Chapter 1

Excerpts from
Col’s Diary

Saturday 8^th September 1962

They gave me back my diary today; it’s been five days. I know because I’ve been counting them since we walked into the Dusseldorf army HQ asking for political asylum. They took everything from us then, including our clothes and my diary. I ended up with some sort of one-piece overall. Once the legs and sleeves were rolled up, it sort of fitted me like a potato sack and that’s what I wore for a couple of days until they found some English clothes to fit me. I never got back my original clothes.

I’m making this entry as they clearly expect me to write one – so they can read it. But I’m the child of a Staatssicherheitsdienst officer and know that writing things down is dangerous, so I will keep this to what they already know – or should know.

Hello there, British security people. I hope that doesn’t disappoint you.

Who are ‘they’ I hear you ask, dear diary? Well, I’m not exactly sure as ‘they’ have been in civilian clothes since they brought us here – to ‘somewhere in England’ – but they are British security, whether military or civilian. And the ‘us’, of course is Mutti and I.

We’ve been well treated – apart from being kept apart for much of the time – but they are being very cautious, which is understandable; they need to make sure we are not spies. They also want to get as much information from us as possible: the wife of a Stasi officer would not fall into their hands very often.

So let’s start there, with my father – Major Axel Schmidt of the Stasi Leipzig office.

I actually don’t know what year he was born, but I do know that he shares (to his annoyance if people mention it) a birthday with Adolf Hitler, 20^th April. During the war, he was an officer in the Ordnungspolizei, the civilian police known as the Orpo. He was a member of the Nazi party, but I hear it was impossible to have a career unless you were in the party (much like East Germany now), so that doesn’t mean anything really, lots of current DDR bureaucrats were Nazis too.

After the war he was recruited into the Stasi. His police experience would have been useful to them. In Leipzig, he met and married my mother, though she is much younger than him. To me, he was always a rather distant person and I never experienced much affection from him – but my parents were not overtly affectionate to one another. Fortunately, Mutti hugged me tight and often.

When you are a child, your parents and how you live are ‘normal’. It was only as I started to venture out into the world that I realised that they – and as a result, me as well – were not normal.