Prisoners for Bananas? Buying GDR’s Political Prisoner’s Freedom and the ‘Honecker Banking Account’

Abstract

Between 1963 and 1990, the West German Federal Government spent more than 3.44 bn Deutschmarks for goods delivered to a few East German firms in exchange for the release of GDR citizens imprisoned for political reasons. Eventually, those firms re-sold most of the goods on international commodity markets in order to cash in hard currency. Since 1974, the “earnings” from this kind of trafficking in human beings were deposited on a special banking account, which was opened by order and on behalf of East Germany’s party chief Erich Honecker. The article investigates the proportion of the various sources of the accounts deposits and the different purposes, the assets were spent on. The in-depth analysis proofs that more than three fifths of the deposits originated from buying GDR’s political prisoner’s freedom by West German authorities, enabling the accounts trustees at Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski’s “Department of Commercial Coordination” to earn additional interest. The text also shows that trustees had to give up on Honecker’s initial intentions to use the assets for the financing of imports of consumer goods to the benefits of GDR’s population. Over time, other purposes became pre-dominant: Financing imports of industrial goods and raw materials and - above all - securing East Germanys liquidity in serving its liabilities. Eventually, only 11 per cent of the assets were spent on imports of consumer goods.