Despite the SED’s special efforts to appeal to the youth, opposition by young people was a constant in the history of the GDR, right from the start. Particularly in the 1950s, the SED justice system, initially with the support of the Soviet military tribunals, responded to any indication of resistance on the part of young persons by imposing Terror-style punishments. The fate of Achim Beyer and schoolmates from the small Saxon town of Werdau is representative of many stories of youthful rebellion and state terror.

The trial of 19 members of a resistance group began promptly at 10 am on 3 October 1951 in the chamber responsible for political crimes of the Zwickau Regional Court in Werdau (Saxony). A group of 50 carefully selected functionaries were admitted to watch the “public” hearing; the parents of the young people were not. A mere fourteen and a half hours later (12:30 am on 4 October) the court handed down sentences ranging from 2 to 15 years of penal servitude. Fifteen of the accused were students at the local secondary school, six of whom were under 18, and three of them were girls. Achim Beyer turned 19 years old on the very day that his sentence to 8 years of penal servitude was pronounced. The indictment accused the young people of having acted together, consciously and wilfully, to form a resistance group directed against the GDR in early October 1950 in Werdau of having established communication with the anti-communist Combat Group against Inhumanity (Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit, KgU) operating out of West Berlin and of producing and disseminating papers intended to stir up hostility while acting on the instructions of this group, as well as of having “declared their willingness to take up arms and fight as partisans against the GDR and the Soviet Union on behalf of American and the re-emergent German imperialism in the event of a third world war”.

Achim Beyer commented on these charges in 1998: “We designed, produced, distributed and glued up handbills ourselves, specifically handbills about the Volkskammer (legislative) elections of 1950, we protested the death sentence issued against the secondary school student Josef Flade, and we called for resistance against the SED regime. […] We kept the security agencies excited for months. There was fierce debate in the town [...]. We were kept under observation, there were suspicions [...]. In the night of the 19/20 May 1951, two of our friends were arrested while distributing handbills. The next morning, there were discussions and arguments about how and when to escape; it was all amateurish, with little or no preparation.”

The secondary school students did not deny that they had established contact with the KgU. But the claims that they had committed themselves to “armed partisan activity” were the usual SED propaganda lies. Moreover, the will to resistance was home grown in the Soviet Occupation Zone (Sowjetische Besatzungszone, SBZ), later the DDR – in Werdau, as in many other towns and cities, where young people experienced first-hand the contradiction between Stalinist Realpolitik and the propaganda about “building up a new democratic order” in these early years.

Achim Beyer explained his actions this way, in 1998: “After war and National Socialism had come to an end, we learned of the crimes committed by that dictatorship. So, for us, the summer of 1945 was a liberating new beginning. [...] We heard the offer to work with the new government as a call to engage in political activity. In our understanding, democracy included respect for freedom of opinion and expression, the rejection of dictatorship of any kind [...]. But political opposition had been largely eliminated shortly after the forced merger of the Social Democratic and Communist parties in April of 1946 and even before the GDR was founded. [...] Reading the handbills written by Hans and Sophie Scholl (the White Rose student group) in 1943 made us particularly aware of the similarity, or rather, of the analogy between the Nazi regime and Stalinism of 1950: replacing the terms National Socialist Party, Hitler Youth, and Gestapo with SED, Free German Youth, and Stasi seemed entirely appropriate and characterised our political situation at that time.”

Resistance inspired by learning about the Scholl siblings is a recurring theme among this early generation of pupils and students in the newly founded GDR. Their anti-fascist education had the unintended consequence of encouraging the development of anti-Stalinist attitudes and a desire to emulate the Scholls.

Around half of the Werdau school pupils convicted on these charges served five and a half years in very harsh, undignified conditions at various prisons. Achim Beyer was held in the Waldheim prison for most of his sentence. During brief period of “thaw” that followed the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (held in February 1956), he served five years before being placed on probation. He was the last of those who were tried with him to be released, on 13 October 1956.

Beyer escaped immediately to West Germany, where he completed his schooling and earned a degree in economics. Achim Beyer remained “true” to the GDR his entire life: after earning his degree, he spent thirty years working at the IWG, a research institute in Erlangen, which he helped to found, that focused on developments in research and academia in the GDR. The attention was mutual, though: the GDR, in the form of State Security, kept an eye on him as well, as his Stasi files testify.

Achim Beyer became unemployed in 1992, when the state funding for his institute was eliminated. Thus, in a way, he became a victim of reunification, a cause which he had staunchly advocated in many contexts, including in the organisation “Curatorium for an Undivided Germany” (Kuratorium unteilbares Deutschland), since fleeing to the FRG.

A plaque commemorating the courage and the suffering of the pupils convicted in 1951 has hung at the Alexander-von-Humboldt-Gymnasium in Werdau since 1997.

Achim Beyer died in the autumn of 2009 in Erlangen.