public prosecutor's office in Bitterfeld, a short distance to the north of Leipzig.People's police
His time in the prosecutor's office was relatively short.After a further intervention on his behalf by the regional party leadership he was appointed to a position as Task Force Group Leader with the People's Police in 1976.The mission assigned to him involved the creation of the "9th People's Police Company", a specialist counter-terrorist unit under the direct control of Colonel General Karl-Heinz Wagner who combined the role of a senior police officer with that of a minister at the Interior Ministry.Sources indicate that the decision of the East German government to create a specialist counter-terrorist police unit it was surprising that the authorities thought it necessary to create a specialist counter-terrorist unit inside the police service. While studiously avoiding a direct response, he did not disagree. There was, however, nothing unusual about manifestations of extreme political nervousness in the East German politburo. For Gerhard Lauter, still aged just 26, his new position represented a remarkable promotion, but it nevertheless involved relocating to Berlin. There was initially no family apartment available for him in Berlin and for the time being his wife and two children remained behind in Leipzig-Rattenloch. The actual nature of his police duties is not entirely clear, although over the next few years it was in criminal police work that he excelled. In the more immediate term, one of the key duties of "9th People's Police Company" was to provide personal protection for the Soviet Police Chief and prominent Brezhnev backer, Nikolai Shchelokov. The first foreign language taught in East German schools was Russian. One duty included in the 9th Company's protection duties which has found its way into the available sources, and which Lauter undertook personally, involved accompanying Shchelokov to the Centrum-Warenhaus and providing advice in Russian on buying kitchen curtains.Within the police service he quickly built himself a formidable reputation as a criminal investigator, with a particular flair for the difficult cases. His caseload was not restricted to murder and manslaughter suspects, but also covered other categories that needed an exceptionally sure detective's instinct. East Germany, founded in 1949, remained under the fraternal sponsorship of the Soviet Union, which meant an ongoing trickle of cases involving Soviet army deserters, armed and desperate to avoid being recaptured and returned to the rough care of their Red Army commanders at the Soviet military bases. In reality, the re-arrest of Soviet army deserters was the only task for which he regularly invoked his small carefully trained group of "9th People's Police Company" specialist counter-terrorist officers. He was also given important responsibilities in respect the politically explosive cases of West German RAF terrorist "activist-deserters" who during the early 1980s were given new homes and meticulously constructed new identities in East Germany. During his career as a criminal investigator his case portfolio also included the usual quota of missing children cases. A particularly important promotion came during 1985 when, still aged only 35, Gerhard Lauter became Head of Investigation for the East German Criminal Police, following the death of Deputy Interior Minister Lt. Gen. Rudolf Riss to whom, alongside his other duties, he became, as he later recalled, a de facto personal assistant during the early 1980s. It was clear during the later 1980s that his time and energies were increasingly dominated not by detective work but by related administrative and quasi-political responsibilities straddling the important interface between the People's Police and the Interior Ministry.
1989
Passport administration
It nevertheless came as a "biographical shock" when he was suddenly appointed vice-head of the Interior Ministry's national office for passports and citizens' registration. Despite his Law degree, he could muster no enthusiasm for running a department concerned with government administration. Nevertheless, as a government employee there was no obvious way in which he should contemplate resisting his unexpected transfer out of the police service. His new department was concerned with administering identity cards, passports and visas. Importantly, however, it was not responsible for decisions on travel permissions. Foreign travel – especially to the "Non-Socialist" countries outside the "Soviet Bloc", had become a rare privilege for East Germans following the acute labour shortages generated by the slaughter of war in the 1940s and the mass-migrations to the west of the 1950s. Especially since August 1961, the foreign travel privilege was one jealously controlled by the government through another section in the Department for Internal Affairs and through the Ministry for State Security. "If a 'no' came through from next door, there could be no approval ", Lauter later explained.The department did, however, collate and maintain the statistics on citizens leaving the country, including a subset of those seeking to visit "the west". At the start of 1989 Party General Secretary Erich Honecker made a public pronouncement that the Berlin Wall would still be in place "in fifty years and indeed in a hundred years". This triggered an immediate increase in the number of people wishing to leave the country, not merely for a foreign trip, but permanently. The development came in the wider context of an intensifying surge through 1989 in anti-government streets protests. In the past government security services might have "cracked down" on citizen street protests, using whatever level of savagery was necessary, and supported as necessary by Soviet troops and tanks. That had happened in 1953. But in 1989, with the winds of Glasnost blowing across from Moscow, and with Erich Honecker seriously unwell, the politburo became paralysed with indecision. That would create a vacuum which officials lower down in the hierarchy of power would sometimes find themselves called upon to fill. Meanwhile, Gerhard Lauter's formidable mental abilities, coupled with his work in the department that controlled the relevant statistics, made him one of the best informed people in East Germany about emigration applications and emigration figures. During the first six months of 1989 almost 22,000 East Germans applied for permission to emigrate. That compared with just 30,000 emigration applications processed during the entire twelve months if the previous year. "That was a clear signal that people were voting with their feet", in Lauter's judgement.