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 ("Home Office" / "Department of the Interior") 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 (and unwise) 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" [for the] Fall of the Berlin Wall".

Provenance and police career Early years: early opportunities Gerhard Lauter was born in Dresden in 1950. Hans Lauter (1914–2012), 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 (1949–1989), it was a politically impressive pedigree. 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 ("SED-Bezirksleitung") 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. After he graduated the offer of a career as a Stasi officer seemed to have been withdrawn.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.

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. and, in 1982, Inge Viett. During his career as a criminal investigator his case portfolio also included the usual quota of missing children cases. 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. By the middle of 1989 there was a widespread perception that change – possibly unwelcome and certainly uncertain – was on the horizon. The so-called Iron Curtain down the centre of Europe had become porous. For weeks more and more East Germans had been escaping to West Germany, not via the direct route (which would still have been impossible) but by taking a "vacation" through Czechoslovakia and into Hungary, from where it had become possible to cross into Austria at the point where the electric fencing between the two countries had been dismantled in May 1989. The crisis became personal when a postcard arrived at Lauter's home from Copacabana in Brazil. It was good to know that their daughter, who had last been seen heading towards Hungary with some friends and a tent, was alive and apparently well; but there was a more pressing challenge at home in the form of the Lauter's grandson. "We were very happy to look after the little chap [while his mother took a holiday]". But now it was entirely uncertain whether or when the child would see his mother again. The man in charge of the statistics of East Germans travelling abroad now had to add his daughter to the list. "If the decision had been down to me at that time, then we would have had complete travel freedom, if only to stabilise the situation in East Germany .... Travel freedom was one of the greatest wishes [of the ever more restive East German population]. But the German Democratic Republic was actually driving people out of the country". He could not know that less than three months later, through a series of bizarre circumstances and government mis-steps, the decision would indeed be "down to him". Party General Secretary Honecker had taken another decision, apparently without involving politburo comrades. The people would be allowed out. But the trains taking them would not travel directly from Prague to West Germany via the border at Passau. Instead the campers would take the train from Prague back to East Germany, and would then be permitted to cross into West Germany to East Germany. "Sovereignty" must be respected. When Genscher reached this part of his announcement in his speech in the embassy gardens it is not clear how many heard him, since the angry calls from those standing closest to him drowned out his words. Lauter's assessment, shared in a subsequent interview, was that this was "a completely absurd [stipulation]". Interior Ministry officials would have to join the already badly overcrowded trains between Dresden and Hof min order to stamp the passports of the would-be emigrants in order to "release them from East German citizenship" (as the matter was officially expressed). but by November it had become obvious that for East Germany there was little that was "normal" about 1989. The parliamentary Justice Committee determined on 7 November 1989 that the draft Travel Law was "not enough"

The Travel Law: "interim solution" draft On the morning of 9 November 1989 Gerhard Lauter sat in his office with Gotthard Hubrich, the head of the department for domestic affairs (a subdivision of the Interior Ministry) and Colonels Krüger and Lemme from the Ministry for State Security. The Stasi colonels had taken the precaution of bringing their own draft of Lauter's proposal with them. It was engagingly simple, stating in effect that citizens wishing to emigrate permanently could do so without precondition and with immediate effect. Lauter was still feeling bruised by the reception that his own draft for a permanent solution had received in the media and from the government. He became exasperated and attempted to explain to the colonels the problem with their draft: "That is not how it works ... Anyone wanting to emigrate permanently can just get in the car and drive. Yet if someone just wants to visit an aunt in West Germany or see the Eiffel Tower, and then come home again, should they still not be permitted to do that? This is how we will drive people out of the country more than ever!" Lauter was not at all certain that any of the other participants in the ad hoc meeting understood either the issues or the text he had been mandated to prepare. Although Lauter's preference fell far outside the guidelines of the mandate he had received from the politburo via Interior Minister Dickel, he was able to win round the others attending the meeting in his office on the morning of 9 November. During or immediately after the meeting he had three extra sentences added to the "draft interim proposal", as follows: "Applications can be made for private trips abroad without the requirement to provide the [hitherto necessary] justifications (reasons for travel and family relationships). Permits will be granted without delay. Reasons for the refusal of applications will be applied only in exceptional cases." His wife had bought theatre tickets for an evening show at the Palace of the Republic. Eberhard Esche was giving a performance of "Reineke Fuchs", Goethe's twelve part set of scathing insights of life at the royal court. When pressed Schabowski blustered on, more consequentially than ever: "it comes in, as far as I know ... is immediate ... at once". ("Das tritt nach meiner Kenntnis ...) ist das sofort ... unverzüglich". Looking back a quarter of century later Lauter expressed his huge relief that during that night no border guard obeyed his standing order to shoot anyone crossing the border without the proper paperwork. Confusion among their commanders and the lack of any clear orders could very easily have had tragic consequences: "Colleagues on the border acted very courageously and prudently .... I admire them for that". An extraordinary (two part) Party Congress was held on 8/9 December and 16/17 December 1989 at which the Socialist Unity Party rebranded itself as the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and began the lengthy preparations for a more democratic future. Gerd Lauter was elected a member of the party's newly constituted so-called "Arbitration Commission" ("Schiedskommission"), mandated to investigate the misdeeds of the old politburo. One of his first pieces of investigation involved forcing open a very large very heavy trunk. Gold and coins fell out. Lauter would later recall his shock over the nature and scale of sheer old-fashioned corruption in the higher echelons of the old ruling party that the commission uncovered. In a secret ballot, commission members voted to exclude from the relaunched rebranded PDS almost all those who had been leading members of the Socialist Unity Party before November 1989, including Günter Schabowski. Due to his deteriorating eyesight he was obliged to resign from the firm in 2012.