People's War

[James G]

Aug 31, 2021 18:05:31 GMT lordroel said:

Aug 31, 2021 17:49:09 GMT James G said:

Six – Candidate X


The dissent playwright Václav Havel had been instrumental in bringing down the Czechoslovakian communist regime at the end of 1989. It had been no easy process, one that had seen bloodshed when Havel was one of those who sought to make it violence free, yet it wasn’t on the scale of Romania and the streets of Prague hadn’t run red. Working with the deposed reformer Alexander Dubček (who’d been removed by the Soviets during the Prague Spring twenty-plus years beforehand), the leadership of the union that then was Czechoslovakia had given in to the street protests and general strike which Havel had worked so hard to see succeed. Dubček’s favour with the people had floundered yet Havel’s had only grown. He became the Czechoslovak president and had then succeeded in securing a peaceful dissolution to the union into two separate states. The Czech Republic had been born at the start of ‘93 with Havel once more in the presidency. He was the head of state for the country though the founding constitution of the nation gave more governmental domestic power to the nation’s prime minister. With the passage of time, the popularity of Havel had diminished somewhat – making him in many ways more popular outside of the country – yet he was still regarded by the majority of Czechs as the founder of their modern nation. Throughout his presidency, leading from the historic Prague Castle, Havel was an enemy of those up in East Berlin.

Right from the start, when he was Czechoslovak federal president, Havel hadn’t just turned his back upon East German extensions of ties but thrown them right back in the face of Honecker and the Politburo. He wanted nothing to do with the DDR. East Germany sought economic links with its neighbour to mitigate the financial distress which each country was in when the Eastern Bloc collapsed. Havel would have none of that: he sought ties with the West. He travelled throughout Western Europe, even across the ocean to America, publicly savaging the continued rule of the DDR by the surviving regime. At every opportunity, he reminded influential foreign audiences that freedom might have been gained in his country but that up in East Germany, the communists were still in power. He urged for overseas forces to bring down the DDR regime… using any means possible too. Havel worked to defend his country against Stasi efforts turns Czechs traitors against their own nation and found spies within the security forces. His government turfed out those who loyalties were with the old regime and whom had new links to the East Germans. When during 1993 there was that domestic propaganda campaign within the DDR to try and accuse the Czech Republic of working to bring down the state, Havel make public his agreement with that goal though decried the lies told about ‘active measures’ taken by supposed ‘Czech agents’. No one took that story seriously but it really upset Havel. He knew the truth of the matter was that the destabilisation was done the other way. East Germany sought to maintain links with the Czech Republic against the will of him and his government where they used his country as a conduit for their sanction busting & illegal dealings. When she took over in East Berlin in the summer of ‘94, Margot Honecker gave permission for the state’s security service to continue, even expand if possible, ongoing activities inside the Czech Republic. The Czech leadership was more of an enemy than anyone else close by and with a leader whose seemingly one goal was to smash the DDR.

The Czech Republic hadn’t emerged from independence as the promised land that many of its citizens had hoped it would. Havel’s domestic popularity suffered due to economic constraints and also matters such as an immense crime wave. Criminals locked up under the communist regime had been freed en masse and the lax internal security powers that state organs had post-’89 allowed for foreign criminal groups to flourish inside the country. The Russian mafia organisations which East Germany had ties to did a lot of business within the Czech Republic. At times, their actions gave the outwards impression that the country was turning into a gangster state: there were shootings, they flaunted their wealth & untouchability and they corrupted politicians. Havel reversed track on his distrust of police and intelligence organisations – so many of them full of those who’d worked for the Czechoslovakian regime – but it wasn’t enough. In Parliament, the growing opposition to him battled with him to take charge of the fightback against criminality and also that foreign interference that East Germany was behind. Yet, during early-’95, Havel went on the offensive when faced with parliamentary displeasure that was bleeding over into the public. He saw to it that smuggling across into the DDR was impeded via arrests and prosecutions while also having soldiers from the new-born Army of the Czech Republic sent to the border on patrol. Bank accounts in the ‘Wild West’ atmosphere of Czech banking that had sprung up as capitalism flourished were frozen. Those domestic measures were followed up by overseas activities. To Paris, London, Bonn then New York he travelled and everywhere he spoke out against the East German regime with its rampant international criminality. Everyone who listened to him was given a patient, evidence-backed explanation of what was going on. Havel went to Poland to meet with President Bogdan Borusewicz. He and Borusewicz struck a deal, an unofficial alliance between their two countries. Not relying upon the West, though committed to ask for help if the situation ever arose, they agreed that should East Germany make an attack upon one of them, then the other would come to their aid. It wasn’t a fool-proof, legally-binding alliance but it was a commitment made that Havel wanted to see done. He had done so much work in his early presidency to help demolish the last remains of communist influence across Eastern Europe and wanted to finish that off by seeing an end put to the actions of East Germany. Should he hurt them financially, diplomatically too by extension, he aimed to see that regime finally fall. He did it for his own country but also for Europe as well.

None of that went unnoticed. So much of Havel’s actions were public, in the face of the Margot Honecker regime. She turned to her trusted ally in the Politburo to deal with the issue. Stasi chief Schwanitz agreed completely that Havel needed to be stopped with his leader putting her trust in him to do that while not asking for all of the details. There was much faith she had in him and other securocrats, faith that hadn’t disappointed her beforehand. Schwanitz got to the issue and worked with foreign contacts. There were trans-national criminal elements whose interests Havel hurt by what he did and so too figures in the Russian government all the way up as high as President Chernomyrdin in Moscow too. There were lots of different ways that Schwanitz could have gotten rid of the problem. He chose the ‘long-term’ option though. Mafia chiefs weren’t privy to what exactly was planned though Chernomyrdin’s security people were though. There was no opposition to the Stasi’s operation… just as long as Russia was kept uninvolved and thus ‘innocent’.


Havel went to West Berlin at the beginning of May. He made a speech there in front of the Berlin Wall, bringing out his inner Reagan with a call almost of ‘tear down this wall’. In Bonn, they were unimpressed at that suggestion. West Berliners, especially the political establishment there who were at odds with Chancellor Schäuble over whether possible reunification was in Germany’s best interest, applauded him though. He got back on a flight to take him home, though one which had to travel via West Germany rather than direct to the Czech Republic. Havel fell ill on that flight. He was rapidly overcome by crippling stomach pains before he fainted. An aircraft divert saw medical attention directed towards him once he was on the ground and he ended up in a West German hospital. Havel was unconscious and soon at death’s door. Poison was at once suspected though the Czech authorities, plus the West Germans and other interested parties, were unable to pin down what was causing him to slowly lose his battle to live. The days progressed and his health got worse. Havel had major internal organ failure and the spread of the death ravaging his body moved at a rapid rate. Four days after that flight from West Berlin, he died without ever regaining consciousness.

The Czech Republic had a vacancy for the office of president.

Presidential succession in that country was written into the constitution so that should the office fall vacant, it wouldn’t be immediately directly replaced. There was no vice president waiting by. Instead, the prime minister and the parliamentary speaker were due to share the duties of the office pending an emergency election. That wouldn’t take long to come about because it wasn’t a popular vote which had put Havel in power but instead one among parliamentarians where a majority was needed. Václav Klaus was the Czech prime minister in May 1994. A growing political opponent of Havel’s leadership, he should have been a shoo-in for the role. Klaus had public support and there would have been enough votes among colleagues to get him there. However, on the second day that Havel was in that West German hospital – there had been an intention to bring him home but his situation had deteriorated so fast that moving him was deemed unwise – a young female secretary working for Klaus was found dead in his personal office. She was discovered naked and had been strangled. No public announcement of that was made, not when the Czech Republic’s leadership was in crisis mode with a president poisoned when overseas and clinging to life. There was no direct evidence to tie Klaus to that young woman’s apparent murder. He had been in the same building though, down the hall meeting with media strategists at the time. Both of them swore that he had been with them the whole time. Rumours swirled around among parliamentarians as to what that was all about. There was information fed indirectly to them from outside sources that Klaus did have something to do with it all, that his aides were lying about his complete non-involvement.

The Czech Police, so distrusted by Havel, even Klaus too in many ways, investigated alongside the state intelligence service which the president had been castrating for his fears over East German links. Just as Havel had feared, infiltration by the Stasi to buy traitors there paid off. All sorts of evidence was seemingly conjured up to implicate Klaus. Then there were the leaks which saw to it that the news about that secretary’s death became public. At first, the story came to the attention of the West German media who broadcast it and afterwards sections of the Czech media did as well. There were some shadowy owners of the domestic media inside the country and Havel had been seeking to take on yet he had never gotten around to do that, impeded by parliamentarians bought off. Klaus had been thought to have been favoured by them but he was suddenly in the negative spotlight. No clear allegations were made that he was intimately involved with that young woman nor had seen to it that she was killed yet there were a whole load of innuendos put about. Havel’s death was not long afterwards announced. That knocked the Klaus story out of the way. However, there was no time for allies of the prime minister to present evidence to disprove the wild allegations: people only heard them, not the demolishing of such silliness as the country’s head of government being involved in anything like that which came afterwards.

Candidate X moved to take the presidency while Klaus was beset by scandal and distrust. The codename was what Schwanitz and those with him up in East Berlin called their preferred choice to replace Havel instead of Klaus. They had long-term connections with him and had helped build him a support base within parliament. If they could get him into the office of the presidency, even with the issue of that young woman’s death going away for the prime minister, the entire future of Czech-DDR relations could be changed. An extraordinary Stasi effort was made to see Candidate X be considered by those parliamentarians and then to have them vote for him too. The gamble was massive but the pay offs were considered to be worth it if the third, final phase of Schwanitz’s scheme would bring the result desired.

Why do i have the feeling that the East German operation will backfire seriously.

Big time! With that, plus so much else, we'll get a war.

Aug 31, 2021 19:39:41 GMT kyuzoaoi said:

I think you should rename the story into "Volkskrieg-People's War"; you don't want them to confuse it with a Chinese story.

I did consider a German title. Years ago I did an East German story entitled 'Volksarmee' - People's Army.
This story will be a people's war though where the DDR throws everyone into it, willingly or not. So I like the English name of that.

Sept 1, 2021 6:47:42 GMT gillan1220 said:

How will this affect the Hong Kong and Macau handover by the end of the decade?

As lordroel says below: zero.

Sept 1, 2021 7:06:30 GMT lordroel said:

The treaty to handover Hong Kong was made in 1984, several years before the POD of this TL, thus I do not think it is going to be effected, unless something happens with China.

Correct. No impact.

[James G]

Seven – WMDs


Assassinating the Czech president, framing the prime minister of that small country for murder and throwing everything at getting a favoured candidate into power there in the nation which neighboured East Germany was all not lightly done. Several years beforehand, there had been an effort to put the young Nicu Ceaușescu into power in Romania. That had been a foolish, vanity exercise that had rightfully failed due to the haphazard nature of it all. The DDR regime hadn’t been serious enough there – though even if they had, the attempt would still have been doomed in all honesty – because it wasn’t essential to the survival of East Germany. Seeing a leadership change in the Czech Republic was though. It needed to work.

Since the Seventies, the wheels had been coming off the national economy. East Germany had been propped up by Soviet subsidies then massive, eye-watering loans from West Germany too. During the Special Period post-’89, none of that was available. Belts were tightened nationwide with luxuries forgone. The economic sanctions imposed by the West hurt, but it was hurt already atop of the gaping wound that was the national financial situation. The DDR’s economy just couldn’t function properly. The weapons smuggling, which moved to general state-backed criminality in moving non-military goods, had started back in the Eighties and expanded significantly during the Nineties. East Germany might smuggle a crate of missiles but there would be a container of grain too. Food, medicines, fuel, industrial equipment… the country had to go out and get all of that either cheap or, better yet, without paying for it all. Serious effort had to be undertaken to cover up what was done, sometimes negating the value of what had been stolen making the process more difficult and costly going forwards. Notice was taken all over the place among foreign governments, international organisations and investigative journalists of what was going on. Denials from East Berlin came but they were less and less convincing every time. Access to needed goods was slowly shut down. Changes in governments within Russia, as well as Belarus and Bulgaria, brought with them allies whom East Germany turned to. They weren’t willing to do what they did for nothing though. What had seemed fortuitous at first turned sour, with Russia especially. Chernomyrdin wanted a bigger slice, he in fact wanted everything that the DDR had been getting its hands upon. Too much dependence upon his regime had been shifted too quick, leading to East Germany getting stuck in the quicksand that was Russian state corruption.

What it couldn’t steal, the regime had to buy. The sanctions were gotten around using false buyers: either private companies or individuals abroad. Payment was never in East German Marks. Foreign currency was needed and that had to be of the valued & convertible kind. Sellers wanted their payment using Deutschmarks, US Dollars, Pound Sterling or French & Swiss Francs. That illegal smuggling effort organised by the state had started out with the intention of gaining such currency solely for that purpose though that was before a lot of it was diverted into personal hands: those acting as criminals took that to its natural conclusion and became what they pretended to be. Not enough foreign currency came in – the books were cooked right to explain away the absence – and East Germany really began to feel the shortage come 1995. That was compounded upon by the actions of Havel and, to a lesser extent, the West German Parliament as well. With regards to the latter, West Germany had been for decades buying the freedom of East Germans. In a process known as häftlingsfreikauf (prisoner’s ransom), political prisoners in the DDR were released across the border in exchange for payment in valued Deutschmarks. Parliamentarians in Bonn finally put an end to that. The humanitarian argument was used by Schäuble try to keep it going but the chancellor was overruled. East Germany was using that money to stay afloat, to finance criminality and to carry on oppressing millions more of its citizens. As to the Czech President, he helped highlight East German activity to those who had for so long desired to look away by using his popularity outside of his country as a noted warrior against communism to make everyone aware of what the DDR was up to. His speeches and lobbying brought attention to illegal activity that was gradually shut down. When he went to Poland to arrange for that informal Czech-Polish defensive pact, Borusewicz there agreed that Poland would help put the squeeze on East Germany. Ships carrying cargo that entered Polish ports often had elements of that bound for East Germany no matter what the paperwork said about ultimate destination. Through Szczecin a lot of the smuggling into the DDR started because foreign companies were banned for sending goods to East Germany directly. Yet neither of those two presidents knew how just much the Szczecin route was relied upon and the closing it down really hurt East Germany with a near immediate effect. Havel had got wind of the matter due to the Moldauhafen anchorage at the Port of Hamburg. Under a ninety-nine year lease arranged back in 1929, Czechoslovakia (and thus the Czech successor state who took over the lease) had access to their own berths there. East German smuggling went through Moldauhafen like it did through Szczecin, before the Czechs and the West Germans together worked to shut that down at the end of ‘94. Szczecin’s importance had grown more than they knew. Furthermore, trucks, canal barges & rail cars laden with goods often went through East Germany between Poland and Western Europe with movements going both ways. Cargo disappeared where it was most often not on a manifest but there were also noticeable thefts. The latter became more and more visible with Borusewicz already seeking to see than end before Havel presented an agreement to allow for Polish freight to move through the Czech Republic. West German companies were open to the idea, willing to shift routings, and the Czech economy would also benefit. While the focus there was on illegal goings-on, there were also the legitimate factors involved where East Germany made money in the open from transit fees but also secondary spending: none of that had been subject to Western sanctions. Havel and Borusewicz were working on getting that set up when the former took that flight where he fell seriously ill.

What was wanted in East Berlin was a Czech government that would stop all that was being done to cause serious damage to the DDR economy that was already on the verge of complete collapse. A sticky plaster would be applied, so the hope went, with the halt to the death by a thousand cuts that the ideologically-driven Havel was doing. More that than, down the line there was the aim that the new leader installed in Prague would be more favourable to East Germany in other ways. Trade between the two countries was wanted with an eye on exploiting that Czech economy rather than seeing each getting a fair deal out of things. Their Candidate X had an idea of patriotism that involved getting himself rich: him first, country a distant second. It would take more than even that to turn things around long-term for the DDR but it was a start. Margot Honecker and her Politburo were getting desperate. They told themselves that they had a good plan and the outcome was likely to see success. Stasi chief Schwanitz held back a ‘Plan B’ option just in case though he never intended that to come into play.


The first half of 1995 witnessed eyes finally being fully opened among Western intelligence services, and thus their governments, when it came to what East Germany was involved in alongside various unsavoury allies with the procurement of weapons of mass destruction. The DDR never had a WMD programme when part of the Soviet-controlled Warsaw Pact. There was no ‘nuclear sharing’ – like what NATO did in preparation for war – nor was the country allowed to have any independence in acquiring weapons of such nature. The Soviets never would have allowed it, not with memories still fresh of Hitler’s attempt at full-scale genocide. There was the technical know-how though and East Germany had much of what was needed to arm itself with WMDs should it set about doing so. The DDR was like other nations, West Germany included, who could, if the political will was there, and foreign opposition not actively in-place, with the ability to become a nuclear power. Erich Honecker had authorised that beginnings of a WMD programme in 1991. It wasn’t chemicals nor biological weapons that the Stasi set about seeing that East Germany could be armed with but nuclear weapons instead. Armed with such weapons, no foreign invasion to depose the regime would ever occur. When it had been set up, Margot Honecker had actually been opposed to the idea. Only a select inner circle of the Politburo knew and she had been the strongest voice against it all. Her concern was that the West, maybe the Russians too working with them, would put a stop to the DDR joining the most exclusive of clubs that a nation could join. Her husband had overruled such suggestions. The country must be able to defend itself with the threat of nuclear force, he had argued, though he did declare his intention that there would never be the actual use: to possess them meant that they would never have to be employed, didn’t it?

The secrecy was quite something when it came to the effort to arm itself. Iraq and Libya were joint partners, as they were with an associated missile programme, and within their countries, there were even more ruthless measures taken to ensure that the knowledge was closely held. The trio worked together though each was firmly intended to shut the other two out at the very end and take everything for themselves. Duplicitous final goals aside, there was much cooperation done in the meantime. Real progress was made towards assembling nuclear weapons that could be fitted towards military hardware that each nation employed already and planned to in the future too. East Germany supplied the uranium. It came from domestic sources at the Wismut facility in Saxony. Their allies helped in other ways with more materials with some quite underhand, violent means to acquire what was needed. The DDR leadership as well as Gaddafi and Saddam both were eager throughout the years for things to be completed. Just how long could all of this take!? It did take a long time though. To rush it all was impossible. The secrecy and thus the inability to undertake tests slowed things down dramatically. In April ‘95, Margot Honecker was briefed upon the progress. She was told six more months were needed before East Germany could become a nuclear power. Her position with regards to such weapons had changed. She saw the need for them that her deceased husband had. To have them, to tell the world that East Germany had them, would ensure the survival of the regime against any attempt at the foreign invasion she had begun to fear was one day likely from the West who wanted to see the DDR regime thrown into the ashes of history.

That same report she read there in East Berlin was read first in Tel Aviv and then later in Washington, London and Paris. Mossad operatives all over what they thought was a conventional Libyan missile programme – with the reach to hit Israel – came across the Iraqi and then East German connections to that. Further investigation uncovered the desired payload. The discussions that were had in Tel Aviv were similar to those had there more than a decade before when it came to Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor: the national policy was to strike ahead of capability less an enemy gain usable nuclear weapons. That was soon realised to be more difficult than thought though considering how far along everything was and the dispersed nature of things. There was activity down in Libya but also in Iraq and especially East Germany. Shimon Peres (someone demonised in East German propaganda for his premiership of Israel) went to the Americans with what he knew. Not everyone back in Tel Aviv agreed with that, believing that it should be an Israeli-only matter, but he looked at what he saw as the bigger picture. If Israel stamped out what was going on physically in Libya, plus Iraq as well, the East Germans would only continue. Who knew if one day the crazy, anti-Semites there would pass their nuclear weapons technology onto another Arab regime? That was unlikely but so was the very real East Berlin–Tripoli–Baghdad alliance. Only the Americans could really put a stop to the whole thing. Cuomo would later make the decision to not tell the Israelis that he shared what they told him with the British and French: Peres had regarded the matter as between him and the 42nd President. That was done because Cuomo was briefed by his intelligence people that those two countries were already biting at the edges of getting a look-in towards a possible East German WMD programme. What Israel had uncovered confirmed what they had suspected. In London and Paris there had been a lot of wishing that they were wrong, that they were barking up the wrong tree, due to what flimsy evidence they had that the DDR might be involved in a nuclear weapons programme. When the Americans told them that they were right all along, after several years of politely telling them that they were paranoid, there wasn’t any ‘I told you so’ directed back towards Washington. The situation was too serious for that. It had actually been said by members of the Cuomo Administration to concerned European counterparts that East Germany was more likely to steal (from out of the former USSR) rather than create its own nuclear weapons: they were wrong there in Washington but there was no celebration of that in Britain & France.

It was in nobody’s interest for East Germany to have such weapons, let alone for the Iraqis and Libyans to be involved as well when they were led by such madmen as Saddam & Gaddafi. The Israelis did find out that Washington had been blabbing though the reaction wasn’t much in the end. They were more concerned about what came back as a consequence of that unauthorised sharing of information. The United States had its own eyes on missile activity in Iraq that was then revealed to Peres. It would be noted by yet unsaid by the British foreign secretary that if only all of them had put their heads together early on, working in unison, there would have been a real chance to nip the whole thing in the bud at the start. All of the pieces fitted together. What they had all uncovered only made sense then. Suspected thefts of nuclear material all over the place including plutonium from a Swedish civilian nuclear reactor. Professors in nuclear physics with unexplained absences from the Humboldt University in East Berlin. Extensive security around an unknown state military facility at Trebbin within the DDR. A major, unexplained effort by the Iraqis to silence a defector who’d reached Jordan who had a background in missile warhead technology. Disappearances of Libyan PhD students in various fields where their value for Gaddafi wasn’t exploited as it might have been. All of these little pieces, and so much more, fitted together in that jigsaw to point to what the Israelis having their hands on in terms of that report to East Germany’s new leader as being true. Before anyone in the West could approve any action, there was further proof required though. Peres agreed to wait too. Back home, there was a desire to start bombing but he said that Israel would hold its punches. Not for long though, just a little while. He did so because the Cuomo Administration wanted to be sure before it acted. Waiting also meant that when Israel did strike, it wouldn’t be alone and could really put an end to the whole thing rather than just see the danger delayed a few years. So Peres waited. And he waited some more. His impatience, those of his colleagues, was pushed to the very limit. When was action going to be taken? Washington urged caution. Come the following month, East Germany tried to change the leadership of the Czech Republic to one suitable to its own needs. Western attention focused on that yet the WMD issue still hadn’t been solved. That six month time limit had been chipped away at while, as Peres’ defence minister put it, Cuomo tried to discover his manhood.

[lordroel]

Sept 1, 2021 18:15:17 GMT James G said:

Seven – WMDs


Assassinating the Czech president, framing the prime minister of that small country for murder and throwing everything at getting a favoured candidate into power there in the nation which neighboured East Germany was all not lightly done. Several years beforehand, there had been an effort to put the young Nicu Ceaușescu into power in Romania. That had been a foolish, vanity exercise that had rightfully failed due to the haphazard nature of it all. The DDR regime hadn’t been serious enough there – though even if they had, the attempt would still have been doomed in all honesty – because it wasn’t essential to the survival of East Germany. Seeing a leadership change in the Czech Republic was though. It needed to work.

Since the Seventies, the wheels had been coming off the national economy. East Germany had been propped up by Soviet subsidies then massive, eye-watering loans from West Germany too. During the Special Period post-’89, none of that was available. Belts were tightened nationwide with luxuries forgone. The economic sanctions imposed by the West hurt, but it was hurt already atop of the gaping wound that was the national financial situation. The DDR’s economy just couldn’t function properly. The weapons smuggling, which moved to general state-backed criminality in moving non-military goods, had started back in the Eighties and expanded significantly during the Nineties. East Germany might smuggle a crate of missiles but there would be a container of grain too. Food, medicines, fuel, industrial equipment… the country had to go out and get all of that either cheap or, better yet, without paying for it all. Serious effort had to be undertaken to cover up what was done, sometimes negating the value of what had been stolen making the process more difficult and costly going forwards. Notice was taken all over the place among foreign governments, international organisations and investigative journalists of what was going on. Denials from East Berlin came but they were less and less convincing every time. Access to needed goods was slowly shut down. Changes in governments within Russia, as well as Belarus and Bulgaria, brought with them allies whom East Germany turned to. They weren’t willing to do what they did for nothing though. What had seemed fortuitous at first turned sour, with Russia especially. Chernomyrdin wanted a bigger slice, he in fact wanted everything that the DDR had been getting its hands upon. Too much dependence upon his regime had been shifted too quick, leading to East Germany getting stuck in the quicksand that was Russian state corruption.

What it couldn’t steal, the regime had to buy. The sanctions were gotten around using false buyers: either private companies or individuals abroad. Payment was never in East German Marks. Foreign currency was needed and that had to be of the valued & convertible kind. Sellers wanted their payment using Deutschmarks, US Dollars, Pound Sterling or French & Swiss Francs. That illegal smuggling effort organised by the state had started out with the intention of gaining such currency solely for that purpose though that was before a lot of it was diverted into personal hands: those acting as criminals took that to its natural conclusion and became what they pretended to be. Not enough foreign currency came in – the books were cooked right to explain away the absence – and East Germany really began to feel the shortage come 1995. That was compounded upon by the actions of Havel and, to a lesser extent, the West German Parliament as well. With regards to the latter, West Germany had been for decades buying the freedom of East Germans. In a process known as häftlingsfreikauf (prisoner’s ransom), political prisoners in the DDR were released across the border in exchange for payment in valued Deutschmarks. Parliamentarians in Bonn finally put an end to that. The humanitarian argument was used by Schäuble try to keep it going but the chancellor was overruled. East Germany was using that money to stay afloat, to finance criminality and to carry on oppressing millions more of its citizens. As to the Czech President, he helped highlight East German activity to those who had for so long desired to look away by using his popularity outside of his country as a noted warrior against communism to make everyone aware of what the DDR was up to. His speeches and lobbying brought attention to illegal activity that was gradually shut down. When he went to Poland to arrange for that informal Czech-Polish defensive pact, Borusewicz there agreed that Poland would help put the squeeze on East Germany. Ships carrying cargo that entered Polish ports often had elements of that bound for East Germany no matter what the paperwork said about ultimate destination. Through Szczecin a lot of the smuggling into the DDR started because foreign companies were banned for sending goods to East Germany directly. Yet neither of those two presidents knew how just much the Szczecin route was relied upon and the closing it down really hurt East Germany with a near immediate effect. Havel had got wind of the matter due to the Moldauhafen anchorage at the Port of Hamburg. Under a ninety-nine year lease arranged back in 1929, Czechoslovakia (and thus the Czech successor state who took over the lease) had access to their own berths there. East German smuggling went through Moldauhafen like it did through Szczecin, before the Czechs and the West Germans together worked to shut that down at the end of ‘94. Szczecin’s importance had grown more than they knew. Furthermore, trucks, canal barges & rail cars laden with goods often went through East Germany between Poland and Western Europe with movements going both ways. Cargo disappeared where it was most often not on a manifest but there were also noticeable thefts. The latter became more and more visible with Borusewicz already seeking to see than end before Havel presented an agreement to allow for Polish freight to move through the Czech Republic. West German companies were open to the idea, willing to shift routings, and the Czech economy would also benefit. While the focus there was on illegal goings-on, there were also the legitimate factors involved where East Germany made money in the open from transit fees but also secondary spending: none of that had been subject to Western sanctions. Havel and Borusewicz were working on getting that set up when the former took that flight where he fell seriously ill.

What was wanted in East Berlin was a Czech government that would stop all that was being done to cause serious damage to the DDR economy that was already on the verge of complete collapse. A sticky plaster would be applied, so the hope went, with the halt to the death by a thousand cuts that the ideologically-driven Havel was doing. More that than, down the line there was the aim that the new leader installed in Prague would be more favourable to East Germany in other ways. Trade between the two countries was wanted with an eye on exploiting that Czech economy rather than seeing each getting a fair deal out of things. Their Candidate X had an idea of patriotism that involved getting himself rich: him first, country a distant second. It would take more than even that to turn things around long-term for the DDR but it was a start. Margot Honecker and her Politburo were getting desperate. They told themselves that they had a good plan and the outcome was likely to see success. Stasi chief Schwanitz held back a ‘Plan B’ option just in case though he never intended that to come into play.


The first half of 1995 witnessed eyes finally being fully opened among Western intelligence services, and thus their governments, when it came to what East Germany was involved in alongside various unsavoury allies with the procurement of weapons of mass destruction. The DDR never had a WMD programme when part of the Soviet-controlled Warsaw Pact. There was no ‘nuclear sharing’ – like what NATO did in preparation for war – nor was the country allowed to have any independence in acquiring weapons of such nature. The Soviets never would have allowed it, not with memories still fresh of Hitler’s attempt at full-scale genocide. There was the technical know-how though and East Germany had much of what was needed to arm itself with WMDs should it set about doing so. The DDR was like other nations, West Germany included, who could, if the political will was there, and foreign opposition not actively in-place, with the ability to become a nuclear power. Erich Honecker had authorised that beginnings of a WMD programme in 1991. It wasn’t chemicals nor biological weapons that the Stasi set about seeing that East Germany could be armed with but nuclear weapons instead. Armed with such weapons, no foreign invasion to depose the regime would ever occur. When it had been set up, Margot Honecker had actually been opposed to the idea. Only a select inner circle of the Politburo knew and she had been the strongest voice against it all. Her concern was that the West, maybe the Russians too working with them, would put a stop to the DDR joining the most exclusive of clubs that a nation could join. Her husband had overruled such suggestions. The country must be able to defend itself with the threat of nuclear force, he had argued, though he did declare his intention that there would never be the actual use: to possess them meant that they would never have to be employed, didn’t it?

The secrecy was quite something when it came to the effort to arm itself. Iraq and Libya were joint partners, as they were with an associated missile programme, and within their countries, there were even more ruthless measures taken to ensure that the knowledge was closely held. The trio worked together though each was firmly intended to shut the other two out at the very end and take everything for themselves. Duplicitous final goals aside, there was much cooperation done in the meantime. Real progress was made towards assembling nuclear weapons that could be fitted towards military hardware that each nation employed already and planned to in the future too. East Germany supplied the uranium. It came from domestic sources at the Wismut facility in Saxony. Their allies helped in other ways with more materials with some quite underhand, violent means to acquire what was needed. The DDR leadership as well as Gaddafi and Saddam both were eager throughout the years for things to be completed. Just how long could all of this take!? It did take a long time though. To rush it all was impossible. The secrecy and thus the inability to undertake tests slowed things down dramatically. In April ‘95, Margot Honecker was briefed upon the progress. She was told six more months were needed before East Germany could become a nuclear power. Her position with regards to such weapons had changed. She saw the need for them that her deceased husband had. To have them, to tell the world that East Germany had them, would ensure the survival of the regime against any attempt at the foreign invasion she had begun to fear was one day likely from the West who wanted to see the DDR regime thrown into the ashes of history.

That same report she read there in East Berlin was read first in Tel Aviv and then later in Washington, London and Paris. Mossad operatives all over what they thought was a conventional Libyan missile programme – with the reach to hit Israel – came across the Iraqi and then East German connections to that. Further investigation uncovered the desired payload. The discussions that were had in Tel Aviv were similar to those had there more than a decade before when it came to Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor: the national policy was to strike ahead of capability less an enemy gain usable nuclear weapons. That was soon realised to be more difficult than thought though considering how far along everything was and the dispersed nature of things. There was activity down in Libya but also in Iraq and especially East Germany. Shimon Peres (someone demonised in East German propaganda for his premiership of Israel) went to the Americans with what he knew. Not everyone back in Tel Aviv agreed with that, believing that it should be an Israeli-only matter, but he looked at what he saw as the bigger picture. If Israel stamped out what was going on physically in Libya, plus Iraq as well, the East Germans would only continue. Who knew if one day the crazy, anti-Semites there would pass their nuclear weapons technology onto another Arab regime? That was unlikely but so was the very real East Berlin–Tripoli–Baghdad alliance. Only the Americans could really put a stop to the whole thing. Cuomo would later make the decision to not tell the Israelis that he shared what they told him with the British and French: Peres had regarded the matter as between him and the 42nd President. That was done because Cuomo was briefed by his intelligence people that those two countries were already biting at the edges of getting a look-in towards a possible East German WMD programme. What Israel had uncovered confirmed what they had suspected. In London and Paris there had been a lot of wishing that they were wrong, that they were barking up the wrong tree, due to what flimsy evidence they had that the DDR might be involved in a nuclear weapons programme. When the Americans told them that they were right all along, after several years of politely telling them that they were paranoid, there wasn’t any ‘I told you so’ directed back towards Washington. The situation was too serious for that. It had actually been said by members of the Cuomo Administration to concerned European counterparts that East Germany was more likely to steal (from out of the former USSR) rather than create its own nuclear weapons: they were wrong there in Washington but there was no celebration of that in Britain & France.

It was in nobody’s interest for East Germany to have such weapons, let alone for the Iraqis and Libyans to be involved as well when they were led by such madmen as Saddam & Gaddafi. The Israelis did find out that Washington had been blabbing though the reaction wasn’t much in the end. They were more concerned about what came back as a consequence of that unauthorised sharing of information. The United States had its own eyes on missile activity in Iraq that was then revealed to Peres. It would be noted by yet unsaid by the British foreign secretary that if only all of them had put their heads together early on, working in unison, there would have been a real chance to nip the whole thing in the bud at the start. All of the pieces fitted together. What they had all uncovered only made sense then. Suspected thefts of nuclear material all over the place including plutonium from a Swedish civilian nuclear reactor. Professors in nuclear physics with unexplained absences from the Humboldt University in East Berlin. Extensive security around an unknown state military facility at Trebbin within the DDR. A major, unexplained effort by the Iraqis to silence a defector who’d reached Jordan who had a background in missile warhead technology. Disappearances of Libyan PHD students in various fields where their value for Gaddafi wasn’t exploited as it might have been. All of these little pieces, and so much more, fitted together in that jigsaw to point to what the Israelis having their hands on in terms of that report to East Germany’s new leader as being true. Before anyone in the West could approve any action, there was further proof required though. Peres agreed to wait too. Back home, there was a desire to start bombing but he said that Israel would hold its punches. Not for long though, just a little while. He did so because the Cuomo Administration wanted to be sure before it acted. Waiting also meant that when Israel did strike, it wouldn’t be alone and could really put an end to the whole thing rather than just see the danger delayed a few years. So Peres waited. And he waited some more. His impatience, those of his colleagues, was pushed to the very limit. When was action going to be taken? Washington urged caution. Come the following month, East Germany tried to change the leadership of the Czech Republic to one suitable to its own needs. Western attention focused on that yet the WMD issue still hadn’t been solved. That six month time limit had been chipped away at while, as Peres’ defence minister put it, Cuomo tried to discover his manhood.

Slowly but steadily the water in the boiler is getting to boiling temperature and then, BOOM.

[kyuzoaoi]

When Margot would talk with Kim Jong-il?

[stevep]

Sept 1, 2021 18:37:16 GMT lordroel said:

Sept 1, 2021 18:15:17 GMT James G said:

Seven – WMDs


Assassinating the Czech president, framing the prime minister of that small country for murder and throwing everything at getting a favoured candidate into power there in the nation which neighboured East Germany was all not lightly done. Several years beforehand, there had been an effort to put the young Nicu Ceaușescu into power in Romania. That had been a foolish, vanity exercise that had rightfully failed due to the haphazard nature of it all. The DDR regime hadn’t been serious enough there – though even if they had, the attempt would still have been doomed in all honesty – because it wasn’t essential to the survival of East Germany. Seeing a leadership change in the Czech Republic was though. It needed to work.

Since the Seventies, the wheels had been coming off the national economy. East Germany had been propped up by Soviet subsidies then massive, eye-watering loans from West Germany too. During the Special Period post-’89, none of that was available. Belts were tightened nationwide with luxuries forgone. The economic sanctions imposed by the West hurt, but it was hurt already atop of the gaping wound that was the national financial situation. The DDR’s economy just couldn’t function properly. The weapons smuggling, which moved to general state-backed criminality in moving non-military goods, had started back in the Eighties and expanded significantly during the Nineties. East Germany might smuggle a crate of missiles but there would be a container of grain too. Food, medicines, fuel, industrial equipment… the country had to go out and get all of that either cheap or, better yet, without paying for it all. Serious effort had to be undertaken to cover up what was done, sometimes negating the value of what had been stolen making the process more difficult and costly going forwards. Notice was taken all over the place among foreign governments, international organisations and investigative journalists of what was going on. Denials from East Berlin came but they were less and less convincing every time. Access to needed goods was slowly shut down. Changes in governments within Russia, as well as Belarus and Bulgaria, brought with them allies whom East Germany turned to. They weren’t willing to do what they did for nothing though. What had seemed fortuitous at first turned sour, with Russia especially. Chernomyrdin wanted a bigger slice, he in fact wanted everything that the DDR had been getting its hands upon. Too much dependence upon his regime had been shifted too quick, leading to East Germany getting stuck in the quicksand that was Russian state corruption.

What it couldn’t steal, the regime had to buy. The sanctions were gotten around using false buyers: either private companies or individuals abroad. Payment was never in East German Marks. Foreign currency was needed and that had to be of the valued & convertible kind. Sellers wanted their payment using Deutschmarks, US Dollars, Pound Sterling or French & Swiss Francs. That illegal smuggling effort organised by the state had started out with the intention of gaining such currency solely for that purpose though that was before a lot of it was diverted into personal hands: those acting as criminals took that to its natural conclusion and became what they pretended to be. Not enough foreign currency came in – the books were cooked right to explain away the absence – and East Germany really began to feel the shortage come 1995. That was compounded upon by the actions of Havel and, to a lesser extent, the West German Parliament as well. With regards to the latter, West Germany had been for decades buying the freedom of East Germans. In a process known as häftlingsfreikauf (prisoner’s ransom), political prisoners in the DDR were released across the border in exchange for payment in valued Deutschmarks. Parliamentarians in Bonn finally put an end to that. The humanitarian argument was used by Schäuble try to keep it going but the chancellor was overruled. East Germany was using that money to stay afloat, to finance criminality and to carry on oppressing millions more of its citizens. As to the Czech President, he helped highlight East German activity to those who had for so long desired to look away by using his popularity outside of his country as a noted warrior against communism to make everyone aware of what the DDR was up to. His speeches and lobbying brought attention to illegal activity that was gradually shut down. When he went to Poland to arrange for that informal Czech-Polish defensive pact, Borusewicz there agreed that Poland would help put the squeeze on East Germany. Ships carrying cargo that entered Polish ports often had elements of that bound for East Germany no matter what the paperwork said about ultimate destination. Through Szczecin a lot of the smuggling into the DDR started because foreign companies were banned for sending goods to East Germany directly. Yet neither of those two presidents knew how just much the Szczecin route was relied upon and the closing it down really hurt East Germany with a near immediate effect. Havel had got wind of the matter due to the Moldauhafen anchorage at the Port of Hamburg. Under a ninety-nine year lease arranged back in 1929, Czechoslovakia (and thus the Czech successor state who took over the lease) had access to their own berths there. East German smuggling went through Moldauhafen like it did through Szczecin, before the Czechs and the West Germans together worked to shut that down at the end of ‘94. Szczecin’s importance had grown more than they knew. Furthermore, trucks, canal barges & rail cars laden with goods often went through East Germany between Poland and Western Europe with movements going both ways. Cargo disappeared where it was most often not on a manifest but there were also noticeable thefts. The latter became more and more visible with Borusewicz already seeking to see than end before Havel presented an agreement to allow for Polish freight to move through the Czech Republic. West German companies were open to the idea, willing to shift routings, and the Czech economy would also benefit. While the focus there was on illegal goings-on, there were also the legitimate factors involved where East Germany made money in the open from transit fees but also secondary spending: none of that had been subject to Western sanctions. Havel and Borusewicz were working on getting that set up when the former took that flight where he fell seriously ill.

What was wanted in East Berlin was a Czech government that would stop all that was being done to cause serious damage to the DDR economy that was already on the verge of complete collapse. A sticky plaster would be applied, so the hope went, with the halt to the death by a thousand cuts that the ideologically-driven Havel was doing. More that than, down the line there was the aim that the new leader installed in Prague would be more favourable to East Germany in other ways. Trade between the two countries was wanted with an eye on exploiting that Czech economy rather than seeing each getting a fair deal out of things. Their Candidate X had an idea of patriotism that involved getting himself rich: him first, country a distant second. It would take more than even that to turn things around long-term for the DDR but it was a start. Margot Honecker and her Politburo were getting desperate. They told themselves that they had a good plan and the outcome was likely to see success. Stasi chief Schwanitz held back a ‘Plan B’ option just in case though he never intended that to come into play.


The first half of 1995 witnessed eyes finally being fully opened among Western intelligence services, and thus their governments, when it came to what East Germany was involved in alongside various unsavoury allies with the procurement of weapons of mass destruction. The DDR never had a WMD programme when part of the Soviet-controlled Warsaw Pact. There was no ‘nuclear sharing’ – like what NATO did in preparation for war – nor was the country allowed to have any independence in acquiring weapons of such nature. The Soviets never would have allowed it, not with memories still fresh of Hitler’s attempt at full-scale genocide. There was the technical know-how though and East Germany had much of what was needed to arm itself with WMDs should it set about doing so. The DDR was like other nations, West Germany included, who could, if the political will was there, and foreign opposition not actively in-place, with the ability to become a nuclear power. Erich Honecker had authorised that beginnings of a WMD programme in 1991. It wasn’t chemicals nor biological weapons that the Stasi set about seeing that East Germany could be armed with but nuclear weapons instead. Armed with such weapons, no foreign invasion to depose the regime would ever occur. When it had been set up, Margot Honecker had actually been opposed to the idea. Only a select inner circle of the Politburo knew and she had been the strongest voice against it all. Her concern was that the West, maybe the Russians too working with them, would put a stop to the DDR joining the most exclusive of clubs that a nation could join. Her husband had overruled such suggestions. The country must be able to defend itself with the threat of nuclear force, he had argued, though he did declare his intention that there would never be the actual use: to possess them meant that they would never have to be employed, didn’t it?

The secrecy was quite something when it came to the effort to arm itself. Iraq and Libya were joint partners, as they were with an associated missile programme, and within their countries, there were even more ruthless measures taken to ensure that the knowledge was closely held. The trio worked together though each was firmly intended to shut the other two out at the very end and take everything for themselves. Duplicitous final goals aside, there was much cooperation done in the meantime. Real progress was made towards assembling nuclear weapons that could be fitted towards military hardware that each nation employed already and planned to in the future too. East Germany supplied the uranium. It came from domestic sources at the Wismut facility in Saxony. Their allies helped in other ways with more materials with some quite underhand, violent means to acquire what was needed. The DDR leadership as well as Gaddafi and Saddam both were eager throughout the years for things to be completed. Just how long could all of this take!? It did take a long time though. To rush it all was impossible. The secrecy and thus the inability to undertake tests slowed things down dramatically. In April ‘95, Margot Honecker was briefed upon the progress. She was told six more months were needed before East Germany could become a nuclear power. Her position with regards to such weapons had changed. She saw the need for them that her deceased husband had. To have them, to tell the world that East Germany had them, would ensure the survival of the regime against any attempt at the foreign invasion she had begun to fear was one day likely from the West who wanted to see the DDR regime thrown into the ashes of history.

That same report she read there in East Berlin was read first in Tel Aviv and then later in Washington, London and Paris. Mossad operatives all over what they thought was a conventional Libyan missile programme – with the reach to hit Israel – came across the Iraqi and then East German connections to that. Further investigation uncovered the desired payload. The discussions that were had in Tel Aviv were similar to those had there more than a decade before when it came to Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor: the national policy was to strike ahead of capability less an enemy gain usable nuclear weapons. That was soon realised to be more difficult than thought though considering how far along everything was and the dispersed nature of things. There was activity down in Libya but also in Iraq and especially East Germany. Shimon Peres (someone demonised in East German propaganda for his premiership of Israel) went to the Americans with what he knew. Not everyone back in Tel Aviv agreed with that, believing that it should be an Israeli-only matter, but he looked at what he saw as the bigger picture. If Israel stamped out what was going on physically in Libya, plus Iraq as well, the East Germans would only continue. Who knew if one day the crazy, anti-Semites there would pass their nuclear weapons technology onto another Arab regime? That was unlikely but so was the very real East Berlin–Tripoli–Baghdad alliance. Only the Americans could really put a stop to the whole thing. Cuomo would later make the decision to not tell the Israelis that he shared what they told him with the British and French: Peres had regarded the matter as between him and the 42nd President. That was done because Cuomo was briefed by his intelligence people that those two countries were already biting at the edges of getting a look-in towards a possible East German WMD programme. What Israel had uncovered confirmed what they had suspected. In London and Paris there had been a lot of wishing that they were wrong, that they were barking up the wrong tree, due to what flimsy evidence they had that the DDR might be involved in a nuclear weapons programme. When the Americans told them that they were right all along, after several years of politely telling them that they were paranoid, there wasn’t any ‘I told you so’ directed back towards Washington. The situation was too serious for that. It had actually been said by members of the Cuomo Administration to concerned European counterparts that East Germany was more likely to steal (from out of the former USSR) rather than create its own nuclear weapons: they were wrong there in Washington but there was no celebration of that in Britain & France.

It was in nobody’s interest for East Germany to have such weapons, let alone for the Iraqis and Libyans to be involved as well when they were led by such madmen as Saddam & Gaddafi. The Israelis did find out that Washington had been blabbing though the reaction wasn’t much in the end. They were more concerned about what came back as a consequence of that unauthorised sharing of information. The United States had its own eyes on missile activity in Iraq that was then revealed to Peres. It would be noted by yet unsaid by the British foreign secretary that if only all of them had put their heads together early on, working in unison, there would have been a real chance to nip the whole thing in the bud at the start. All of the pieces fitted together. What they had all uncovered only made sense then. Suspected thefts of nuclear material all over the place including plutonium from a Swedish civilian nuclear reactor. Professors in nuclear physics with unexplained absences from the Humboldt University in East Berlin. Extensive security around an unknown state military facility at Trebbin within the DDR. A major, unexplained effort by the Iraqis to silence a defector who’d reached Jordan who had a background in missile warhead technology. Disappearances of Libyan PHD students in various fields where their value for Gaddafi wasn’t exploited as it might have been. All of these little pieces, and so much more, fitted together in that jigsaw to point to what the Israelis having their hands on in terms of that report to East Germany’s new leader as being true. Before anyone in the West could approve any action, there was further proof required though. Peres agreed to wait too. Back home, there was a desire to start bombing but he said that Israel would hold its punches. Not for long though, just a little while. He did so because the Cuomo Administration wanted to be sure before it acted. Waiting also meant that when Israel did strike, it wouldn’t be alone and could really put an end to the whole thing rather than just see the danger delayed a few years. So Peres waited. And he waited some more. His impatience, those of his colleagues, was pushed to the very limit. When was action going to be taken? Washington urged caution. Come the following month, East Germany tried to change the leadership of the Czech Republic to one suitable to its own needs. Western attention focused on that yet the WMD issue still hadn’t been solved. That six month time limit had been chipped away at while, as Peres’ defence minister put it, Cuomo tried to discover his manhood.

Slowly but steadily the water in the boiler is getting to boiling temperature and then, BOOM.

  With increasing speed as the E Germany regime gets more and more desperate.  This latest revelation along with the murder of a political leader known for his opposition to the regime and what is likely to be seen as a transparent attempt to frame another is going to bring things to the boil pretty quickly.  It sounds like E Germany starts the actual fighting, possibly part of Schwanitz's plan B but could be a close thing before NATO decides to step in.

[James G]

Sept 1, 2021 18:37:16 GMT lordroel said:

Sept 1, 2021 18:15:17 GMT James G said:

Seven – WMDs


Assassinating the Czech president, framing the prime minister of that small country for murder and throwing everything at getting a favoured candidate into power there in the nation which neighboured East Germany was all not lightly done. Several years beforehand, there had been an effort to put the young Nicu Ceaușescu into power in Romania. That had been a foolish, vanity exercise that had rightfully failed due to the haphazard nature of it all. The DDR regime hadn’t been serious enough there – though even if they had, the attempt would still have been doomed in all honesty – because it wasn’t essential to the survival of East Germany. Seeing a leadership change in the Czech Republic was though. It needed to work.

Since the Seventies, the wheels had been coming off the national economy. East Germany had been propped up by Soviet subsidies then massive, eye-watering loans from West Germany too. During the Special Period post-’89, none of that was available. Belts were tightened nationwide with luxuries forgone. The economic sanctions imposed by the West hurt, but it was hurt already atop of the gaping wound that was the national financial situation. The DDR’s economy just couldn’t function properly. The weapons smuggling, which moved to general state-backed criminality in moving non-military goods, had started back in the Eighties and expanded significantly during the Nineties. East Germany might smuggle a crate of missiles but there would be a container of grain too. Food, medicines, fuel, industrial equipment… the country had to go out and get all of that either cheap or, better yet, without paying for it all. Serious effort had to be undertaken to cover up what was done, sometimes negating the value of what had been stolen making the process more difficult and costly going forwards. Notice was taken all over the place among foreign governments, international organisations and investigative journalists of what was going on. Denials from East Berlin came but they were less and less convincing every time. Access to needed goods was slowly shut down. Changes in governments within Russia, as well as Belarus and Bulgaria, brought with them allies whom East Germany turned to. They weren’t willing to do what they did for nothing though. What had seemed fortuitous at first turned sour, with Russia especially. Chernomyrdin wanted a bigger slice, he in fact wanted everything that the DDR had been getting its hands upon. Too much dependence upon his regime had been shifted too quick, leading to East Germany getting stuck in the quicksand that was Russian state corruption.

What it couldn’t steal, the regime had to buy. The sanctions were gotten around using false buyers: either private companies or individuals abroad. Payment was never in East German Marks. Foreign currency was needed and that had to be of the valued & convertible kind. Sellers wanted their payment using Deutschmarks, US Dollars, Pound Sterling or French & Swiss Francs. That illegal smuggling effort organised by the state had started out with the intention of gaining such currency solely for that purpose though that was before a lot of it was diverted into personal hands: those acting as criminals took that to its natural conclusion and became what they pretended to be. Not enough foreign currency came in – the books were cooked right to explain away the absence – and East Germany really began to feel the shortage come 1995. That was compounded upon by the actions of Havel and, to a lesser extent, the West German Parliament as well. With regards to the latter, West Germany had been for decades buying the freedom of East Germans. In a process known as häftlingsfreikauf (prisoner’s ransom), political prisoners in the DDR were released across the border in exchange for payment in valued Deutschmarks. Parliamentarians in Bonn finally put an end to that. The humanitarian argument was used by Schäuble try to keep it going but the chancellor was overruled. East Germany was using that money to stay afloat, to finance criminality and to carry on oppressing millions more of its citizens. As to the Czech President, he helped highlight East German activity to those who had for so long desired to look away by using his popularity outside of his country as a noted warrior against communism to make everyone aware of what the DDR was up to. His speeches and lobbying brought attention to illegal activity that was gradually shut down. When he went to Poland to arrange for that informal Czech-Polish defensive pact, Borusewicz there agreed that Poland would help put the squeeze on East Germany. Ships carrying cargo that entered Polish ports often had elements of that bound for East Germany no matter what the paperwork said about ultimate destination. Through Szczecin a lot of the smuggling into the DDR started because foreign companies were banned for sending goods to East Germany directly. Yet neither of those two presidents knew how just much the Szczecin route was relied upon and the closing it down really hurt East Germany with a near immediate effect. Havel had got wind of the matter due to the Moldauhafen anchorage at the Port of Hamburg. Under a ninety-nine year lease arranged back in 1929, Czechoslovakia (and thus the Czech successor state who took over the lease) had access to their own berths there. East German smuggling went through Moldauhafen like it did through Szczecin, before the Czechs and the West Germans together worked to shut that down at the end of ‘94. Szczecin’s importance had grown more than they knew. Furthermore, trucks, canal barges & rail cars laden with goods often went through East Germany between Poland and Western Europe with movements going both ways. Cargo disappeared where it was most often not on a manifest but there were also noticeable thefts. The latter became more and more visible with Borusewicz already seeking to see than end before Havel presented an agreement to allow for Polish freight to move through the Czech Republic. West German companies were open to the idea, willing to shift routings, and the Czech economy would also benefit. While the focus there was on illegal goings-on, there were also the legitimate factors involved where East Germany made money in the open from transit fees but also secondary spending: none of that had been subject to Western sanctions. Havel and Borusewicz were working on getting that set up when the former took that flight where he fell seriously ill.

What was wanted in East Berlin was a Czech government that would stop all that was being done to cause serious damage to the DDR economy that was already on the verge of complete collapse. A sticky plaster would be applied, so the hope went, with the halt to the death by a thousand cuts that the ideologically-driven Havel was doing. More that than, down the line there was the aim that the new leader installed in Prague would be more favourable to East Germany in other ways. Trade between the two countries was wanted with an eye on exploiting that Czech economy rather than seeing each getting a fair deal out of things. Their Candidate X had an idea of patriotism that involved getting himself rich: him first, country a distant second. It would take more than even that to turn things around long-term for the DDR but it was a start. Margot Honecker and her Politburo were getting desperate. They told themselves that they had a good plan and the outcome was likely to see success. Stasi chief Schwanitz held back a ‘Plan B’ option just in case though he never intended that to come into play.


The first half of 1995 witnessed eyes finally being fully opened among Western intelligence services, and thus their governments, when it came to what East Germany was involved in alongside various unsavoury allies with the procurement of weapons of mass destruction. The DDR never had a WMD programme when part of the Soviet-controlled Warsaw Pact. There was no ‘nuclear sharing’ – like what NATO did in preparation for war – nor was the country allowed to have any independence in acquiring weapons of such nature. The Soviets never would have allowed it, not with memories still fresh of Hitler’s attempt at full-scale genocide. There was the technical know-how though and East Germany had much of what was needed to arm itself with WMDs should it set about doing so. The DDR was like other nations, West Germany included, who could, if the political will was there, and foreign opposition not actively in-place, with the ability to become a nuclear power. Erich Honecker had authorised that beginnings of a WMD programme in 1991. It wasn’t chemicals nor biological weapons that the Stasi set about seeing that East Germany could be armed with but nuclear weapons instead. Armed with such weapons, no foreign invasion to depose the regime would ever occur. When it had been set up, Margot Honecker had actually been opposed to the idea. Only a select inner circle of the Politburo knew and she had been the strongest voice against it all. Her concern was that the West, maybe the Russians too working with them, would put a stop to the DDR joining the most exclusive of clubs that a nation could join. Her husband had overruled such suggestions. The country must be able to defend itself with the threat of nuclear force, he had argued, though he did declare his intention that there would never be the actual use: to possess them meant that they would never have to be employed, didn’t it?

The secrecy was quite something when it came to the effort to arm itself. Iraq and Libya were joint partners, as they were with an associated missile programme, and within their countries, there were even more ruthless measures taken to ensure that the knowledge was closely held. The trio worked together though each was firmly intended to shut the other two out at the very end and take everything for themselves. Duplicitous final goals aside, there was much cooperation done in the meantime. Real progress was made towards assembling nuclear weapons that could be fitted towards military hardware that each nation employed already and planned to in the future too. East Germany supplied the uranium. It came from domestic sources at the Wismut facility in Saxony. Their allies helped in other ways with more materials with some quite underhand, violent means to acquire what was needed. The DDR leadership as well as Gaddafi and Saddam both were eager throughout the years for things to be completed. Just how long could all of this take!? It did take a long time though. To rush it all was impossible. The secrecy and thus the inability to undertake tests slowed things down dramatically. In April ‘95, Margot Honecker was briefed upon the progress. She was told six more months were needed before East Germany could become a nuclear power. Her position with regards to such weapons had changed. She saw the need for them that her deceased husband had. To have them, to tell the world that East Germany had them, would ensure the survival of the regime against any attempt at the foreign invasion she had begun to fear was one day likely from the West who wanted to see the DDR regime thrown into the ashes of history.

That same report she read there in East Berlin was read first in Tel Aviv and then later in Washington, London and Paris. Mossad operatives all over what they thought was a conventional Libyan missile programme – with the reach to hit Israel – came across the Iraqi and then East German connections to that. Further investigation uncovered the desired payload. The discussions that were had in Tel Aviv were similar to those had there more than a decade before when it came to Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor: the national policy was to strike ahead of capability less an enemy gain usable nuclear weapons. That was soon realised to be more difficult than thought though considering how far along everything was and the dispersed nature of things. There was activity down in Libya but also in Iraq and especially East Germany. Shimon Peres (someone demonised in East German propaganda for his premiership of Israel) went to the Americans with what he knew. Not everyone back in Tel Aviv agreed with that, believing that it should be an Israeli-only matter, but he looked at what he saw as the bigger picture. If Israel stamped out what was going on physically in Libya, plus Iraq as well, the East Germans would only continue. Who knew if one day the crazy, anti-Semites there would pass their nuclear weapons technology onto another Arab regime? That was unlikely but so was the very real East Berlin–Tripoli–Baghdad alliance. Only the Americans could really put a stop to the whole thing. Cuomo would later make the decision to not tell the Israelis that he shared what they told him with the British and French: Peres had regarded the matter as between him and the 42nd President. That was done because Cuomo was briefed by his intelligence people that those two countries were already biting at the edges of getting a look-in towards a possible East German WMD programme. What Israel had uncovered confirmed what they had suspected. In London and Paris there had been a lot of wishing that they were wrong, that they were barking up the wrong tree, due to what flimsy evidence they had that the DDR might be involved in a nuclear weapons programme. When the Americans told them that they were right all along, after several years of politely telling them that they were paranoid, there wasn’t any ‘I told you so’ directed back towards Washington. The situation was too serious for that. It had actually been said by members of the Cuomo Administration to concerned European counterparts that East Germany was more likely to steal (from out of the former USSR) rather than create its own nuclear weapons: they were wrong there in Washington but there was no celebration of that in Britain & France.

It was in nobody’s interest for East Germany to have such weapons, let alone for the Iraqis and Libyans to be involved as well when they were led by such madmen as Saddam & Gaddafi. The Israelis did find out that Washington had been blabbing though the reaction wasn’t much in the end. They were more concerned about what came back as a consequence of that unauthorised sharing of information. The United States had its own eyes on missile activity in Iraq that was then revealed to Peres. It would be noted by yet unsaid by the British foreign secretary that if only all of them had put their heads together early on, working in unison, there would have been a real chance to nip the whole thing in the bud at the start. All of the pieces fitted together. What they had all uncovered only made sense then. Suspected thefts of nuclear material all over the place including plutonium from a Swedish civilian nuclear reactor. Professors in nuclear physics with unexplained absences from the Humboldt University in East Berlin. Extensive security around an unknown state military facility at Trebbin within the DDR. A major, unexplained effort by the Iraqis to silence a defector who’d reached Jordan who had a background in missile warhead technology. Disappearances of Libyan PHD students in various fields where their value for Gaddafi wasn’t exploited as it might have been. All of these little pieces, and so much more, fitted together in that jigsaw to point to what the Israelis having their hands on in terms of that report to East Germany’s new leader as being true. Before anyone in the West could approve any action, there was further proof required though. Peres agreed to wait too. Back home, there was a desire to start bombing but he said that Israel would hold its punches. Not for long though, just a little while. He did so because the Cuomo Administration wanted to be sure before it acted. Waiting also meant that when Israel did strike, it wouldn’t be alone and could really put an end to the whole thing rather than just see the danger delayed a few years. So Peres waited. And he waited some more. His impatience, those of his colleagues, was pushed to the very limit. When was action going to be taken? Washington urged caution. Come the following month, East Germany tried to change the leadership of the Czech Republic to one suitable to its own needs. Western attention focused on that yet the WMD issue still hadn’t been solved. That six month time limit had been chipped away at while, as Peres’ defence minister put it, Cuomo tried to discover his manhood.

Slowly but steadily the water in the boiler is getting to boiling temperature and then, BOOM.

Good summary of the situation in all ways to be honest.

Sept 1, 2021 23:10:57 GMT kyuzoaoi said:

When Margot would talk with Kim Jong-il?

Damn, I should have had that in earlier on. I'll look for a later connection.

Sept 2, 2021 10:31:39 GMT stevep said:

  With increasing speed as the E Germany regime gets more and more desperate.  This latest revelation along with the murder of a political leader known for his opposition to the regime and what is likely to be seen as a transparent attempt to frame another is going to bring things to the boil pretty quickly.  It sounds like E Germany starts the actual fighting, possibly part of Schwanitz's plan B but could be a close thing before NATO decides to step in.

They really are becoming desperate as the walls close in.
Its all going to be exposed and people will believe it.
It will a a 'Coalition' rather than NATO in the end.  

[James G]

Eight – Exposure


The Czech Parliament was due to hold a special election for the role of the nation’s new president not long after President Havel had died. Members of the two houses, the upper & lower chambers, would decide upon a candidate to take office within Prague Castle and act as the head of state. There was no firm timescale for that to occur though it wasn’t expected to take too long. Yet, it did. Havel had clearly been assassinated and the majority of the parliamentarians came to the opinion too that Prime Minister Klaus was being framed for a murder which they didn’t believe he had committed. Public opinion on the matter might be less sure yet those in the parliament looked at the ‘evidence’ and concluded that he was the victim of someone trying to discredit him in quite the dramatic fashion. The whole matter needed to be investigated and time needed to be taken to sort it all out. Klaus remained in his position as the head of the government and shared the – not onerous – duties of head of state with the parliamentary speaker as per the state’s constitution on that. To rush things at such a time seemed unwise to many of the parliamentarians. They were unsure of who was behind what was going on and whether there was more to come.

Candidate X was a parliamentarian. However, he was among the minority of those who considered that there need not be a wait. He and others, from various political parties, urged for an appointment to be made to the vacant presidency. That was the role which he wanted for himself, one which he & his supporters believed he should rightfully take. Klaus was implicated in a murder and there was no one else who could take charge of the nation at such a perilous time. As to the matter of Havel’s death, Candidate X and many of those who supported him agreed that it was something that needed proper investigation but that didn’t mean that there should be a delay in naming a new head of state. The two sides clashed in parliamentary meetings and especially in the media too. The Czech Republic’s media was new, without set boundaries and heavily influenced by those supporting Candidate X. His public profile was crafted by large sections of that and it was a favourable one at that. A week after Havel’s death, as the middle of May 1995 approached, there was no sign of when there would be a vote. Candidate X had put himself forward for the position in the required manner, and so had others too, though Klaus hadn’t. Pressure was applied for a vote to occur but the power lay with the speaker to set that in motion and he didn’t.

Havel’s funeral in Prague was a solemn affair attended by dignitaries from within the Czech Republic as well as abroad. Chancellor Schäuble (West Germany), President Borusewicz (Poland), President Fabius (France), Vice President Kerrey (US), Foreign Secretary Rifkind (UK) and others of note went to Prague. Away from that event directly, there was trouble in the city afterwards. A riot broke out when citizens marching in remembrance of Havel claimed they were attacked by the police. The counter-claim was that among the mourners there were troublemakers who used the opportunity to loot from shuttered shops & commercial premises. Klaus would later act to discipline the police where he believed that the former was the case for the trouble, but that brought with it criticism from sections of the media that he was instead turning against the police for them daring to consider him a suspect in the murder of his secretary. Allies of Candidate X used the opportunity to assert that Klaus was unfit for the office of the prime minister. As to their man himself, he called for the army to be brought in. The situation with crime and violence was rampant across the nation, so he said, and only military force would solve it. While it was true that the Czech Republic had for many years been suffering from criminality, many of those who heard such words from him didn’t agree. Calling in the army for a riot that was over with in a few hours in Prague and also banditry in the countryside didn’t seem enough justification. Klaus dismissed such an idea out of hand. He wasn’t the desired audience of that though. Neither were in fact the majority of the country’s population, especially among city-dwellers whom Candidate X had never had the faith of. He was instead continuing his long-established call for law and order that a good number of Czechs – many of them outside urban areas, not part of the well-educated either – agreed with. A select number of those in uniform, in the small and rather disorganised Czech Armed Forces, had for some time too been in favour of the same thing too. Among them there was backing for the law & order demand as well.

The office of the presidency continued to be unfulfilled. The police investigation against Klaus, complete with external interference, failed to implicate him no matter how much certain figures wanted it to. Too many Czech police officials remained unwilling to bend on the matter, to see fire where there was smoke. The country’s foreign and interior ministers both briefed the police that it all looked to in fact be the work of ‘foreign forces’. Havel killed and Klaus framed for murder seemed to be an attempt by outsiders to cause chaos within the Czech Republic for their own advantage. As to Candidate X, while no fingers were pointed direct towards him, he started to lose support. His faction within the parliament was already a minority and every supporter lost was a blow. The opportunity appeared to be slipping away. Klaus held on where he was and no vote on presidential succession took place. If it was to occur, many eyes were in fact turned to the parliamentary speaker instead of Klaus. He had behaved with what many felt was the proper manner at a time of crisis: should Klaus not take the position and thus remain as prime minister, then many parliamentarians were prepared to see him there instead. Candidate X was considered to be too outspoken, too unpredictable in a time where stability was desired. As there was a growth in that position among those who had the power, those without it considered the opposite to be the case. Candidate X took his case direct to the people and won a lot of them over. The nation was imperilled and needed to have a president in-place with him being the one most suitable: that was the argument he and his supporters put out there. Agreement came from wider sections of society on that, away from parliament itself. Still, it wasn’t enough to see those in the parliament move to put him in power no matter how much pressure he sought to apply externally.


Extraordinary revelations were made on May 14th with regard to what had happened to Havel and with Klaus’ secretary. The West German media, ran with a story – picked up far and wide soon enough – that what was going on in the Czech Republic was the work of East Germany. The DDR was said to be trying to insert a favoured candidate into the Czech leadership after they were behind the assassination of that country’s president. In print and on the airwaves, the allegations came thick and fast to that affect. Multiple sources provided information to those who first aired the stories. Those sources were able to provide detailed information on what had gone on at the beginning of the month and the continuing effort to see someone out to betray the Czech Republic for the nefarious causes of its neighbour succeed. Questions were soon put to government officials in West Germany and then other countries as to whether they could confirm such a story. Confirmations started to come in. West Germany first then Britain, France, Poland and the United States would all too declare that they believed that that was the case.

Implicating the Stasi and the East German leadership in what was happening in Czech Republic was done by the government of Schäuble. The West German security services received a defector from out of the Czech Republic who fled his nation fearing the worst. He spoke with the West Germans and told them about his (small) role in helping what was happening and the far larger roles played by other Czechs in selling out their country. Initially, his story was taken with a big dose of scepticism. Facts backed up the claims though. Schäuble looked at what the DDR was trying to do in securing a subservient ally on its border and decided that the best thing to do would be to expose it all for the whole world to see. No other action looked likely to succeed, not in what he regarded as the short-time frame to put a stop to it all. It was considered the only option there in Bonn from the chancellor though was something that wouldn’t be fully supported after the fact by others in government. He authorised the leak to the domestic media within his country and then saw to it that government spokesmen didn’t deny it when journalists came calling with their questions. There was also contact made abroad by Schäuble too where he spoke with his country’s allies informing them of the whole matter. Disbelief came at first from many quarters, especially among several governments in Western Europe, yet elsewhere there was a realisation that the West Germans looked to be correct. Pieces fell into place with the strange goings on there in the Czech Republic when they related to the big picture of recent East German behaviour since the change in leadership there the year beforehand. The DDR had gone a big crazy and was doing real wrong.

Like their governments, European citizens reacted with strong negativity to the news about what East Germany was up to. The DDR had few defenders continent-wide – the old support among many circles for the Soviet Union had dried up when that empire had imploded – and to the vast majority of people, that country was one of the last bastions of oppression left when the rest had collapsed. People wanted to believe what they heard when it came to allegations about covert, murderous activities in the Czech Republic. The story was ‘sexy’ too with spies at work and grand schemes at play. The revelations brought more hostility towards East Germany than many years of defectors and escapees who had gotten out of that country could ever do. ‘German’ aims at territorial expansionism hit a nerve (that caused some discomfort in West Germany) among a wide variety of people. Havel himself had a following among many Europeans who saw him as the public face of bringing down communism despite that being quite the exaggeration. East German agents had then gone and murdered him for daring to stand up to them and their designs on his country.

As the days went by, the story didn’t disappear. It was one followed up by others outside of West Germany. The Czech Republic didn’t have closed borders and there were soon reporters from across the West going to Prague. Candidate X hadn’t been named in the first reports by Bild and ZDF. British and French media outlets didn’t hesitate to name him though. Sources in their own governments gave unofficial confirmation that it was he whom the East Germans had bought off and who intended to sell his country down the River Elbe should he succeed in managing to take the presidency. Journalists sought him out though he wasn’t in Prague. Instead, they spoke with other Czech politicians and public figures. A lot of hesitancy came among Czech parliamentarians, even those who had long been opposed to Candidate X, to outright claim that he was as guilty as foreign media were claiming he was. It didn’t seem proper to do that, not when he was a member of the Chamber of Deputies. Interviews with Czech citizens conducted on the streets of Prague found more willing comments to be made where there seemed to be an opinion that what was being alleged was in fact true. Naturally, the foreign media teams didn’t really go beyond the middle of Prague and speak with other Czechs so their coverage of what ‘ordinary Czechs’ were thinking didn’t reflect the true situation. Candidate X and his supporters denounced the story and it was all called a pack of lies. He was a patriot seeking through legitimate means the vacant office of the presidency. That position was supported by a good portion of the Czech media that was already on side though not all of it. Several independent sections raised questions as to his behaviour yet did so, just like those politicians in Prague, in a manner that didn’t come outright and claim it was all in fact true.

The allegations made against East Germany were ones which didn’t bring with it the type of response as would be expected from other governments. The DDR wasn’t a free country with a media that did what it wanted nor officials who responded well to foreign journalists. Questions were put to the DDR regime and ignored when they came from the international media. A statement was released from East Berlin on a timescale that was decided by the leadership without any regard to the wishes of enemies of that state. The allegations against East Germany were declared to be false. The country had nothing to do with the death of Havel nor the murder of a young secretary to Klaus. No intelligence operatives of the country were active within the Czech Republic aiming to see a change in the leadership & future of that nation. All claims to the contrary, the fantastical stories perpetrated by the Western media and intelligence agencies, were completely untrue. As a responsible member of the international order, part of the community of nations within Europe and also worldwide, the DDR would never be involved in such a scheme as that. There was that complete denial which came out of East Berlin in public and it was also one echoed by the country’s diplomats abroad as well.

Nonetheless, the truth had been exposed. A closed, rushed meeting of the Politburo took place. Schwanitz presented his Plan B, a fall-back to draw upon if everything had gone wrong in the Czech Republic as it had done. He offered a way out of the situation which East Germany found itself in where there was foreign exposure of what it was up to. A different way out was proposed by others within the leadership. They urged that the DDR should walk away from the whole matter with the claim that the damage done was already severe and any further involvement would only bring about what they all feared: the toppling of their own leadership. Margot Honecker sided with the Stasi chief though. There was still a way to resolve the situation across the border inside that small country to the favour of the DDR. East Germany remained in need of a friendly Czech Republic to exploit otherwise the imminent collapse that they all feared wasn’t likely but instead certain. Trapped, the country was, trapped into continuing what had been started. Schwanitz was given authorisation to proceed with his emergency actions to salvage not just the situation there in the Czech Republic but for the whole of East Germany too by extension. As to what the West would do, the belief that Margot and those with Schwanitz had was that they would huff & puff but do nothing at all of any real substance.

[lordroel]

Sept 2, 2021 18:20:22 GMT James G said:

Eight – Exposure
As to what the West would do, the belief that Margot and those with Schwanitz had was that they would huff & puff but do nothing at all of any real substance.

But West Germany might think otherwise.

[James G]

Sept 2, 2021 18:24:49 GMT lordroel said:

Sept 2, 2021 18:20:22 GMT James G said:

Eight – Exposure
As to what the West would do, the belief that Margot and those with Schwanitz had was that they would huff & puff but do nothing at all of any real substance.

But West Germany might think otherwise.

More like the wider West rather than West Germany to be honest.

[James G]

Eight – Final straw


In birth at the beginning of 1993, the Czech Republic inherited a portion of the armed forces of the former Czechoslovakia. There had already been a rapid downsizing post-’89 of what had been a large military force during the communist years and that continued following the split with the new Slovak Republic. Conscription remained in-place yet it wasn’t fully enforced. Unit disbandment, unity and reorganisation took place. Equipment was placed into storage and military facilities closed. The officer corps was slimmed down significantly and so too was the technical base of non-commissioned officers. The Czech Republic no longer needed the mass of manpower and firepower that had once been available during the years of the Warsaw Pact. By mid-1995, the Czech Armed Forces were a shadow of what they once had been and there was a wide belief that what remained was nothing more than a paper tiger too. Major exercises hadn’t been undertaken in a long time, equipment & munitions was left without care in warehouses (a lot of that stolen to be sold on the black market too) and morale was rather low. Candidate X, the East German-backed contender for the vacant presidency, had a good following among the military. He had long appealed to those in uniform, of the officer class especially, with his message of the need to ‘restore order’ nationwide. Enforcing discipline among the people in times of woe was a message that cut through there. NCOs and what conscripts did serve their country were less impressed with such rhetoric though how deep that unease went was something that wasn’t measurable. Before his death, Havel had approved governmental measures – coming from Klaus – to make further cuts to military numbers. The president had wanted to see the Czech Republic join NATO and an armed forces slimmed down even more than they were but with more capability was the intention. Yet, disputes had taken place as to what that meant and whether the cutbacks were the right way ahead. At the same time, during the early months of ‘94 there had also been a deployment made of military forces to the country’s northwestern border where the frontier ran with East Germany. Soldiers were sent to aid customs enforcement by freeing up those non-militarised personnel from patrol duties. Troops were tasked to ensure that only legal cross-border traffic went through and that the rampant smuggling came to a complete close.

Czech soldiers had been sent to what history had once called part of the Sudetenland. No one in the Czech Republic called the border region with East Germany that name though, not since the end of World War Two and the forcible ethnic cleansing that had taken place there to rid the area of Germans. On the Czech side of the Ore Mountains, with East Germany’s region of Saxony over on the other side, there were a good number of soldiers out there by the middle of May. There had been few encounters by them with the smugglers they were sent to combat. The mission was questioned by most of those involved who believed that it was all a political stunt. Still, they were able to get some unofficial exercises underway and move in large-scale manoeuvres where for some time beforehand, ministers in Prague hadn’t wished to see any of that done. A three-star general led that deployment to the not-Sudetenland. He was a supporter of Candidate X and the two of the, general & politician, had a mutual acquaintance within the defence ministry who arranged a meeting out in the field. It was one not authorised by Prague for the general to take and he shouldn’t have done what he did. That was just the start of his illegal behaviour though. Candidate X won him over to his side and gained the backing of the general for what he said was the presidency being denied to him. It was wrong that he was being locked out of power, it was wrong that in a time of crisis when the West was attempted to smear & slander patriotic Czechs that a cabal of corrupt politicians there in the capital were willing to see all of that happen. A hypothetical plan of action was drawn up to change things. Candidate X then asked if that hypothetical could become a reality…? What if they could save their country together?


May 17th witnessed an attempted coup made in the Czech Republic. Soldiers moved against Prague aiming to install in there a new president. A divisional-sized element of troops went towards the city aiming to seize control. Orders ran to those below the general at the top that those involved were on their way to restore order to the nation against traitors working to see the nation fractured and sent into anarchy. Everything happened very fast with that process: there was no time for questions, not with the future of the country at stake! Columns of armoured vehicles – OT-64 wheeled personnel carriers rather than tanks – as well as many trucks sent almost ten thousand soldiers away from the border regions and towards the capital. It was a night-time movement with subunits sent also to locations outside of Prague where the government buildings were. Seizures were planned to take place of military bases as well as the main national airport. On paper, it was a good plan. In reality though, things were different. There was a lot of confusion during the rush deployment over routings which took place in the darkness. Those involved weren’t as motivated as they should have been when involved in such an endeavour. When it came to rules of engagement, the soldiers were instructed to only open fire on those who directly opposed them and who could be regarded as hostile. Talk of ‘foreign conspirators’ acting against the Czech Republic was in the mission orders but that was too vague along with what constituted too to be ‘traitors’ allegedly working with them. Radio silence was meant to be enforced during the movement so as to take enemies of the nation by surprise. That was rapidly broken though by junior officers seeking clarification when they came upon stumbling blocks as well as those seeking directions. Shots were exchanged early on during the takeover attempts of selected facilities outside of Prague before the main body of troops, led by the general himself, were able to reach the capital. He was called upon for permission to open fire and with subordinates too starting to refuse to fire upon fellow Czechs when it actually came down to it. The force stumbled onwards in the face of setbacks, just slower than planned.

Klaus and others managed to flee Prague. He and his government were supposed to be caught sleeping with the nation waking up to a new president who had come to restore order while the prime minister was already in custody. The ‘noise’ that was made during the approach over the airwaves and also reports from military posts in the way of the advance on the capital gave warning though. There was a rush from loyal troops to facilitate the evacuation of Klaus and move into place to defend the city. The prime minister had wanted to stay, declaring that that to flee meant giving in, but he was bundled into a helicopter at the insistence of the defence minister who knew that he had few soldiers at-hand. Prague would fall and he didn’t want to be responsible for seeing Klaus captured. What was done in the short time available was to instead make a stand, even a doomed one, so that those seeking to overthrow the legitimate government would have to fight for the city. They, other Czechs and the whole world would then know that blood had been spilt. That was important if the confusing but clearly abhorrent coup would face proper opposition down the line. Prague was reached in the early hours of the following morning. The entry made was several hours behind schedule following a series of navigation errors, breakdown and general f*ck-ups on the way. There was fighting right in the heart of the city. Czech commandos from the 6th Special Brigade, along with conscripts who served as the garrison force, put up resistance to try to stop the inevitable. They weren’t aware of the defence minister’s line of thinking about making a stand for the sake of making a stand. Instead, they fought to defend their country’s rule of law. Quickly, heavy firepower was made use of. Prague Castle would become a battlefield and so too many other buildings in the centre of the city. Casualties mounted dramatically. Czechs awoke to their city having become a battlefield. The defenders were finally overcome before midday. They held out longer than expected yet in the end, their numbers were too few to stop the inevitable. The seizure of the city was a complete mess though. The troops involved put up quite a poor show of themselves. All of the years of the Czech Armed Forces being run down had mattered.

Candidate X arrived in Prague. In an entirely illegitimate fashion, he had himself installed as the new president. His inauguration was in no way how it was supposed to be as per the constitution. Few political backers were on-hand and it was bayonets, not the votes of parliamentarians, who put him into power. His televised claim afterwards that he was the nation’s rightful ruler came right before another broadcast made from Pardubice where Klaus was. Over in that smaller city to the east of Prague, the prime minister was at a military airbase where his evacuation had taken him to. Klaus denounced the seizure of power made in Prague and denied that there was any legitimacy to the man in the capital claiming authority. He said that it was treason which had put Candidate X in power, treason aided by East Germany too. Klaus called upon all Czechs to resist the coup and to stand with the legitimate Czech government. Those of his countrymen he called upon to side with him included the armed forces as well. He promised that Prague would be liberated and those who had taken it in doing what they had would face punishment.


There was an explosion of hostility from outside the Czech Republic at what happened.

East German fingerprints were all over the violent seizure of Prague even if there was no direct evidence that they had an actual physical presence there when the city was taken. The previous exposure of Stasi activities in assassinating Havel and trying to frame Klaus for murder was fresh in the minds of those who witnessed from afar the sudden action taken by Czech soldiers rebelling against the recognised government. Images came out of Prague where there were international media crews already there due to recent ongoing events. Again, while it was Czechs fighting Czechs with not a single figure from the DDR regime present, it was widely understood that East Germany was behind everything that was going on. That was unacceptable for governments as well as many of their peoples. To many, it was the final straw in what they were willing to accept from those in East Berlin who were defying all international norms and behaving outrageously. Government meetings were held in foreign capitals and there was also contact between them too. Klaus’ government, first when it was at Pardubice and the following his movement to the city of Olomouc, was contacted. Western governments affirmed that they recognised his authority. The Poles were in contact as well where there was the offer of more than just words but direct assistance: Havel and Borusewicz had made that arrangement between them of mutual defence.

The world continued to watch as the aftermath of the seizure of Prague played out. Candidate X and his position as president wasn’t just challenged by Klaus and those with him who had gotten out of the capital in time. The initial plan of action taken to launch the coup had run with the belief that once Prague was taken and the new president declared, the rest of the country would fall in-line. Military units were expected to side with those who held Prague. That didn’t happen as it was meant to. There were those who did so, who supported the apparent restoration of order, but they were in the minority. The rest came down on the side of the legitimate government where they declared their allegiance to the elected government. The rebellion had been denounced by Klaus and he had called upon Czechs, in uniform as well as civilians, to support his authority. Czech military forces across the country responded to that call. The first shots of the civil war had been fired when Prague was taken and there were quickly more of them. Across the country, shooting incidents took place. The country moved into the stage of an undeclared civil war. No one wanted that, certainly not even the DDR regime, but it began regardless of the wishes of Czechs and others outside.

[lordroel]

Sept 3, 2021 15:15:22 GMT James G said:

Eight – Final straw


In birth at the beginning of 1993, the Czech Republic inherited a portion of the armed forces of the former Czechoslovakia. There had already been a rapid downsizing post-’89 of what had been a large military force during the communist years and that continued following the split with the new Slovak Republic. Conscription remained in-place yet it wasn’t fully enforced. Unit disbandment, unity and reorganisation took place. Equipment was placed into storage and military facilities closed. The officer corps was slimmed down significantly and so too was the technical base of non-commissioned officers. The Czech Republic no longer needed the mass of manpower and firepower that had once been available during the years of the Warsaw Pact. By mid-1995, the Czech Armed Forces were a shadow of what they once had been and there was a wide belief that what remained was nothing more than a paper tiger too. Major exercises hadn’t been undertaken in a long time, equipment & munitions was left without care in warehouses (a lot of that stolen to be sold on the black market too) and morale was rather low. Candidate X, the East German-backed contender for the vacant presidency, had a good following among the military. He had long appealed to those in uniform, of the officer class especially, with his message of the need to ‘restore order’ nationwide. Enforcing discipline among the people in times of woe was a message that cut through there. NCOs and what conscripts did serve their country were less impressed with such rhetoric though how deep that unease went was something that wasn’t measurable. Before his death, Havel had approved governmental measures – coming from Klaus – to make further cuts to military numbers. The president had wanted to see the Czech Republic join NATO and an armed forces slimmed down even more than they were but with more capability was the intention. Yet, disputes had taken place as to what that meant and whether the cutbacks were the right way ahead. At the same time, during the early months of ‘94 there had also been a deployment made of military forces to the country’s northwestern border where the frontier ran with East Germany. Soldiers were sent to aid customs enforcement by freeing up those non-militarised personnel from patrol duties. Troops were tasked to ensure that only legal cross-border traffic went through and that the rampant smuggling came to a complete close.

Czech soldiers had been sent to what history had once called part of the Sudetenland. No one in the Czech Republic called the border region with East Germany that name though, not since the end of World War Two and the forcible ethnic cleansing that had taken place there to rid the area of Germans. On the Czech side of the Ore Mountains, with East Germany’s region of Saxony over on the other side, there were a good number of soldiers out there by the middle of May. There had been few encounters by them with the smugglers they were sent to combat. The mission was questioned by most of those involved who believed that it was all a political stunt. Still, they were able to get some unofficial exercises underway and move in large-scale manoeuvres where for some time beforehand, ministers in Prague hadn’t wished to see any of that done. A three-star general led that deployment to the not-Sudetenland. He was a supporter of Candidate X and the two of the, general & politician, had a mutual acquaintance within the defence ministry who arranged a meeting out in the field. It was one not authorised by Prague for the general to take and he shouldn’t have done what he did. That was just the start of his illegal behaviour though. Candidate X won him over to his side and gained the backing of the general for what he said was the presidency being denied to him. It was wrong that he was being locked out of power, it was wrong that in a time of crisis when the West was attempted to smear & slander patriotic Czechs that a cabal of corrupt politicians there in the capital were willing to see all of that happen. A hypothetical plan of action was drawn up to change things. Candidate X then asked if that hypothetical could become a reality…? What if they could save their country together?


May 17th witnessed an attempted coup made in the Czech Republic. Soldiers moved against Prague aiming to install in there a new president. A divisional-sized element of troops went towards the city aiming to seize control. Orders ran to those below the general at the top that those involved were on their way to restore order to the nation against traitors working to see the nation fractured and sent into anarchy. Everything happened very fast with that process: there was no time for questions, not with the future of the country at stake! Columns of armoured vehicles – OT-64 wheeled personnel carriers rather than tanks – as well as many trucks sent almost ten thousand soldiers away from the border regions and towards the capital. It was a night-time movement with subunits sent also to locations outside of Prague where the government buildings were. Seizures were planned to take place of military bases as well as the main national airport. On paper, it was a good plan. In reality though, things were different. There was a lot of confusion during the rush deployment over routings which took place in the darkness. Those involved weren’t as motivated as they should have been when involved in such an endeavour. When it came to rules of engagement, the soldiers were instructed to only open fire on those who directly opposed them and who could be regarded as hostile. Talk of ‘foreign conspirators’ acting against the Czech Republic was in the mission orders but that was too vague along with what constituted too to be ‘traitors’ allegedly working with them. Radio silence was meant to be enforced during the movement so as to take enemies of the nation by surprise. That was rapidly broken though by junior officers seeking clarification when they came upon stumbling blocks as well as those seeking directions. Shots were exchanged early on during the takeover attempts of selected facilities outside of Prague before the main body of troops, led by the general himself, were able to reach the capital. He was called upon for permission to open fire and with subordinates too starting to refuse to fire upon fellow Czechs when it actually came down to it. The force stumbled onwards in the face of setbacks, just slower than planned.

Klaus and others managed to flee Prague. He and his government were supposed to be caught sleeping with the nation waking up to a new president who had come to restore order while the prime minister was already in custody. The ‘noise’ that was made during the approach over the airwaves and also reports from military posts in the way of the advance on the capital gave warning though. There was a rush from loyal troops to facilitate the evacuation of Klaus and move into place to defend the city. The prime minister had wanted to stay, declaring that that to flee meant giving in, but he was bundled into a helicopter at the insistence of the defence minister who knew that he had few soldiers at-hand. Prague would fall and he didn’t want to be responsible for seeing Klaus captured. What was done in the short time available was to instead make a stand, even a doomed one, so that those seeking to overthrow the legitimate government would have to fight for the city. They, other Czechs and the whole world would then know that blood had been spilt. That was important if the confusing but clearly abhorrent coup would face proper opposition down the line. Prague was reached in the early hours of the following morning. The entry made was several hours behind schedule following a series of navigation errors, breakdown and general f*ck-ups on the way. There was fighting right in the heart of the city. Czech commandos from the 6th Special Brigade, along with conscripts who served as the garrison force, put up resistance to try to stop the inevitable. They weren’t aware of the defence minister’s line of thinking about making a stand for the sake of making a stand. Instead, they fought to defend their country’s rule of law. Quickly, heavy firepower was made use of. Prague Castle would become a battlefield and so too many other buildings in the centre of the city. Casualties mounted dramatically. Czechs awoke to their city having become a battlefield. The defenders were finally overcome before midday. They held out longer than expected yet in the end, their numbers were too few to stop the inevitable. The seizure of the city was a complete mess though. The troops involved put up quite a poor show of themselves. All of the years of the Czech Armed Forces being run down had mattered.

Candidate X arrived in Prague. In an entirely illegitimate fashion, he had himself installed as the new president. His inauguration was in no way how it was supposed to be as per the constitution. Few political backers were on-hand and it was bayonets, not the votes of parliamentarians, who put him into power. His televised claim afterwards that he was the nation’s rightful ruler came right before another broadcast made from Pardubice where Klaus was. Over in that smaller city to the east of Prague, the prime minister was at a military airbase where his evacuation had taken him to. Klaus denounced the seizure of power made in Prague and denied that there was any legitimacy to the man in the capital claiming authority. He said that it was treason which had put Candidate X in power, treason aided by East Germany too. Klaus called upon all Czechs to resist the coup and to stand with the legitimate Czech government. Those of his countrymen he called upon to side with him included the armed forces as well. He promised that Prague would be liberated and those who had taken it in doing what they had would face punishment.


There was an explosion of hostility from outside the Czech Republic at what happened.

East German fingerprints were all over the violent seizure of Prague even if there was no direct evidence that they had an actual physical presence there when the city was taken. The previous exposure of Stasi activities in assassinating Havel and trying to frame Klaus for murder was fresh in the minds of those who witnessed from afar the sudden action taken by Czech soldiers rebelling against the recognised government. Images came out of Prague where there were international media crews already there due to recent ongoing events. Again, while it was Czechs fighting Czechs with not a single figure from the DDR regime present, it was widely understood that East Germany was behind everything that was going on. That was unacceptable for governments as well as many of their peoples. To many, it was the final straw in what they were willing to accept from those in East Berlin who were defying all international norms and behaving outrageously. Government meetings were held in foreign capitals and there was also contact between them too. Klaus’ government, first when it was at Pardubice and the following his movement to the city of Olomouc, was contacted. Western governments affirmed that they recognised his authority. The Poles were in contact as well where there was the offer of more than just words but direct assistance: Havel and Borusewicz had made that arrangement between them of mutual defence.

The world continued to watch as the aftermath of the seizure of Prague played out. Candidate X and his position as president wasn’t just challenged by Klaus and those with him who had gotten out of the capital in time. The initial plan of action taken to launch the coup had run with the belief that once Prague was taken and the new president declared, the rest of the country would fall in-line. Military units were expected to side with those who held Prague. That didn’t happen as it was meant to. There were those who did so, who supported the apparent restoration of order, but they were in the minority. The rest came down on the side of the legitimate government where they declared their allegiance to the elected government. The rebellion had been denounced by Klaus and he had called upon Czechs, in uniform as well as civilians, to support his authority. Czech military forces across the country responded to that call. The first shots of the civil war had been fired when Prague was taken and there were quickly more of them. Across the country, shooting incidents took place. The country moved into the stage of an undeclared civil war. No one wanted that, certainly not even the DDR regime, but it began regardless of the wishes of Czechs and others outside.

So can we say the Czech Civil War has begun.

[kyuzoaoi]

Second Prague Spring becomes Prague War.

[stevep]

Sept 3, 2021 15:38:29 GMT kyuzoaoi said:

Second Prague Spring becomes Prague War.

  In turn becoming the E German war fairly quickly I would say.

[James G]

Sept 3, 2021 15:30:58 GMT lordroel said:

Sept 3, 2021 15:15:22 GMT James G said:

Eight – Final straw


In birth at the beginning of 1993, the Czech Republic inherited a portion of the armed forces of the former Czechoslovakia. There had already been a rapid downsizing post-’89 of what had been a large military force during the communist years and that continued following the split with the new Slovak Republic. Conscription remained in-place yet it wasn’t fully enforced. Unit disbandment, unity and reorganisation took place. Equipment was placed into storage and military facilities closed. The officer corps was slimmed down significantly and so too was the technical base of non-commissioned officers. The Czech Republic no longer needed the mass of manpower and firepower that had once been available during the years of the Warsaw Pact. By mid-1995, the Czech Armed Forces were a shadow of what they once had been and there was a wide belief that what remained was nothing more than a paper tiger too. Major exercises hadn’t been undertaken in a long time, equipment & munitions was left without care in warehouses (a lot of that stolen to be sold on the black market too) and morale was rather low. Candidate X, the East German-backed contender for the vacant presidency, had a good following among the military. He had long appealed to those in uniform, of the officer class especially, with his message of the need to ‘restore order’ nationwide. Enforcing discipline among the people in times of woe was a message that cut through there. NCOs and what conscripts did serve their country were less impressed with such rhetoric though how deep that unease went was something that wasn’t measurable. Before his death, Havel had approved governmental measures – coming from Klaus – to make further cuts to military numbers. The president had wanted to see the Czech Republic join NATO and an armed forces slimmed down even more than they were but with more capability was the intention. Yet, disputes had taken place as to what that meant and whether the cutbacks were the right way ahead. At the same time, during the early months of ‘94 there had also been a deployment made of military forces to the country’s northwestern border where the frontier ran with East Germany. Soldiers were sent to aid customs enforcement by freeing up those non-militarised personnel from patrol duties. Troops were tasked to ensure that only legal cross-border traffic went through and that the rampant smuggling came to a complete close.

Czech soldiers had been sent to what history had once called part of the Sudetenland. No one in the Czech Republic called the border region with East Germany that name though, not since the end of World War Two and the forcible ethnic cleansing that had taken place there to rid the area of Germans. On the Czech side of the Ore Mountains, with East Germany’s region of Saxony over on the other side, there were a good number of soldiers out there by the middle of May. There had been few encounters by them with the smugglers they were sent to combat. The mission was questioned by most of those involved who believed that it was all a political stunt. Still, they were able to get some unofficial exercises underway and move in large-scale manoeuvres where for some time beforehand, ministers in Prague hadn’t wished to see any of that done. A three-star general led that deployment to the not-Sudetenland. He was a supporter of Candidate X and the two of the, general & politician, had a mutual acquaintance within the defence ministry who arranged a meeting out in the field. It was one not authorised by Prague for the general to take and he shouldn’t have done what he did. That was just the start of his illegal behaviour though. Candidate X won him over to his side and gained the backing of the general for what he said was the presidency being denied to him. It was wrong that he was being locked out of power, it was wrong that in a time of crisis when the West was attempted to smear & slander patriotic Czechs that a cabal of corrupt politicians there in the capital were willing to see all of that happen. A hypothetical plan of action was drawn up to change things. Candidate X then asked if that hypothetical could become a reality…? What if they could save their country together?


May 17th witnessed an attempted coup made in the Czech Republic. Soldiers moved against Prague aiming to install in there a new president. A divisional-sized element of troops went towards the city aiming to seize control. Orders ran to those below the general at the top that those involved were on their way to restore order to the nation against traitors working to see the nation fractured and sent into anarchy. Everything happened very fast with that process: there was no time for questions, not with the future of the country at stake! Columns of armoured vehicles – OT-64 wheeled personnel carriers rather than tanks – as well as many trucks sent almost ten thousand soldiers away from the border regions and towards the capital. It was a night-time movement with subunits sent also to locations outside of Prague where the government buildings were. Seizures were planned to take place of military bases as well as the main national airport. On paper, it was a good plan. In reality though, things were different. There was a lot of confusion during the rush deployment over routings which took place in the darkness. Those involved weren’t as motivated as they should have been when involved in such an endeavour. When it came to rules of engagement, the soldiers were instructed to only open fire on those who directly opposed them and who could be regarded as hostile. Talk of ‘foreign conspirators’ acting against the Czech Republic was in the mission orders but that was too vague along with what constituted too to be ‘traitors’ allegedly working with them. Radio silence was meant to be enforced during the movement so as to take enemies of the nation by surprise. That was rapidly broken though by junior officers seeking clarification when they came upon stumbling blocks as well as those seeking directions. Shots were exchanged early on during the takeover attempts of selected facilities outside of Prague before the main body of troops, led by the general himself, were able to reach the capital. He was called upon for permission to open fire and with subordinates too starting to refuse to fire upon fellow Czechs when it actually came down to it. The force stumbled onwards in the face of setbacks, just slower than planned.

Klaus and others managed to flee Prague. He and his government were supposed to be caught sleeping with the nation waking up to a new president who had come to restore order while the prime minister was already in custody. The ‘noise’ that was made during the approach over the airwaves and also reports from military posts in the way of the advance on the capital gave warning though. There was a rush from loyal troops to facilitate the evacuation of Klaus and move into place to defend the city. The prime minister had wanted to stay, declaring that that to flee meant giving in, but he was bundled into a helicopter at the insistence of the defence minister who knew that he had few soldiers at-hand. Prague would fall and he didn’t want to be responsible for seeing Klaus captured. What was done in the short time available was to instead make a stand, even a doomed one, so that those seeking to overthrow the legitimate government would have to fight for the city. They, other Czechs and the whole world would then know that blood had been spilt. That was important if the confusing but clearly abhorrent coup would face proper opposition down the line. Prague was reached in the early hours of the following morning. The entry made was several hours behind schedule following a series of navigation errors, breakdown and general f*ck-ups on the way. There was fighting right in the heart of the city. Czech commandos from the 6th Special Brigade, along with conscripts who served as the garrison force, put up resistance to try to stop the inevitable. They weren’t aware of the defence minister’s line of thinking about making a stand for the sake of making a stand. Instead, they fought to defend their country’s rule of law. Quickly, heavy firepower was made use of. Prague Castle would become a battlefield and so too many other buildings in the centre of the city. Casualties mounted dramatically. Czechs awoke to their city having become a battlefield. The defenders were finally overcome before midday. They held out longer than expected yet in the end, their numbers were too few to stop the inevitable. The seizure of the city was a complete mess though. The troops involved put up quite a poor show of themselves. All of the years of the Czech Armed Forces being run down had mattered.

Candidate X arrived in Prague. In an entirely illegitimate fashion, he had himself installed as the new president. His inauguration was in no way how it was supposed to be as per the constitution. Few political backers were on-hand and it was bayonets, not the votes of parliamentarians, who put him into power. His televised claim afterwards that he was the nation’s rightful ruler came right before another broadcast made from Pardubice where Klaus was. Over in that smaller city to the east of Prague, the prime minister was at a military airbase where his evacuation had taken him to. Klaus denounced the seizure of power made in Prague and denied that there was any legitimacy to the man in the capital claiming authority. He said that it was treason which had put Candidate X in power, treason aided by East Germany too. Klaus called upon all Czechs to resist the coup and to stand with the legitimate Czech government. Those of his countrymen he called upon to side with him included the armed forces as well. He promised that Prague would be liberated and those who had taken it in doing what they had would face punishment.


There was an explosion of hostility from outside the Czech Republic at what happened.

East German fingerprints were all over the violent seizure of Prague even if there was no direct evidence that they had an actual physical presence there when the city was taken. The previous exposure of Stasi activities in assassinating Havel and trying to frame Klaus for murder was fresh in the minds of those who witnessed from afar the sudden action taken by Czech soldiers rebelling against the recognised government. Images came out of Prague where there were international media crews already there due to recent ongoing events. Again, while it was Czechs fighting Czechs with not a single figure from the DDR regime present, it was widely understood that East Germany was behind everything that was going on. That was unacceptable for governments as well as many of their peoples. To many, it was the final straw in what they were willing to accept from those in East Berlin who were defying all international norms and behaving outrageously. Government meetings were held in foreign capitals and there was also contact between them too. Klaus’ government, first when it was at Pardubice and the following his movement to the city of Olomouc, was contacted. Western governments affirmed that they recognised his authority. The Poles were in contact as well where there was the offer of more than just words but direct assistance: Havel and Borusewicz had made that arrangement between them of mutual defence.

The world continued to watch as the aftermath of the seizure of Prague played out. Candidate X and his position as president wasn’t just challenged by Klaus and those with him who had gotten out of the capital in time. The initial plan of action taken to launch the coup had run with the belief that once Prague was taken and the new president declared, the rest of the country would fall in-line. Military units were expected to side with those who held Prague. That didn’t happen as it was meant to. There were those who did so, who supported the apparent restoration of order, but they were in the minority. The rest came down on the side of the legitimate government where they declared their allegiance to the elected government. The rebellion had been denounced by Klaus and he had called upon Czechs, in uniform as well as civilians, to support his authority. Czech military forces across the country responded to that call. The first shots of the civil war had been fired when Prague was taken and there were quickly more of them. Across the country, shooting incidents took place. The country moved into the stage of an undeclared civil war. No one wanted that, certainly not even the DDR regime, but it began regardless of the wishes of Czechs and others outside.

So can we say the Czech Civil War has begun.

It certainly has.

Sept 3, 2021 15:38:29 GMT kyuzoaoi said:

Second Prague Spring becomes Prague War.

It was all supposed to be over so quickly too!

Sept 4, 2021 11:03:45 GMT stevep said:

  In turn becoming the E German war fairly quickly I would say.

It will indeed.

[James G]

Nine – Civil war


Like the beginning of any civil war, the situation on the ground in the Czech Republic during the middle of May 1995 was a confusing mess. Conflict began unexpectedly and brought with it chaos. There were two sides each claiming legitimacy as the Czech government and who called for support, the loyalty of everyone else. To oppose them was to be deemed a traitor. Blood was spilt early on with death and destruction caused. There was a demand that sides be chosen with the expectation from each that everyone join with them. Czech military personnel were forced into doing that, to come to the aid of either the illegitimate government which had installed itself in Prague or with the internationally-recognised government which had fled from that capital. Neutrality was proposed and rejected among sections of the armed forces: you are with us or against us came the retort. Loyalties shifted dramatically with sudden reversals with regard to whom commanders and ordinary soldiers wished to support. Defections and desertions took place. Senior officers were removed or killed. Mutinies occurred. The first couple of weeks before the month was out witnessed all of that happen. Moreover, there were also the escape made of those who had no wish to fight where they didn’t just desert but attempted to leave the country. The most high-profile instances of that involved a good portion of the Czech Air Force being flown outside of the country by aircrews determined to either not see their aircraft used against the other side or, more than that, fellow Czechs. Into Poland, Slovakia, Austria and West Germany went aircraft while below them far more people also sought to enter those countries as well.

The first major fight after Prague was for Pardubice. Klaus and his ministers had fled to the military airbase outside of that small city between Prague and the Polish frontier, though had soon left there fearing that Czech Army units also in the area had defected to the regime of Candidate X. That was a mistake and they instead stayed loyal. A defence of Pardubice was mounted in the face of ‘rebel’ Czech troops who moved upon the city. Calls were made from each side for the other to stand down rather than fight but those weren’t heeded. Czechs fought Czechs. The airbase fell and the city itself was fought over somewhat too. Casualties were extensive among soldiers and civilians as well. The rebels won control and moved onwards towards the garrison town of Chrudrim soon afterwards. The aim was to win a second fight quickly and demolish the will of those fighting for Klaus to carry on when faced with another defeat in Bohemia. Chrudrim couldn’t be taken though. Moving up from all across Moravia, Czech troops answerable to Klaus’ government engaged the rebels successfully and checked their advance. Another bloody fight was had. Civilians scrambled to get clear. There wasn’t any direct targeting of them but they found themselves in the way. Collateral damage was a big deal when massed artillery and air strikes were used.

After defeat at Chrudrim, the rebels fought to clear pockets of resistance in the western parts of Bohemia, across the border from West Germany, where they already had a strong position. Victories came there with the storming of Plzen-Line Airbase but there were also some reverses too. Plzen itself, one of the country’s biggest cities, wasn’t fought over though: its mayor declared it an open city when rebel troops came towards it. A further effort was made around Chrudrim yet ahead of a renewed round of heavy fighting, government troops were ordered to withdraw and start falling back into Moravia. The rebels had the upper hand not there direct on that battlefield but overall. The numbers were on the side of the self-declared president in Prague as well as far more access to supplies of ammunition & fuel. A regrouping was to be done by government forces in the Moravia area while they sorted themselves out. First expectations, on each side too, had been of a short fight, but that wasn’t the case and so that retreat was made to conserve forces and supplies. Hundreds had died in fighting around Chrudrim but went it finally fell, it was all very anticlimactic.

Rebel control extended further across Bohemia. Government forces had Moravia and Czech Silesia. Behind where the recognised front-lines ran down the middle of the country, each of the opposing sides ‘cleaned up’ in their rear areas before the end of May. Cut off enemy units as well as those who sought to try and remain neutral in the face of all that was going on were dealt with. Reservists and deserting conscripts were impressed into service. Arms depots were emptied and new combat units formed. New appointments and transfers of personnel were made. The war hadn’t ended quickly and so, along with that withdrawal made by government forces into a better position, there was a movement to get ready for a far longer conflict. The affect on civilian activities was immense. The Czech Republic had become a war zone and that affected everything. Martial law was brought in to deal with unrest in certain areas and that came after the rapid onset of shortages of practically everything. No one was able to escape what was going on, not if they remained inside the country anyway. So many didn’t want to and so they set about trying to leave. They headed towards the borders of the country’s neighbours (not really towards East Germany though) where they made themselves refuges rather than stay where access to basic services became near impossible in many places and there was also widespread fighting either taken place or soon expected where they lived. What started out as a trickle with that would quickly turn into a flood.

Rather than Brno (the country’s second largest city), Klaus’ government set itself up in temporary internal exile at Olomouc. That was a military city close to the frontiers of both Poland & Slovakia as well as being deep in the heart of Moravia. Olomouc came under attack despite its distance from the front-lines. Su-22 attack-fighters flown by the rebels struck first where they bombed ‘government targets’. Their bombs fell everywhere apart from where they were supposed to go. The government was the first to use ballistic missiles. Short-range Scuds – Soviet-manufactured weapons made famous by their usage in the Gulf War several years beforehand – were launched against military bases instead of Prague. Caslav Airbase as well as the one at Pardubice were hit following air attacks against Olomouc as well as Czech government troops being laughed from the two sites. Olomouc was later hit by Scuds fired by the rebels themselves. Explosions rocked the city and those caused immense casualties. Images of the missile strikes there went around the world where Western news-crews broadcast them. Attacks such as those drove people to flee from them direct and also the fear that more would commence against other places soon enough.

Prisoners fell into the hands of each side. They took surrenders of the other side in large numbers and then were forced to deal with them. Disarming and releasing captives was out of the question so there had to be a long-term holding of them instead. That was an immediate tax on resources, of what there weren’t many. Guards needed to be provided in holding facilities that had to be set up. Food, water and access to medical care was all required. It was fellow Czechs that were held prisoner as well meaning that each side was in no way keen to not provide for, and thus mistreat, their countrymen. That meant that effort was expended upon that. Undertakings were made to ‘turn’ captives, to have them fight for their captors. Volunteers were found to do just that yet there were plentiful trust issues. The government side had more concerns over than than the rebels yet enlisted the services of captive soldiers who said that they had only fought for the rebels because they either had no choice in doing so or had been misled. With haste, the government and the rebels each set about building up an accurate and capable intelligence-gathering effort. State-level organisations had broken down upon the start of the conflict and there was a lot of distrust with them too. To know what the other side was doing and what it intended to do in the future was key when it came to winning the ongoing conflict in the shortest time possible. Aircraft flew recon. missions, patrols of soldiers were sent out scouting and there were spies employed also on intelligence tasks. Information was of vital importance: gaining it and also stopping the other side from having the same thing too.

War crimes were committed early on the Czech Civil War. The instances were few and far between, certainly not authorised from on-high, but they happened. Captives taken were shot by fighter’s whose blood was up. Alleged spies, often civilians caught where they weren’t supposed to be, were given the same treatment. There was shelling and bombing of civilian targets when it was claimed that such places weren’t what they were. In Prague, hundreds of urban youngsters came out to demonstrate against the illegal seizure of the city and the restrictions in-place. Shots were fired into the air to disperse them and most fled but the ones who didn’t were beaten and even killed. Commanders covered up crimes committed by those underneath them for various reasons though word did eventually get to those at the top. In Olomouc and Prague, the leadership of each side sought to see such instances stopped yet also aided in trying to suppress the news of what was going on. It would only hurt their cause, domestically and internationally.

June approached. The government and the rebels got ready to each go on the offensive. That quick end to the conflict was still sought by each despite the ongoing preparations for a longer war. Knock-out blows were sought to finish off the other. Planners presented options to commanders who them briefed their leaders. There were approvals and disapprovals of what those in uniform wanted to see done due to various reasons of practicality, political considerations and expected international reactions. The whole world was paying attention to what was going on with the first weeks of fighting within the Czech Republic drawing plentiful international attention. That was all really beginning to matter because the internal conflict within the country was never going to be contained there. Outsiders had been involved from the start and would continue to be so as the war went onwards. As to ordinary Czechs, in uniform or not, their wishes for the all of the killing to stop, mattered for nought among those who could stop it and also those who wished to intervene.