The background against which Flade’s actions took place are key to understanding the verdict, for Flade was arrested on the eve 15 October 1950, a historic date for the SED dictatorship. This was the day of the first elections to the national legislature, the Volkskammer, and to the state parliaments and municipal councils, in which voters were offered the choice of approving or rejecting a “unity list” of National Front candidates. The ballots offered no other options. Long before the actual day of the election, all of the seats in these governmental bodies had already been assigned, either to the SED or to one of the block parties or mass organisations tolerated under its hegemony, in a manner ensuring that the communists had an absolute majority in all of these bodies. The act of voting meant nothing other than the mere act of turning in a ballot slip. The sham elections of 15 October1950 also set the stage for all of the elections to follow. Free elections would not be possible again in the GDR until 18 March 1990, when the state was already well on its way towards collapse. Flade’s actions can be understood against this backdrop.

Hermann Joseph Flade was born to an unmarried mother on 22 May 1932 in Würzburg. In 1936, his mother married Erich Flade, a dispatch clerk. He was raised in the Catholic faith. The family lived in Olbernhau, in the Ore Mountains, where Hermann Flade started school in 1938. He started secondary school in Dresden after his family moved there in 1942. Both mother and son survived the devastating British and American bombing raids on Dresden in the night of 13/14 February 1945 uninjured, after which they returned to Olbernhau, where Flade enrolled in the local secondary school. By then, Erich Flade had been conscripted and taken prisoner.

When his family’s financial situation became untenable, Hermann Flade took a year’s leave from school to work as in the Soviet-owned uranium mines of Wismut AG in Marienberg in the Ore Mountains. The work in the mine was brutal, but well-paid. Flade stuck with it until he was injured in an accident in April 1950, after which he found work in a brickyard. He planned to return to the secondary school in Olbernhau in October of 1950.

This was the situation in which Flade, who took an early interest in politics, experienced the campaign leading up the elections on 15 October 1950. He was appalled. His decision to resist was spontaneous but definite. Acting alone, without discussing his plans with anyone else, he drafted texts for hand-printed handbills articulating his rejection of the sham elections. He distributed nearly 200 copies of these handbills, produced with a child’s printing set, throughout his home- town under cover of darkness.

The first evening he remained unnoticed, but while out on his second late-evening foray on 14 October – the eve of the election – he was caught in the act, as it were, by a two-man Volkspolizei patrol. In the course of the ensuing struggle, he pulled out a pocket-knife and stabbed one of the two police officers multiple times on the upper left arm and in the back. The injuries were not life-threatening. Flade managed to flee the scene but was arrested two days later. 

Flade was the subject of multiple interrogations by State Security. According to the official record, he made his confession on 19 October 1950. He made no secret of his political convictions. “My act in distributing the handbills sprang from the political recognition of the imperative of taking passive and active action to fight the GDR and its bodies.” This declaration of belief in the rightness of his own act was an expression of open defiance of the ruling regime. The latter decided that it called for a verdict that would deter such defiance in others. The case fell to the state attorney’s office and the Dresden Regional Court, the criminal court of first instance, which decided to hold the main proceedings in the case in Olbernhau. The hearing took place the largest room in the town, which was in a restaurant called Gaststätte Tivoli. Around 1,200 people came to watch, including workers, miners, other secondary-school students and SED partisans, most of them attending as “delegates”. To the court’s displeasure, the accused appeared unrepentant. The official record of the trial cites Flade as testifying: “I said to myself, in an election, another voice should be heard too, and since I could not do this openly, because then I would be expelled from school, I would have to do it at night, in secret”, and “I was a hundred-percent certain of the justice of my cause.”

On 10 January 1951, at around 4:40 pm, the presiding judge read out the following verdict: “In the name of the people! The accused, Flade, is found guilty of agitation to boycott the democratic institutions and organisations and in a coincidental offense of engaging in militaristic propaganda, attempted murder and resisting law enforcement officers and is sentenced to the penalty of death, with costs awarded against him.”

The verdict triggered a wave of protests on a scale never seen before in the GDR, as well as in West Berlin and West Germany. In the face of these protests, the appellate court decided to review the sentencing on 19 January 1951 and commuted the death sentence to one of 15 years of penal servitude. 

Flade was released under an amnesty after serving two thirds of this sentence behind the walls of Bautzen, Torgau and Waldheim. Unsurprisingly, he then left the GDR. Unbroken despite his ten years in prison, he studied at the Universities of Munich and Mainz, earning a doctorate in 1967 with a dissertation on “Political theory in Western culture”. He then wrote a book about his experiences entitled “Deutsche gegen Deutsche” (Germans vs. Germans). In the last years of his life, he worked at the All-German Institute (Gesamtdeutsches Institut) in Bonn. 

Hermann Flade died of health problems resulting from his imprisonment on the night of 15/16 May 1980, a few days before his 48th birthday.