We arrested six thousand criminals, Fascists and foreign agents. Soviet military tribunals began shooting the ringleaders in August; we’d already liquidated several others. The Red Guillotine is said to have taken pleasure in being present at these affairs; she particularly enjoyed inspecting the coffin beforehand. In her Stasi file, an evaluation from this period reports that Comrade BENJAMIN is from the professional and political standpoint an extremely qualified comrade. She works scientifically. She’d long since added to our penal code the crimes of offense against work discipline, offense against Plan discipline. Scornfully she addressed the defendants: You have the right to strike, yes, but a Fascist putsch is not a strike! In the name of the people, I find you guilty; you are sentenced to death!—and she drank a glass of water.
As we would expect, she never failed to distinguish carefully in her verdicts between misguided workers and provocateurs.
What about Fechner? This question remained on the lips of the working class until 1955, when our darling Red Guillotine arrested him. She gave him an opportunity to clarify his attitude, not for his own sake but for the sake of our people who had yet to learn the meaning of vigilance. Then she sentenced him to eight years.
She assembled new brigades of instructors in the courts, to command the judges, and further transform them from dupes of bourgeois “objectivity” into uncompromising fighters—a task all the more compelling since she’d now begun to worry that many of her own colleagues might be unsteady, insubstantial in the work. She instructed her minions: We can show neither softness nor weakness in the confrontation against the adversary of our order. Therefore, hard punishments are correct punishments.
Marveling at her accomplishments during this period, Comrade Gotthold Bley implicitly compares her to a factory proletarian when he writes that socialist law and socialist legislation were tools, motors and levers she used.
She withdrew the new proposed Criminal Code, which wasn’t strict enough. (Believe it or not, in many subcategories of law we continued to rely on the Criminal Code of 1871.) Justice now became as neat as the salvaged bricks stacked on carts in Dresden. With a bitter smile, she laced her fingers like scissors, her eyes glittering almost happily as she unraveled another plot. (Comrade Büttner: She solidified the dialectical interrelation between law and society in the general consciousness.)
In September she condemned Werner Hoffmann, who’d wormed his way all the way up to the Ministry of the Interior. I’ll never forget the way her lips parted like a beak as she clenched the lectern, demanding death.
In October, since the purpose of our justice system is to smash the resistance of expropriated monopolists for all time and defend the achievements of the workers against external enemies, we liquidated the engineer Christian Lange-Werner, whose Nazi connections can be proved. I was there when the Red Guillotine cried out: Only here in the German Democratic Republic have we learned the lessons of the past.
This wretched Lange-Werner tried to justify himself.—Lies! laughed the Red Guillotine, and the whole world laughed with her.
She proved to all of us that he had attempted betrayal of the Fatherland to the West German agent codenamed SYLVIA, who no doubt worked for British intelligence, the American imperialists, Department K-5 and the Gehlen Organization. While his trial was still in progress, the Red Guillotine commanded: The sentence is to be carried out immediately after a reprieve has been turned down.
By the time we had elevated her to full Zentralkomitee status, she was the terror of imperialists everywhere, and her Stasi file accordingly reports that on 28.1.54 it came to our attention that the American Secret Service planted an accomplice to carry out terrorist acts against Frau Dr. Hilde BENJAMIN. But we caught him; we guillotined him in secret.
The forces of revanchism paid her other compliments. One winter night, unknown persons erected a mock gallows on the roof of her dacha in Brieselang; they even hanged a straw doll from it—an outrageous provocation. We were the ones who informed her; we noticed it at dawn, when she was still sleeping. When the black telephone advised her of the situation, she turned pale, but quickly laughed it off. To soothe her, we arrested four suspicious individuals at once, and it’s certainly possible that one of them might have been the culprit.
Ever since we’d taken note of a strange rumor, reported several times by our informants, that she had fled to Switzerland en route to Israel, because she was a Jew. This simply shows how crucial it remains to exterminate the Fascist criminals without mercy. For instance, two workers were drinking at an inn, and one said to the other: There are three kinds of people here: those who have been arrested, those who are arrested and those who will be arrested. The black telephone overheard, which meant that so did the Red Guillotine. Leaning forward in her pale grey suit, the light ricocheting off her dark grey hair, she gazed across the thicket of microphones with the same rapt sincerity as a child begging for candy, and her moist little lips parted as she demanded death, death, death.
She began to say that to achieve the future we needed to study the lessons of the past still more closely. She had herself chauffeured to Dresden to attend another lecture given by the former German Fascist Field-Marshal Paulus, who blamed Hitler, von Manstein and the monopolists for everything—which is the correct line, after all. His glaring white old man’s face gaped in what might have been meant to be firmness, his eyes huge as if panicked behind the heavy black spectacles as he stood at the lectern, a glass of water never far away. The Red Guillotine sat in the back row, smiling. On her lap she held a Stasi folder. From time to time, she opened it and peeked humorously at the topmost item, which was a photograph of Paulus in the Nuremberg Palace of Justice eight years before, when Germany remained undivided; he’d resembled a scarecrow in the witness stand; a white helmeted military policeman stood beside him; wires ran from Paulus’s earphones; he stared queasily ahead; only the MP was looking back at him. For some reason she could not explain, this image gave her pleasure.
In 7.54, thanks to steadily increasing cooperation between the courts and our people’s representatives, we guillotined the former Nazi Wilhelm Wolff for causing epidemics in farm animals on our collective farms, and for other equally depraved crimes. I attended his trial; I remember Hilde Benjamin standing at the lectern, digging her fingers into it as she leaned toward the microphone, shouting: No freedom for the enemies of democracy!
Called on to defend himself, the Fascist reptile Wolff pointed out that he would have had no motive to cause an epidemic.
Replied the Red Guillotine: Here is your motive—to spread unrest.