Twenty-year-old Stefan Weingärtner had never been active politically before 17 June 1953. He was born in Görlitz on 22 February 1933 and had two younger siblings. His parents were divorced. His mother, a nurse, raised the children by herself; their father lived in Hannover from 1950 onwards. A technology enthusiast, Weingärtner worked as an auto mechanic at the company Tesch in Görlitz at the time of his arrest.
Although he was raised as a Christian and participated in the events of the Young Congregation (Junge Gemeinde), Weingärtner was also, like most of his peers, a member of the Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend, FDJ). He was also a member of the Sport and Technology Association (Gesellschaft für Sport und Technik, GST) and pursued his hobby in the GST’s Young Technicians Club. The events of 17 June 1953 would fundamentally change his life and those of his closest relations.
As soon as they got word that the workers from the locomotive and railcar factory were protesting on the afternoon of 17 June 1953, Stefan Weingärtner and his co-workers headed out to join them, taking their screwdrivers and tin snips with them. Later that day, Weingärtner was among those who laid siege to the district office of the Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS). He was also present when a delegation was allowed into the building to look for prisoners in the basement, at the recommendation of the SED district secretary. The district secretary later testified that a young man, whom he did not know but was able to describe, had assisted him when he needed medical aid. Weingärtner and a few other young people took the injured SED party secretary and another injured MfS employee to the doctor. Both the lord mayor and the SED district secretary attested to the “good manners” of the young people.
Weingärtner was also among the demonstrators who stormed the MfS district office, though he had never drawn notice for being particularly prone to violence before. He had the bad luck to have a distinctive appearance that people remembered. He wore thick glasses and, that particular day, was wearing a black beret. He was also very tall, so he stood out, quite literally, from the crowd.
Weingärtner was arrested in the afternoon when the rally on the market square (Obermarkt) was dispersing. During an interrogation conducted by State Security that same day, he said that a Soviet officer there had ordered him to come with him. Apparently, he had been among the young people who were unwilling to leave the square after the announcement of a state of emergency and had greeted the Soviet military vehicles with “hoots and howls”. He was taken first to the town hall, then to State Security and later to the local Soviet headquarters.
On 19 June 1953, a Soviet military tribunal condemned Stefan Weingärtner to death by shooting, identifying him as “one of the most active provocateurs and chief ringleaders during the putsch in Görlitz on 17 June 1953”. However, Weingärtner and one other young man from Görlitz, whose death was also ordered by the military tribunal, were lucky, although “lucky” is a strange word for such a tragic situation: Their sentences were never carried out. Weingärtner was granted a reprieve on 5 October and his sentence was commuted to 25 years in a labour camp. An “Excerpt from the proclamation of the sentence” identified “the active participation in the counter-revolutionary demonstrations to overthrow the GDR” as the grounds for this sentence. On 4 October 1956, the sentence was further reduced to ten years “through a ruling of the President of the GDR in favour of clemency". Weingärtner served almost the full ten years. He was incarcerated in Bautzen, Luckau and Torgau, where he was when he was finally released in January of 1963.
Though Weingärtner was quite clearly not a fully-fledged “enemy” of the GDR before his arrest, he knew himself to be an opponent of the GDR regime when he came out of prison. Curiosity and youthful exuberance may have taken him into the Stasi headquarters that day in Görlitz, but his sentencing and experiences in prison transform him. In prison, he was viewed as a rebellious inmate who was unwilling to conform to gain privileges. His prison files contain multiple references to his “negative” attitude towards the GDR and to his continuing “glorification of the June putsch”. Disciplinary measures were imposed on him on several occasions, including mail stoppage and withdrawal of visitation privileges as well as multiple-day periods of strict confinement. He received particularly harsh treatment from the wardens in Torgau, because he refused to bow down and made no secret of his feelings about the regime. Weingärtner felt that the treatment he received from Soviet soldiers and officers had been more humane than his treatment within the GDR prison system, despite the fact that it was a Soviet military tribunal that had initially condemned him to death.
Weingärtner paid a high price for his stance: unlike many of his fellow inmates, he was not pardoned after the death of Wilhelm Pieck, President of the GDR, in September of 1960.
By the time he was finally released, on 25 January 1963, both Weingärtner and the GDR had changed a great deal. The SED leadership had had walls and fences raised around its citizens, which made it extremely difficult to escape their domain. Upon his release, Weingärtner went back to Görlitz, where his family still lived. The Church made it possible for him to recover at a sanatorium for a while. He was assigned to a job, but his very poor health prevented him from starting it.
From his first day out of prison, Weingärtner was kept under observation by the MfS and the Volkspolizei. The agents even tried to recruit him as an unofficial collaborator and used his interest in technology to craft an appropriate background story. He saw through this manoeuvre though and asked them to abandon any thought of his collaboration.
The Stasi determined that it could not “rule out the possibility of an attempt to flee the country” on his part, since he had been sighted in the Rostock harbour and near the border in Thuringia in the spring of 1963. The Stasi’s informers also reported that he made several trips to Berlin for medical treatment in the Charité hospital in late 1964. He failed to return to Görlitz from one of these trips. His informers had not realised that he might be fleeing to West Berlin.
The MfS investigation into how he had managed to escape, operation “Sluice”, remained open until October of 1970. A note in the final report reads, “Given his past and the circumstance of his father being in West Germany, one can assume that he was smuggled into West Berlin. The investigation was unable to identify the escape route or smuggler organisation involved.” The MfS was also notified that Weingärtner had been recognised by the “Relief Committee for Political Prisoners of the Soviet Zone” and of how much money he had received as “integration assistance”.
Stefan Weingärtner died in Hannover in 1977 at the age of 44. Only his mother was allowed out of the GDR to attend his funeral, the authorities refused his brother and sister permission to travel.