Gary Bruce is Associate Professor of History at the University of Waterloo. His newest book is The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi. The book is based on previously classified documents and interviews with former secret police officers and ordinary citizens and is the first comprehensive history of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, at the grassroots level. In the excerpt below Bruce looks at how the Stasi impacted one ordinary man’s life.
Dr. Werner Hoffman studied medicine at Humboldt University in Berlin from 1954 to 1960 before interning until 1963 at the hospital in Fürstenberg in District Gransee…His time in Fürstenberg counted toward his compulsory Landjahr, a year in the countryside required of all new physicians. In 1962, one year after the construction of the Berlin Wall (which made previously available western medicines nearly impossible to obtain) and while still tending to the medical needs of villagers and miners from the southern GDR who had a union holiday retreat near Fürstenberg, Dr. Hoffman began his specialization in internal medicine at the regional hospital in Schwerin.
While vacationing on the Black Sea…he happened upon a high-ranking administrator in the Wittenberge hospital who arranged for his transfer there…Five years later he was promoted to senior physician in charge of the rheumatism division. Within the decade, he had become one of the very few surgeons in the GDR who could treat people who suffered from rheumatism in their knuckles, a surgery that was in its infancy in the West as well.
His first misgivings about the regime came in 1972 when the position of chief of medicine opened up in nearby Bad Wilsnack. Although the position called for expertise in rheumatoid arthritis, Dr. Hoffman was passed over in favor of a younger physician who had no experience in treated rheumatism but was a member of the Communist Party…
Hoffmann knew that in order to one day become chief of medicine he would have to join the Communist Party, and so in spite of what he had seen, he joined the SED in 1974. He was promoted to chief of medicine of the Wittenberge Hospital in 1978. Financially, this was a good decision. In this position he earned 2,500 Ostmarks a month, nearly twice the average wage in the GDR of 1,280 Ostmarks but, remarkably, on a par with Stasi wages, where the average wage for Stasi officers in the regional administrations was 1,700 a month…
Dr. Hoffmann’s position required him to be responsible for every aspect of the hospital, from the care of patients (with 615 beds and anywhere from fifteen to twenty-eight physicians, the hospital was quite large) to ordering rubber gloves to ensuring broken windows were replaced, and that there was sufficient coal for heating…
Shortly after his appointment, the urologist on staff attempted to flee the GDR while vacationing in Romania…the escape attempt caught Wittenberge’s chief doctor completely by surprise. Months later Dr. Hoffmann and his wife were awaiting a flight to Bucharest…when two Stasi officers arrested them and escorted them…into waiting vans. He and his wife were transported separately to Alexanderplatz in Berlin, where they were accused of preparing to flee the GDR, just as the urologist had. In the initial whirr of events, the surgeon had difficulty comprehending what was happening. When his interrogator asked him if he knew where he was, Hoffmann answered that he believed he was in police headquarters. The Stasi officer looked at him squarely and, scanning his face for any reaction, said: “No. You are at the Ministry for St