Stealing a Living in East Germany

On 13 April 1972, East Germany’s Attorney General Josef Streit wrote to Erich Honecker, then leader of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED), to request that the state’s crime rate not be published in the 1971 edition of the regime’s annual statistical yearbook. Up to this point a limited set of figures regarding acts of ‘everyday criminality’ such as burglary, theft, robbery, assault, arson, rape and murder had appeared in the book, which was available to the general public. This year, however, Streit was concerned: the latest figures showed that the rate of everyday criminality had jumped 18.5 per cent between 1970 and 1971. Such a sharp increase might supply the West with ammunition ‘to develop vile propaganda’ against the East.

Honecker agreed to Streit’s request; the East German leader was determined to promote the positive aspects of life under his Party. Publication of the state’s crime figures ceased – not just in the statistical yearbook, but also in all media publications. Yet the ban lasted only until 1979. Ironically, Attorney General Streit was also the driving force behind the decision to reverse it. He had petitioned Honecker to rescind the ban, citing the fact that the West German media was using the Party’s non-publication of the figures as a means by which to cast doubt on the credibility of the SED regime.

This was not how it was meant to be. Friedrich Engels had claimed that communists would ‘take an axe to the roots of crime’ and eliminate it as a phenomenon. Acts of ‘everyday criminality’ were ‘incompatible’ with communist societal conditions; only under capitalism would crime flourish. Yet the annual rate of instances of ‘everyday criminality’ never fell below 100,000 throughout the period of East Germany’s existence from 1949 to 1989. The phenomenon was a thorn in the side of the SED, for it undermined the regime’s political project.

The people’s sport

All manner of everyday offences were recorded in East Germany, from drink driving to assault, but theft annually topped the table. Such was the extent of stealing in East Germany that former citizens have referred to it as ‘the people’s sport’. Larceny accounted for almost 50 per cent of all crimes, compared with an average rate of 30 per cent of all offences in West Germany. Post-1990 analyses of crime suggest that the actual rate was three times higher than the Party officially acknowledged. Stealing on an epic scale was, however, not just an East German phenomenon. Across the Eastern Bloc, regimes recorded rates of theft that were well above average in the developed world. In 1988 a survey of 600 Czechoslovak citizens revealed that 598 of them had stolen something.

What did East Germans steal? Throughout the 1950s citizens pilfered things that they needed to meet their basic needs but which were in short supply, such as meat and dairy products, clothes and shoes. Over the course of the decade the supply of these products was consistently deficient because the SED struggled to implement an adequate system of production. Only in 1958 did rationing come to an end.

By the early 1960s the supply of food could more than keep pace with demand. Exotic fruits such as oranges or bananas often only became available at Christmas, but no one in East Germany was now in danger of going hungry. A study in the 1980s revealed that citizens’ calorie intake was above global average. The supply of clothing was also now more than adequate. Yet theft of clothes and comestibles did not cease. Rather, the stealing of ‘luxury’ items such as coffee, cigarettes, alcohol or fashionable clothing proliferated. Money was now frequently taken – from workplace tills, colleagues’ wallets or friends’ cupboards. The files of the People’s Police occasionally reveal more unusual cases of theft. A 35-year-old woman in 1986, for example, stole a wedding dress after an argument with her boyfriend. She stated that they had often spoken of getting married and she wanted to come home with a dress to put a bit of extra pressure on him.

In this period, however, ‘economy of scarcity’ conditions prevailed with respect to two types of items: car parts, and building materials and tools. These things were virtually unobtainable by legal means. With car production falling far short of demand (the average waiting time for a new Trabant was up to 13 years), it is little wonder that provision of spare parts for vehicle owners was not a priority for the Party. One man in 1980 even wrote to Erich Honecker to complain that the ‘catastrophic’ supply situation meant that Trabant owners had to steal to acquire the parts they needed. Regarding building materials and equipment, the regime’s long-term heavy investment in the construction of new flats meant that every last brick, ounce of cement and soldering iron in the country was required for such projects. Materials and tools for citizens to restore or renovate their homes were simply not on general sale. Theft from industry was the result; the Party estimated that one trillion marks’ worth of materials and equipment was stolen between 1980 and 1989 alone.

Class enemies

Why did so many East Germans partake in ‘the people’s sport’? The SED believed that it knew the answer. Throughout the 1950s, the Party blamed the machinations of the ‘class enemy’; every crime was therefore an act of class warfare. Even innocuous misdemeanours such as the contravention of traffic regulations were condemned as expressions of the ‘egoism’ and ‘recklessness’ of ‘an antisocialist conscience’. Criminals were punished accordingly. One woman in 1953 was sentenced to three years in prison for stealing a pair of slippers.

On 13 August 1961 the SED regime sealed its citizens off from the class enemy and their ‘negative criminal influences’ with the construction of the Berlin Wall. This prompted state criminologists to revise their theory. Criminals were now suffering from the ‘psychological heritage of the past’. According to this ‘Relict Theory’, some citizens had not jettisoned the ‘capitalist mindsets’ that they had developed before the foundation of East Germany in 1949. This ‘psychological legacy’ was leading many to break the law.

Soon, however, criminals began to surface who had been born and bred in East Germany with no experience of capitalism. The regime concluded that such offenders must have been influenced by the West’s ‘psychological warfare’. The Berlin Wall might have sealed East Germans off from the West physically, but it could not block television signals. State officials proclaimed that Western broadcasts – to which the majority of East Germans had access – were breaking down ‘socialist morality and discipline’, leading people to commit crimes. Some regime representatives even concluded that citizens might be using West German news reports about robberies to help them to plan their own.

Around the same time a further school of thought on the causes of crime developed. According to its exponents, the advancement of society from socialism into full communism would not run as smoothly as the Party might desire; there would be ‘contradictions’. These were explained as ‘conflicts and problems’ that should not have existed in a socialist society, but nevertheless did, and therein lay the contradiction. One cited example of such a contradiction was the shortage of leisure facilities for young people. Officials reported that a socialist society should provide these, but for various reasons the SED had not yet managed it. According to the hypothesis, these contradictions acted as a brake on the development of citizens’ ‘socialist consciousness’ and made them more likely to succumb to ‘the old ways of thinking’ and commit crime. Ultimately, the Party proclaimed that the only way to eliminate criminality in East Germany was for all citizens to support its political project wholeheartedly.

Vitamin B

I have conducted interviews with 30 former East German citizens about their experiences and memories of crime before 1990. Their recollections paint a nuanced picture of theft under the SED regime.

All interviewees claimed that it was general knowledge that those employed in the production, construction or manufacturing sectors frequently filched from their places of work. Comments like ‘workers took everything that wasn’t nailed down’ or ‘a real worker always went home with a full rucksack’ abounded. Several former workers with whom I spoke admitted to having committed workplace theft. One man who worked in the factory where the Trabant was produced recalled:

There was a spare parts shop on site, but we knew all the things in it were more or less factory rejects. So, we would buy these lower quality parts, take them to the production line with us, and swap them for the better quality pieces being used to make the cars.

Conversely, many interviewees were surprised to learn that people had pilfered from supermarkets and department stores. They were even more shocked when told that some citizens had stolen from their fellow countrymen and women. ‘What did your neighbour possibly have that was worth stealing?’ was a common, sometimes serious, sometimes facetious, response to this information.

Interviewees were apparently unaware of other types of theft because when it came to crime in the country, East German citizens had access to very little information. If they had not had direct experience of a certain type of offence (or knew someone who had) then they were hardly aware of it at all. Their ignorance was a product of the SED’s vice-like grip on information. The state media underreported the extent of crime. When articles about criminal incidents did appear, they were short, to the point and buried on the back pages. That is not to say that citizens believed the SED had created a virtually crime-free state:

You heard things about murders, rapes and such-like through hearsay or gossip, or sometimes you saw alleyways cordoned off. But despite the rumours, we had absolutely no idea about details.

A majority of citizens, however, did have experience of theft from factories and construction sites because of the existence of a widespread ‘exchange economy’. Similar ‘shadow’ economies existed across the Eastern Bloc. One man explained:

If people wanted to build an extension or repair their house, they had to acquire the required things through an exchange. Sometimes these were quite unusual, like tinned pineapples for a few bags of cement.

To take part in this exchange economy one needed what citizens referred to as ‘Vitamin B’, the ‘B’ standing for Beziehungen ‘connections’. Party officials were well aware of it; in 1971 they concluded that some citizens were stealing so much material and equipment for their ‘connections’ that they could ‘develop a very profitable private repair service’. One interviewee argued that this suited the state: ‘We saved them the trouble of having to set up repair shops because we did that ourselves with the parts we took.’

‘It belongs to me’

Had the SED regime created a society of thieves? ‘No, people didn’t think of it as theft’, one woman commented. ‘They thought: “This is People’s Property, I am one of the People and therefore it belongs to me, so I am going to take it.’’’ The concept of ‘People’s Property’ was based on the collective ownership of the means of production. Any product or equipment that emanated from one of the ‘People’s Own’ factories, construction sites, farms, supermarkets or shops constituted People’s Property. The fact that many of my interviewees laughed or smiled knowingly when reminded about workers’ thefts suggested further that citizens had not regarded it as a serious offence. They also tended not to use the word ‘theft’, speaking rather of ‘self-service’, ‘organising’ or ‘acquiring’. Several even told jokes that they had heard before 1989 about thieving workers. The most common referred to a statement allegedly made by Walter Ulbricht, East German leader from 1949 to 1971. During a speech apparently designed to motivate workers to increase production and productivity levels, Ulbricht announced that ‘there is still a lot more to be extracted from the People’s Own Factories’, words which several interviewees joked were wilfully misinterpreted by citizens.

Others argued that people had no choice but to steal. This justification suggests that economic conditions shaped perceptions of what constituted ethical and moral behaviour. One woman confirmed this. When asked to explain why she had stolen electrodes from her factory she said: ‘A friend of my father needed them to do some welding. It was immoral to steal them, but it was more morally correct to help others.’

It also appears that management attitudes to theft encouraged workers to steal. Interviewees recalled that stealing was tolerated by their superiors. A former lathe operator remembered that he often stayed after work to make things for himself using (and effectively stealing) materials in the factory. Before doing so, he always asked his foreman for permission: ‘The motto was “you scratch my back”. He allowed me to do it so long as I made him something, too. There was a tacit agreement.’ Another man recalled partaking in thefts of food and drink in a warehouse where he had worked: ‘We would open a case of wine and share them out, two for me, two for my colleague, two for the foreman. Then we would inform the insurance that the missing bottles had been smashed in transit.’ There seemed to be just one caveat: do not take too much. Senior management and the police would apparently only get involved if too many things went missing; in one instance the East German State Security Service (Stasi) turned up after a large number of bottles of wine had been reported ‘smashed’.

Moral order

Should we regard the theft of People’s Property from factories as an act of resistance? Those who stole equipment and materials were stealing from the state. They were also thumbing their nose at Party propaganda that claimed that citizens who stole People’s Property were effectively stealing from themselves. Only two interviewees regarded theft as an expression of political opposition. The others recalled that workers stole what they needed; they were not striking a blow against the Party.

When it came to the theft of food, drink, cigarettes and alcohol from supermarkets, many interviewees were surprised to hear that such things had been stolen at all. One woman responded: ‘Everything was cheap, people had enough money to buy things. I am really shocked.’ No interviewee quibbled about whether to call shoplifting a crime; for all of them it was theft and unacceptable. Their reactions reveal that perceptions of the acceptability of theft were governed by the availability of an item, not by whether it was categorised as People’s Property.

Though none had experience of shoplifting, several offered their own thoughts on the matter. One man recalled that his friends who worked in supermarkets told him that in their experiences every shoplifter was an alcoholic, stealing because they had either lost their inhibitions or because they had spent all of their money on drink. Alcoholism was a serious problem in East Germany. The average East German drank an astonishing 23 bottles of spirits annually, double that of their West German counterparts. By 1987, approximately 12 per cent of the population were addicts.

Other interviewees surmised that people stole certain products because they could not afford them. Coffee was frequently stolen and often cited by interviewees as an expensive luxury. A standard jar of East Germany’s Rondo coffee cost 15 marks, increasing to 30 marks in the late 1970s. Between 1960 and 1985, the average monthly wage rose from 417 marks to 924 marks. Thus, when earnings were at their highest, a jar of coffee still cost the average citizen just over three per cent of their wage. The suggestion that food and drink prices were high clashes with nostalgic accounts of cheap comestibles that one often hears from former citizens. One woman offered an explanation:

Basic foodstuffs, the things you really needed to live – bread, flour – were cheap. Everything that was a bit more luxurious – fashionable clothing, a better quality of food – was expensive.

Given that the regime subsidised rents and other living costs (by 1989 the average monthly rent was still just 56 marks) one would assume that items such as coffee, though expensive in comparison to the price of other comestibles, were affordable. It may be that the high prices of these luxury products, when compared with the extremely low prices of basic foodstuffs, gave citizens the impression that they were not affordable.

Another interviewee offered a different explanation; he suggested that theft from supermarkets was due to citizens’ mismanagement of their finances. This was the only reason he could think of for people to steal these items. Another interviewee supported this point of view:

Some just did not know how to manage their money and spent it all on expensive things. I heard a woman say that she couldn’t wait to have a fourth child so that she could spend the welfare money on a TV. Some had poorly paid jobs, three or four children at home, and suddenly all the money was gone.

The People’s Police files reveal, however, that the majority of people who took food, cigarettes and alcohol did so while simultaneously purchasing a larger amount of other products. Many were also found to be in ‘healthy financial circumstances’. These facts suggest that they were not stealing out of need, but rather that their financial resources could not match their purchasing desires.

‘You can buy them now’

Few interviewees recalled hearing about thefts from fellow citizens. This was despite the fact that the regime’s statistics show that citizens stole from others just as frequently as they stole from supermarkets or construction sites. Yet one man commented: ‘I can’t imagine people stole from colleagues’ lockers. From the production hall next door, yes. But not from other people.’ One woman did remember, however, that her grandmother had money stolen from her flat. The People’s Police apparently investigated and, by means of a bundle of money covered in invisible ink, found the culprit living across the courtyard. Another interviewee asserted that he had friends in the police who informed him that ‘the rate of burglaries was off the scale’. Asked to explain why he thought this was the case, he cited the issue of wages not being enough to cover the luxuries that people wanted: ‘TVs were very expensive, stereos, record players – all the everyday objects that people wanted were very expensive compared to what people earned.’ By the end of the 1980s, a colour television cost 4,900 marks – almost four months’ earnings at the average wage. Though there was disagreement about the level of theft of personal property, all interviewees were united on one matter: theft from other citizens was completely unacceptable. ‘If you stole your neighbour’s camera because you wanted it and couldn’t afford it, then that wasn’t on.’

By my interviewees’ accounts, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany less than a year later heralded a change in citizens’ attitudes about theft. In part, this was because private factory owners implemented strict security systems to check workers’ pockets and bags when they left for home. The days of management turning a blind eye because they were also on the take were gone. But the new availability of products in shops also played a key role. To the woman who had stolen electrodes to help out her father’s friend, I posed the question: would you do that today? ‘No’, she replied, ‘because you can buy them now. I would give him the money to buy them.’

In it together?

Did East Germans really have to steal so much? The evidence suggests that no one needed to steal to survive. Basic foodstuffs were cheap and everyone had a roof over their head. But prices and the availability of goods meant that, for some, thieving was necessary to achieve a better standard of living. It was the only means of obtaining a bar of chocolate, installing an indoor toilet or ensuring that their car was roadworthy for their holiday to Czechoslovakia.

Analysis of theft in East Germany reveals broader issues regarding how former citizens remember life there. Memories of the exchange economy, with its close reliance on colleagues and neighbours, plays into the narrative often promoted by former East Germans that one positive aspect of life under the SED regime was the sense of community that existed there. This is often cited when one asks what they miss about their pre-1990 lives. It was also evident in interviewees’ statements about the ultimate taboo of stealing from one another. But the fact that the files of the People’s Police reveal that many citizens did steal from colleagues, friends and neighbours suggests that, for many, the sense of community was not as strong as they remember.

Richard Millington is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Chester.