Secret Police Networks in the Soviet Zone of Occupation in Germany

This chapter enters the Soviet Zone of Occupation in eastern Germany, where the first East German political police, K5, was formed to assist the Soviet occupiers in carrying out denazification investigations and conduct background checks on members of the new state administration. It provides a brief history of the Soviet security forces active in the Zone at the time, including the NKVD, headed by General Ivan Serov, and the NKGB, headed by Viktor Abakumov. It explores the context of occupation, denazification, and terror in which East German police officials were trained under these Soviet security authorities and the porous boundaries between Soviet and German legal authority in the Zone.

The Czechoslovak Road to the Secret Police

This chapter examines the evolution of communist secret police networks in Czechoslovakia between 1945 and 1948. It argues that the era was widely understood by local agents as one of “national roads to socialism” with respect to local security forces as well as other areas of institution building. It details the communist takeover of power in February 1948, when, uniquely in the context of the Eastern Bloc, communist leaders formed revolutionary councils called Action Committee to expel non-communists from state institutions and public life. It then follows the debates inside the Czechoslovak communist elite following the takeover of power in 1948 and their trips abroad to examine the “Soviet model” of the secret police in other countries of the Eastern Bloc.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the arguments and case studies examined in the book. It explains the social and political context in which the Polish, Czechoslovak, and East German secret police forces were created, the common experiences of the officer corps of these institutions in the Comintern and Second World War, and the training of the rank-and-file during the Stalinist terror in each country. It argues that the transfer of secret police institutions from the Soviet Union to the countries of East Europe should be understood as a process of translation that considers not only ideology, but also language, political culture, laws, and methods of policing.