#GDR#OTD 1962 – 18 year old bricklayer Peter Fechter is shot and killed while trying to cross the Berlin Wall (1)
Fechter screamed in pain lying in the death strip in East Berlin, but no help was sent from either side. It took an hour for him to bleed out. (2)
Jumping a 2m high section of the Berlin Wall Peter Fechter was shot in the pelvis. His friend Helmut Kulbeik got away. (3)
GDR border guard Capt Rudi Arnstadt had been killed in exchange of fire with West Berlin Police during an escape three days earlier so East German guards feared going into death strip. (4)
Hundreds heard Peter Fechter’s screams on the West Berlin side, but they too feared crossing border to help and causing an international incident (5)
In 1997, two former border guards convicted of manslaughter, but court did not determine who fired fatal shot. (6)
The idea that East Germany was annexed by West Germany and that 1990 was not a reunification has a wide range of political meanings depending on what exactly is the target of the critique - short thread:
The basis for reunification was the March 1990 election of a center-right bloc allied to the West German CDU that signed the Unification Treaty dissolving the GDR and making its territory into new provinces of the Federal Republic based on Art. 23 of the West German Basic Law.
The critique that this was an annexation has several forms: from the far-left, the claim is that the 1990 election was illegitimate because it was not truly democratic due to interference by West German political parties, which tipped the scales based on false promises.
Germany's seemingly byzantine arms export licensing regime that continues to bind those abroad they have sold weapons to, has been under scrutiny lately for delaying aid to Ukraine. This origins of this system has a long history, well before WWII... (1)
In the late 19th Century, Germany was a major exporter of arms to colonial regions. Military surplus and obsolete arms were sold off via middlemen to peoples in the hinterlands of rival imperial powers. (2)
German arms manufacturers countered charges from Britain that they were fuelling rebellion in Afghanistan by claiming they were only selling luxury and hunting rifles to the Sultanate of Muscat and others (3)
I am curious how histories of NGOs are going to be reframed now that the Taliban has regained control of Afghanistan. 20 years ago, they were widely seen as the driver of international development and cosmopolitain moral progress, based on supposed triumph in late Cold War.
The sheen on international NGOs was already diminishing from its 1990s highas they were also tied to the flailing legitimacy of the humanitarian intervention paradigm that arose from that same era.
Looking at Afghanistan (among other examples like Bosnia) the hopes for civil society/donor-led modernization/peace building appears less as the dynamic alternative to failed high modernity than as an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine that is equally ineffective
#GDR#OTD 1990 – The long transition between the Fall of the Wall and the first competitive elections in East Germany continues (1)
#GDR#OTD 1990 Demo at Alexanderplatz by craftsmen (Handwerker) demanding market liberalization. (2)
#GDR#OTD 1990 – Bautzen prison inmate threaten to break out; they say they are unjustly imprisoned under East German border laws that are no longer valid (3)
As much as the Social Democrats are often seen as the political equals of the Christian Democrats in German politics (at least historically), the SPD has only had two elections with a higher percentage of the vote - 1972 and 1998.
In 1972, Willy Brandt led the SPD to its best results of the post-war with 45.8%. Brandt was able to expand from its Ruhr and northern urban base and even had directly elected seats in the CDU/CSU-dominated south.
By the 1980s, the SPD's core of support was clustered again on the Ruhr, industrial towns and cities in the northern parts of West Germany. Here the 1983 election where Hans-Jochen Vogel lost to the CDU under Helmut Kohl by 10%
There is a meme circulating that Hitler de-funded the police so that the SA and other Nazi party paramilitaries could take over. This is false. The police embraced the Nazi takeover and paramilitaries took on the role of auxiliary police force in support of Nazi rule.
After the Nazi rise to power in 1933, Hermann Goering was placed in charge of the police, but this was not resisted by rank and file. Police and Nazi paramilitaries merged together to form part of an integrated apparatus of security and oppression. From KL by Nikolaus Wachsmann:
In July 1933, the SA descended on the Berlin suburb of Köpenick to round up Social Democrats and Communists. Several dozen were killed and 70 were disappeared During the "Köpenick Week of Blood", police supported Nazi paramilitaries.