She was closely involved in drafting the criminal legislation of 1948 which protects our economy against all parasites, barterers and investors. Six years for selling eggs? Why not twenty? I see her hand in SMAD’s Order 160 against sabotage. After all, as Comrade W. Pieck announced in the Third Party Congress in 1950, the Socialist Unity Party is a party of legality.
She instructed her people’s judges: The important thing is to apply the laws in a new democratic spirit. And so we charged seventy-eight thousand individuals with political crimes in 1950 alone (that was the year our Stasi came into being.) The necessary result: There no longer remained any classes or sections which could live at the expense of others.
In the last two months of 1950, eleven spies were shot by SMAD; then six more—Jehovah’s Witnesses and other hired killers of the American imperialists—got condemned for American espionage.—That is your signature, is it not? hissed the Red Guillotine.
But even now, too many of our judges failed to understand that every verdict is a political verdict! There can be neutrality, no “objectivity,” in a court of law. That is why we now named Comrade Benjamin Vice-President of the Supreme Court. She proved capable, says the legend, of disciplining enemies of the new republic with unrelenting severity.
Why haven’t you admitted that you were in the hire of the British Secret Service? she shouted.
No, I wasn’t at all aware that there was anyone there, replied the defendant weakly; I’m afraid that he made a poor impression in our courtroom.
You didn’t know that at all, although you did sign this receipt!
But that’s merely an everyday business document—
Don’t evade in that fashion. Don’t put up a front as if you were stupid. You were doing business with monopolists whom we’ve already arrested. There. I’ve said it. And you were going to your appointment with the British Secret Service, right? Yes or no? screamed the Red Guillotine.
He sought to wriggle out of it; he wouldn’t answer correctly. Within the hour came the sentence of death, which she imposed for the unity for the German people and the freedom of the entire world.
On 23.5.52, three months after Humboldt University awarded her an honorary doctorate, our Law on the State Prosecution Service finally allowed us to control the decisions of judges and prosecutors directly. Beneath a lamp’s white mushroom she signed another death sentence with a gleaming silver pen, her hair braided up on top of her head, books on the shelves in the background, a round stone gleaming in the ring; she signed with drooping eyelids and clenched lips like a woman doing some household task.
As soon as the Anglo-American crypto-Fascist clique rejected Comrade Stalin’s moderate proposal for a united neutralized Germany, the Red Guillotine showed them that we saw through their despicable actions. This time she’d surely render harmless her nightmare that there might actually be a nest of Nazis in the ground, some of whom were silently playing Skat in a logwalled bunker, with their death’s head caps resting on their knees and their rifles leaning against the wall; one of them hunched over a crystal set with his headphones on and a map on the wall beside him; he was giving away our state secrets to the reactionary Adenauer, the traitor Tito, the traitor Schumacher and the American imperialists. In my opinion she was strangely elegant in her dark suit with the white button shirt beneath, the triangular pin over her left breast; in the name of the people she presided over the trial of the contemptible Wolfgang Kaiser, who’d committed the crime of establishing contact with a so-called “human rights organization” in West Germany. He attempted to justify himself—but not for long. With what we Germans call a Lustschrei, a cry of pleasure, she proved that his intention had been to plant bombs and poison cigarettes. We decapitated him on 6.9.52—a natural outgrowth of our democratic antifascist tendencies.
She attended the vast Party Conference in July, when we set out formally to build socialism in our Germany; we also agreed on the necessity of further hardening our line. In this spirit, the Red Guillotine passed our first new constitutional legislation. Then she had to rush off to condemn more saboteurs.
Johann Burianek sabotaged a bridge with explosives supplied to him by the American imperialists; we made him memorize his confession before we sent him where he belonged. Don’t worry; he won’t come back.
That fall a West German journalist issued the following verdict: Who has ever once experienced this woman when she pulls out all the stops of her ice-cold intellect won’t soon forget her. She alone is the law.
In 1953, in ungrateful discord with A. Pohl’s landmark film “The Invincible Ones,” whose protagonist is the German working class, certain enemies of democracy resisted the imposition of labor-norms. For her own part, the Red Guillotine took every rational measure to prevent the forthcoming uprising. For instance, she rendered harmless the electrician Kurt König, who’d carried out military espionage against the Soviet Union on the territory of our own German Democratic Republic! Would Kriemhild ever have forgiven her husband’s murderer even had he bent the knee? Not likely, and he knew it. Defiance therefore would have cost this König no portion of his already foredoomed safety, and saved his pride. But now he was exhausted. He begged and pleaded before we guillotined him.
All the same, they dared to carry this banner against us: WE DEMAND A REDUCTION IN THE NORMS. The Red Guillotine saw that for what it was: a Fascist provocation. Indeed, within a few instants they’d also begun misleading the masses with the so-called “human rights question.” Half the workers were striking at the Bergmann-Borsig Engineering Works! The “Progress” clothing combine also became infected. Soon there were five hundred thousand criminals! The Red Guillotine shook her head in a fury when the telephone informed her of flames and broken windows at the Potsdamer Platz! The telephone commanded: Declare martial law in a hundred and sixty-seven districts.
Fortunately for people’s power, we still had nineteen Red Army divisions. The stonethrowers at the Potsdamer Platz had no better success against our T-34s now than in 1945.
Our Minister of Justice, Fechner, who’d been foolish enough to support the workers’ right to strike against their own regime, was removed on 16.7.53. In his place we appointed the Red Guillotine. And now her legend truly begins.
As the Great Soviet Encyclopedia explains it: The General Prosecuting Authority, headed by the prosecutor general of the GDR, exercises supervision over the observance of socialist legality. The General Prosecuting Authority now found full and natural expression in the Red Guillotine.
On the Invalidenstrasse, just east of where the Wall would soon rise, the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Akademie für die Ausbildung von Militärärzten, completed in 1905, Nazified in 1933, was now Hilde Benjamin’s courthouse, and every morning she arrived at 0800 hours precisely; at 0750 she was joking with the two Rubblefrauen she saw every day on the other side of the street; one of them wore goggles and kept her white-dusted hair up in a bun; the other, who was younger, wore a dark skirt which went not far below the knee; at the recess, the Red Guillotine frequently saw them sitting on bricks, resting their backs against the brickheap they’d built; the Rubblefrau in goggles stared off into space and the Rubblefrau in the skirt read the newspaper. But that was only for a year. Then the rubble near the courthouse had all been cleared. The Red Guillotine missed those two women a little. Sometimes in summer she wandered to the window and gazed westward. She could see the way that the foliage of the Tiergarten paints the summer clouds green. Her most important trials are known, runs the legend, and need not be mentioned further.