Collapse of the DDR & the transition to capitalism

I have two specific questions about transition from communisim to capitalism in east germany that I havent been able to research the answers to, and my ex DDR co-workers cant fully answer either.

1. How was state-owned property reallocated back into private hands. For example a residential house. Was ownership handed over to the tenants, or to the hiers of the owner before communism, or was it sold to the highest bidder. I did ask one co-worker and he isnt sure but seems to think people did in fact privatly own residential propety. What about small business such as a petshop.

2. I imagine the soviet union had some military bases (or at least some soviet technology in east german military hands) in east germany at the time that communism collapsed. Was west germany and their ally America simply able to go straight in and access this technology at the time of reunification, or was there a time period where the soviets were able to resuce any military secrets before the reunification

to answer question 2: the soviets stripped EVERYTHING down, including toilets and shower fittings. Soviet troops were still in the east well after reunificatio nand had plenty of time to fill their massive cargo planes with western goodies, financed by selling tanks and missile, to sell on the black market back home.

question 1 is harder: initially all state assets were transferred to the Treuhand. What happened afterwards probably can't be answered in one sentence.

Was the Treuhand not just some of the larger enterprises? I read in wikipedia that the Treuhand dealt with 8500 firms.

Oh and 3. Is everyone happy about who owns what now? Or is there a whole court process where people can make claims against property that they think they might be entitiled to?

People owned land and property under the communist regime, when the regime collapsed the still owned it. Land that was taken and put into the hand of the state, is now up for claim. Castles and such things that were taken into state ownership are now being reclaimed by their rightfull owners (or decendants).


Aug. 31, 1994 was the date of the Russian Western Group of Forces left Germany. The Americans had no-access to the technology of the Russians through the Germans, just as the German forces in the west had no access to the technology of the Americans, British or French the same was for the Soviets in the East. Soviet technology was for the Soviets.

There WAS private property in the DDR, some people did own the homes they lived in for example and I THINK that some very small enterprises were owned by individuals.

The big companies went via the Treuhand (or Falschand might be better) to be sold to either management buy out or the highest bidder (to put money into Helmut Kohls slush funds that is).

Small companies (say a small hotel, village shop, small cinema) were often bought out by the manager or a workers collective.

The established middle to ruling class in the DDR mutated into the middle to ruling class in the New States of Germany.

As for the "rightful owners", land barons and absentee landlord who whose property was confiscated after 1945 AREN'T always winning "their" property back in the courts.

firms and state assets that needed ownership transferring. Many apartment blocks became owned by the Stadt or were tansferred to GWGs. I don't think there is one catch-all answer to this.

No. My ex, was from the East, and her parents were going on about this guy that ran from the Russians in 45. He came back in 2001 and took back his burg. The burg had been serving as a college in his absence.

the russian military shipped everything of use back to moscow as part of the deal with the german govt for them to bail out agreed as a vote winner for big helmut.
ruskies took great pleasure in stripping east germany bare and left it with a very flimsy infrastructure indeed. check out the state of the roads in the east even in late 90s. east (apart from east berlin) was so eerily quiet and empty after the russian wdwl. it reminded me of the bondi.

i lived in berlin in the early nineties. happy days.

Until recently the Germans still had a squadron of Mig 29s.

So i think the answer to question 2 is that the Russians pretty much had to accept the West getting hold of a lot of Russian military equipment through the fact that a lot was owned by the DDR. Of course all the Russians important stuff owned by the Red Army went back to the USSR.

By 1990 though it was clear to all concerned that the best Russian equipment was way behind the best western kit critically in the area of electronics & software. Ironically the technology gap was one of the main reasons reasons that got Gorbachev support from the Soviet military for attempting to end the Cold war.

Thanks guys, great answers, really helped fill some gaps in info I was able to surf up online. Very interesting period in history and I hope to learn even more about it.

just adding a confirming voice to private ownership of small businesses in the DDR. I saw in a video set on the history of the DDR (designed for high school kids) a case study on small businesses. the example shown was a furniture manufacturer. one guy "owned" it, but if the number of employees went too high (I think above 30 or 50) then the private ownership would be questioned. these entrepeneurs actually had a lot of power (so long as they didn't flaunt it) and kept the system "running" at the end. similar things were going on in Poland, Czech, and Hungary too. russia was a completely different story.

I know a family of three who left the DDR during the seventies, leaving behind everything they owned. House, car, sailboat, motorboat, bike, savings, all gone. They left with nothing but a small shopping bag with their papers and some worthless cash.
The movable property was sold by the authorities (or disappeared in some fat cats pockets), and the house was rented to some Stasi guy for something like 50 East German marks a month. The money went into their bank account, and when repairs were needed that money was used to pay for it. After 15 years the money was all used up so the house was about to be sold, with the Stasi tenant having the right of first refusal. Before that happened Germany was reunified. Since they never ceased to be the legal owners it was still theirs. Had it already been sold they would have been shit out of luck. That's what happened to one of their neighbors who already left before the wall was built.

I have personally seen a former Soviet military installation while the last ones of them were moving out.
Imagine a few blocks of upper middle class houses, each 2-3 floors with basement, home to 2 to 4 families, built during the thirties. Some time in 1948 some Russian Army officers showed up early in the morning with a big loudspeaker and told the inhabitants they had 6 hours time to leave. And they should please leave all the valuables there. Once the Germans were gone they surrounded the whole area with a concrete wall and two steel gates manned by armed guards.

For the next 45 years the houses were inhabitated by Russian officers and their families (the average soldier was drafted and couldn't bring his family). A typical apartment with 100 square meters and three rooms was home to 10 or more persons, each family using one room with the bathroom and kitchen being shared. Must have been one big frat house party athmosphere in there. I even saw an improvised sauna, an uninsulated room in a basement of a brick house with a dirt floor. The ceiling was wood. The wooden beams and walls had nearly rotted away and were close to collapsing. Since everyone only stayed for a year nobody felt like repairing stuff, painting the walls etc. They didn't have an organised waste disposal, so it was not uncommon for years worth of waste piling up in the back yards. Of course the whole area was inaccessible for the Germans.
When they left they took everything with them: cables, windows, water pipes, wash basins, toilet seats. Not that it was any loss, the shit was 60 years old and all the houses needed a complete overhaul anyway. Some were completely uninhabitable and needed to be torn down since nobody bothered to repair leaky roofs. They were abandoned years before they left and then used for garbage disposal.

The actual military bases were a nightmare too. They usually took over the Nazi installations and built outposts and storage sites in the middle of nowhere. I've been to a secret fuel storage site which consisted of huge concrete swimming pool sized tanks An improvised pipeline was built out of the kind of metal pipes that are used by farmers to pump water. Everything leaked and poisoned the groundwater for years to come. Many of the areas are still inaccessible due to old ordnance being buried there.

One of the conditions for their widthdrawal was that the German government built several thousand houses back in the USSR for the troops moving east. I wonder what they look like today.

Hiya Kza, a while back I read a book called Stasiland by Australian writer Anna Funder. Its basically various personal histories of people during Stasi rule, either civilians or Stasi men themselves. Interesting read.

What is so exciting about 20+ years old technology anyways (accounts for usa as for russian technology). Most of the add-ons that you might consider advances are quite simple stuff and often malfunction.