Bernd Eisenfeld (9 January 1941 – 12 June 2010), also known by the pseudonym Fred Werner, was an opponent of the East German dictatorship who became a writer and an historian.
[1] Bernd Eisenfeld and his twin brother Peter were born in Falkenstein, a small industrial town with a tradition of metals mining and textiles production in the south-west of Saxony.
[2][3] He also noticed that the virulently anti-American propaganda produced by the SED (party) contrasted with his own experiences of American soldiers whom he had met in the immediate aftermath of war, before the US forces had withdrawn to the internal German borders agreed between Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, and whom he had encountered more recently when visiting his Godmother in the western part of Berlin (which during the 1950s was still not as starkly divided, physically, as it became after 1961).
In 1966 Eisenfeld refused to serve in the National People's Army not, he would insist, out of any religious or pacifist convictions, but because he did not wish to swear allegiance to The State and The Party.
[5] Following the end of his period of service he found he had been relieved of his job at the bank, and faced a general employment ban across the extensive government sector.
East Germany's state security establishment responded to Eisenfeld's speech by launching what they termed "Operation Economist" against him, making plans to arrest the dissident together with his two brothers, Ulrich and Peter.
[7] The next month, using a type-writer and carbon paper, he produced approximately 180[8] critical fly-sheets which he distributed in the Theaterplatz in Halle on 20 September 1968.
[4][9] The next day he was preparing to distribute another batch of leaflets at the cinema, but instead he was arrested and detained in the Stasi "Red Ox" detention prison.
Eisenfeld submitted repeated applications to be able to emigrate to West Germany and also, in 1972, sent a file of papers on his case to the United Nations.
Permission to emigrate was finally granted in August 1975, but the authorities made it a condition that he should not disclose how many previous applications he had had rejected.
He took a long time to find permanent employment because the Ministry for State Security had successfully planted rumours that he was in the west on a "secret mission" for them.
Almost till the demise of the GDR in 1989/90 he was the target of a special Stasi "career spoiling" ("Zersetzung") operation, which identified him with the code name "Erz" and his twin brother Peter, still in East Germany, as "Polyp".
[12] In November 1989 the breach of The Wall and the absence of a military response from the Soviet Union triggered a succession of events that led to German reunification in October 1990.
This (widely unforeseen) turn of events led to the dissolution of the "Whole German Institute" for which he had worked, and Bernd Eisenfeld switched to the Bonn based Federal Agency for Civic Education, while at the same time continuing with his writing career.
From 2000 he held a position at the agency as a Research Director, with particular focus on a project covering the use of X-rays by the Stasi in their anti-opposition work.