Talk:Murder of Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck

Mielke and the Nazis

There seems to be a dispute whether in fact Mielke was tried in absentia (see his page). This should be clarified. I have heard the Nazis tried him.

Secondly, I have heard the Nazis glorified Anlauf and Lenck as martyrs to Communism. (Hence the statue.) This belongs in the article but I've got a feeling it's been airbrushed out.--Jack Upland (talk) 19:24, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

Serious re-write required

To quote another editor's verdict from Talk:Erich Mielke on the corresponding section there, from which much of this article has been copied directly, not only is this article "written poorly in a rather non-encyclopedic language and phrasing used (such as goons, thugs, 'specialized in cracking heads' among many others)" and "written more like a story than an article. It contains a lot of dialogue and narrative, along with accounts of people's emotions and thoughts". It's basically written as if it was a sensationalist dime novel.

What's even more serious is that it's written by relying mainly upon a single, rather dubious source that is Koehler, whose account is inaccurate in many places and at more times than one just plain wrong:

For instance, Koehler claims that KPD and NSDAP had "often" "combined forces" at the time of the murders, that Ulbricht and Goebbels had appeared on the same stage during each other's speeches by that time, and cites that as main reason for some kind of incitement of a crowd on the very day of the murders, all of which is patently false. The only time KPD and NSDAP ever co-operated even just on a local level was during the 1932 Berlin public transport strikes more than a year after the murders (which was when Mielke was already in the Soviet Union for a year), and that Berlin strike was also were the cited meeting between Ulbricht and Goebbels took place. See de:Streik bei der Berliner Verkehrsgesellschaft 1932 and de:Walter_Ulbricht#Weimarer_Zeit with all the external published sources.

In order to defend the confessions gained under Nazi-era torture and which the majority of this article is made of, Koehler also claims that "most Berlin criminal detectives" were members of the SPD in late 1933, by which he shows grave ignorance not only of Nazi German history, but also of the Weimar Republic. One of the main reasons besides the Great Depression why the Weimar Republic failed was the fact that a democratically-minded civil service was virtually non-existant during most of the Weimar era, increasingly so since the rise of Paul von Hindenburg to the office as Reich President in 1925 and the start of the Great Depression in 1929. In fact, one of the main beefs (besides the bloody crushing of the Spartacus uprising) between KPD, SPD and even among many followers of the SPD was that during the entire Weimar Republic, the leaders of the SPD failed to elect a meaningful number of democrats as civil servants (such as judges, police leaders, or any other offices in the civil service, from the level of local province towns and communities all the way up to major cities), which was a mistake that the SPD leaders had always defended by saying that they couldn't do without the "experienced professionals" of the extremely right-wing monarchists who secretely and even not-so-secretely hated democracy and the left with a passion. All of which led to a decreasing number of democrats, much less social-democrats, in the civil service long before 1933, after a depressingly low number had gained a foothold to begin with during the short time between November 1918 and the 1919 Spartacus uprising.

You can read about the entire issue of hardly any democratic, much less social-democratic, office holders in Weimar Germany, known exactly for this as Republik ohne Republikaner (a "democracy without democrats"), except for some lone heads of ministries (and even those became fewer and fewer especially after 1925 and 1929) in countless of Kurt Tucholsky's contemporary political articles, for instance. The popular contemporary phrase of "das rote Berlin" ("red Berlin") never referred to any democrats or left-wingers in the city's civil or police service (outside of maybe Emil Eichhorn, but he was only in office for but two months in late 1918), only to the large sympathies for SPD and KPD among the city's workers districts and a few leftist intellectuals here and there. Even Bernhard Weiß, the Berlin police executive that Goebbels as local Berlin Gauleiter often associated with das rote Berlin, was no leftist but a center-liberal of the German Democratic Party, and even people like him certainly couldn't be in office in late 1933, not only because of their liberal (or, in rarer cases, left-wing) political affiliation, as the adherents to which had already been purged by the 1932 right-friendly, dictatorial Preußenschlag on behalf of Franz von Papen, but most of all if they they were Jewish like Weiß was.

Following all that, Nazi Germany not only banned the SPD as a party by the Enabling Act in March 1933, but also immediately began wide-ranging arrests against social-democratic officials, as well as issuing lifetime occupational bans against social-democrats working in the civil service. Goebbels was proud of having entirely crushed das rote Berlin by the summer of 1933, months before the arrests took place which led to the confessions defended by Koehler as supposedly entirely good and proper.

All of this is part of the reason why in contradiction to Koehler's gravely erroneous evaluation of the Berlin police force in late 1933, the court (and not only "defenders of Mielke") in the early 1990s ruled in favor of Mielke that the late-1933 confessions regarding Mielke and Ziemer's involvement in the Bülowplatz murders and the events leading up to them had been "definitely extorted by means of torture" (which the German Wikipedia article corresponding to this one also states as fact independently of the court's opinion) and thus held little to no credibility. All of which Koehler fails to acknowledge other than mentioning in passing that the court dismissed the 1933 confessions, which he critizizes based on his egregious claim that "most Berlin criminal detectives" were members of the SPD in late 1933. In short, when Koehler defends the confessions this article is largely made of as supposedly gained by all-SPD police members, he entirely fails to acknowledge the facts of Republik ohne Republikaner, the 1932 Preußenschlag, the early-1933 official party ban on the SPD, and the consequences of the 1933 Enabling Act which gave Goebbels the opportunity to oust das rote Berlin months before the arrests.

Aside from these points showing Koehler as a rather poor and inaccurate source on the case, it should also be mentioned in the article that an entirely different account of the murders was published by historians Eberhard Czichon and Heinz Marohn in 2010, in their book Thälmann - Ein Report (vol 1, pp. 545-547), a biography of Ernst Thälmann. Quoting at length from the original 1931 police report, they describe the events as followed:

At Bülowplatz and especially the near-by Kino Babylon, the KPD newspaper Rote Fahne was regularly dispersed to the public from the KPD's headquarter located there, due to which usually a larger or smaller crowd of people would gather in order to get copies. However, during August 1931 a general ban upon unregistered public protests was in place as part of a local emergency act aka a limited state of martial law. The police mistakenly took the day's usual gathering of workers at Bülowplatz due to the issuing of Rote Fahne copies as one such illegal protest (the police report itself notes that this judgment on the side of the police had been in error), and hours before the murders forcefully disspelled the crowd by means of truncheons. However, the crowd would soon return for the disspelling of the newspaper. When word of the "returning protesters" reached the police, a squad was gathered of which Anlauf and Lenck were part and that took to Bülowplatz on an open police truck, carrying a machine gun with them. The squad immediately opened fire at the crowd indiscriminately. Following the ensuing chaos, Anlauf and Lenck were found shot dead on the police truck.

Going further according to Czichon and Marohn, after Mielke and Ziemer had defected to the Soviet Union, Ziemer gave a written testimony, co-signed by Mielke, as to the party activities of the two before their defection. The passage later incriminated by the court in the early 1990s read, "We carried out activities usual for the group." ("Wir führten die üblichen Arbeiten der Gruppe durch.") Next were the late-1933 confessions made under Nazi-era torture that incriminated Mielke and Ziemer (and included the events leading up to the murders as they are described also in this article), however five of the confessors revoked their confessions in their entirety with a written affidavit in 1934 before the end of their trial, in which they wrote that none of the accused (including the defected Mielke and Ziemer) had anything to do with the murders. This affidavit was brushed aside as "Communist propaganda" by either the Nazi court or the later 1990s court.

And finally, in his 1945 curriculum vitae (which this article calls "hand-written memoir to blackmail Erich Honecker") to apply for a post in Gruppe Ulbricht and the later East-German Central Committee, Mielke repeated Ziemer's statement about their "usual group activities" prior to their defection, and that they had defected because the police was suspecting them as perpretators of the murders. Nowhere in this curriculum did Mielke admit to being involved with the murders themselves, although he vaguely mentioned having carried out "a party mission" in relation to "the Bülowplatz affair". Combining Ziemer's written testimony about "usual group activities" with these passages from Mielke's 1945 curriculum but dismissing the 1933 confessions (that this article is based upon), the 1990s court found him guilty of having shot police officers Anlauf and Lenck with his own hands.

Also, the source[1] used in the article for the claim that the murders were "celebrated" and the corresponding alleged quote from Mielke is not only an unsourced, self-published private website of a soccer club, which thus make it an illegible source for Wikipeda, but is in fact a satirical tongue-in-cheek essay on Mielke, where his "later talent for telecomunications technology" is lauded in order to make his losing his Weimar era job at a telephone factory a terrible mistake on behalf of his employer, his following unemployment is referred to as a "successfull tenure at the Berlin job office", the Bülowplatz murders are called "graciously creating new jobs for two police officers", and his tenure as head of the Stasi is commended as such that "he tore the mask off ebil Capitalist enemies of the working class hiding among us good socialists by ingeniously finding out about their private flirting habits". This entire soccer club website appears to be a satirical hoax, as it also claims that in 1990, West Germany was annexed by victorious East Germany[2], rather than the other way around, and the site's webmaster calls himself Erich Mielke, as can be seen by his mail address.[3] --2003:71:4E6A:C922:A560:59EB:481D:B6C9 (talk) 08:14, 7 February 2016 (UTC)

Neutrality

I am reinstating the neutrality tag that I placed here a year ago. It was unreasonable to remove it because of lack of discussion. There is a long and detailed comment above, which no one has responded to. That doesn't mean the issues have gone away. I am particularly concerned with the use of the football website as a source. With regard to Koehler, the main source, it is clear that he is a partisan and unreliable source:[4]. The language used in the article is highly charged and belongs in a novel rather than an encyclopedia: "Enraged by police interference, Ulbricht snarled..".--Jack Upland (talk) 21:11, 4 February 2017 (UTC)

The tag was removed again without disucssion, but at least I have removed the football website, which, as the above comment says, appears to be a hoax.--Jack Upland (talk) 05:36, 5 February 2017 (UTC)