Tino
Chrupalla
Memorial,
June 17, 1953
German
Bundestag, June 17, 2020, Plenarprotokoll 19/165, pp. 20550-20551
[Tino Chrupalla is a national chairman of the
Alternative für Deutschland and an AfD Bundestag member from the eastern German
state of Saxony. He here participates in the Bundestag’s commemoration of the
rising against communist rule in East Germany in 1953.]
Right
honorable Herr President. Honored colleagues. I want also to welcome the
representatives of the 17. June 1953 association on the tribune.
We
today remember the people’s rising of June 17, 1953, in which at least 55
people died – by way of state violence in the Soviet-occupied part of Germany.
Among the victims were women and children.
Besides
Leipzig and Berlin, my home of East Saxony/Lower Silesia was a center of resistance.
The protest was directed not only against the social and economic conditions
under which the people had to suffer. The rage was also aimed at the communist
rule of force and against the post-war order. In Gorlitz and Niesky, workers
and brave citizens stormed the MfS offices and jails and disarmed the state
powers. The mayor was spontaneously voted out of office. For a few hours,
Gorlitz was a free city.
But
the rising was soon put down with brutal military force. In the days following
the rising, the citizens were terrorized by house searches and arrest. The
government designated the rising as an attempted fascist coup. In the following
months, 10,000 people were arrested. 16 alleged ring leaders of the rising in Niesky
were sentenced in a show trial in Dresden. The wife of the lead defendant in
Gorlitz received the following two-liner from the state prosecutor:
We inform you that Lothar Markwirth was sentenced to
life imprisonment on 18.7.1953. The property was confiscated.
Two
death sentences were issued and carried out. Despite pleas for mercy, Erna Dorn
and Ernest Jennrich were executed by guillotine. Responsibility for the harsh judgment was
ascribed to the First Lady of the DDR terror justice, Comrade Hilde Benjamin –
in the West, also known as the “The Red Guillotine”.
For
me, remembrance means to once again call events to mind. And to remember means
to give the dead an appropriate place in our consciousness. They died as
martyrs for freedom – for our freedom.
I
do not understand everything that the Federal Center for Political Education is
doing.Yet I welcome the fact that those murdered on June 17 have been presented
on the homepage by name and with pictures. A national memorial for the victims
of the communist rule by force in Germany is still outstanding – the AfD in contrast
looks forward expectantly to its rapid implementation.
The
era of the Stalinist Soviet occupation of Germany is ended. And Russia has also
freed itself of the communist rule of force. May our countrymen who lost their
lives on June 17 rest in peace. And may all the others who were politically
persecuted, who in the following years had to suffer imprisonment, find their
peace. May our country in the future remain spared from every form of violence
and foreign rule.
I
thank you.
[Translated by Todd Martin]
