The Purple Witch who stole dissidents’ children – and other squalid tales from before the Wall’s fall

East Germany was a filthy, malevolent little state created and run by wicked men and women in the service of the monster, Stalin. Take for example the ‘Purple Witch’, as East Germans referred to their Education Minister, Margot Honecker. This woman, with her famously tinted locks, just happened to be married to the country’s shrieky-voiced little despot, Erich Honecker. And she stole the children of jailed political dissidents. Then she gave them to childless Communists to bring up, or lodged them in forbidding orphanages. And then she cut them off for ever from their real parents.

Many years after she was driven from power and died in exile, thousands of Germans were still searching for their lost children or parents, thanks to this Leninist harridan. As this enthralling, fascinating and very readable history makes clear, it was a mad nation as well as a grim one.

It is well known that its leaders fenced in the entire country to stop anyone from escaping. But it is less well known that they then walled themselves up in their own sealed compound outside East Berlin, where they lived comfortable lives quite separate from their subjects. Signs in the surrounding forest lied that it was a ‘Wildlife Research Area’, to keep citizens from getting too close.

Thousands made serious efforts to get out of the GDR. Many were slung into horrible prisons for even thinking about leaving. And then nearly 35,000 men, women and children – many of them wrongly imprisoned – were, literally, sold to the West. In one case a group was handed over in return for three wagonloads of fertiliser. But mostly East Berlin wanted hard cash, and the obscene trade raised about a billion pounds.

Now, it is true that the GDR was a luckless

little country. It would have been poor even if Marxist dogma had not made it poorer. Its dingy, crumbling appearance, its dreary food and bitter fake coffee were not wholly its fault, though Communist spite and rigidity made everything even worse than it needed to be.

Weirdly, it did not really believe in its own claimed superiority. The GDR piped West German TV (officially disapproved of) to remote areas, to reduce discontent. It openly encouraged the sale of Western goods in special shops and allowed East Germans to receive Western money, unMarxist blue jeans and gadgets from their relatives in the capitalist Federal Republic. But much of its nastiness was due to a special, pointless savage intolerance.

The author of this extraordinary book, historian Katja Hoyer, tells how her own father, an air force officer, was arrested and locked up for making a joke. Even more disturbingly, he was then forced to join the SED, the local version of the Communist Party that had demanded and caused his punishment. There was no true freedom in that place. Christians, for example, were cruelly offered well-paid promotions on condition they left the church. The path to university was through special ‘extended upper schools’. These were mainly (though not entirely) open to activists in the Communist Youth, to those prepared to promise years of military service, or to those whose parents were ready to kowtow in other ways to the SED. This is why the notorious Stasi secret police held such sway. Conformism meant privilege. Dissent meant misery. What a moral pigsty it all was.

Yet Hoyer (who was a tiny child when it all ended) can’t quite break off a sort of love affair with her socialist motherland, occasionally slipping in a good word or an excuse. Ms Hoyer’s real weakness is for the GDR’s forced march of its young mothers into offices and factories. This war on the Christian family, and its replacement by the state, was the absolute core of Communism, and still is.

Since the Wall fell, the European Left have abandoned much of the old-fashioned doctrine the GDR embodied. But ‘liberating’ women by turning them into wageslaves is the one thing the Honeckers did that fashionable Leftists still applaud. More than once, the author gushes about this cruel nationalisation of childcare as if it was, and is, a benefit, at one point carolling: ‘On the whole, East German women enjoyed greater professional and economic autonomy than their Western counterparts.’

She is especially pleased that the GDR’s unlovely army allowed women to qualify as officers as long ago as 1988, ‘a remarkable step towards equality’. Equality of what? I still possess a 40-yearold GDR propaganda pamphlet which boasts that East Germany has ‘no women’s rights organisations or liberation movements. Nobody has forbidden or dissolved them. They are quite simply superfluous’. Didn’t anyone ever wonder why a Communist prison state regarded that as a good thing?