Letters Without Signatures was the name of a German BBC radio program that was aimed specifically at listeners in the GDR. For almost 25 years, from the early 1950s until 1974, it enjoyed popularity with listeners from East Germany, who could also write anonymous letters to the editors with their everyday concerns as well as their political opinions.
The program and its thousands of letters was rediscovered in a BBC archive by the German writer Schädlich. "Letters without Signatures" created a cat-and-mouse game between the British broadcaster and GDR state security over cover addresses and code words. Comprehensive postal controls throughout the GDR led to the persecution of letter writers, who were threatened with prison sentences. Thousands of GDR citizens wrote to the BBC using a cover address system in West Berlin.
The Stasi saw the British radio broadcast as a smear program by the west intended to promote the "political-ideological subversion of GDR citizens”. As many as 3,000 letters made their way to London through the Stasi's ever-increasing mail control. The writers were men, women and children from all social sectors of the GDR.
To this day, there are no exact figures on how many letter writers were arrested and convicted. One of them was Karl-Heinz Borchardt from Greifswald, who began writing to the BBC as a 16-year-old schoolboy to vent his indignation at the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968. However, the Stasi intercepted his letters and was able to identify him with the help of blood and saliva samples and handwriting comparison. He was sentenced to two years in prison.
The radio show's host: Austin Harrison was popular, but also eccentric and enigmatic until his death. For the Stasi, the British journalist was a central figure in the fight against Western opinion-making on the radio. They saw him as an influential enemy of the state who was in fact an agent of Britain's MI6. Harrison regularly traveled to the GDR, with a keen interest in the Leipzig Spring Fair, where he was shadowed around the clock.
On this History Stories special, we trace back the story of Letters Without Signatures and the everyday whistleblowers living in the GDR.
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