Emmanuel Thomas, DPA, Friday, June 16, 2023
BERLIN – German lawmakers on Friday commemorated the upcoming 70th anniversary of the June 17, 1953, uprising in East Germany, which was crushed by police and Soviet troops.
President Frank-Walter Steinmeier called the 1953 uprising – in which around 1 million people took to the streets to protest labour conditions and demand free elections – “a referendum for democracy.”
At least 55 people were killed and more than 10,000 arrested after occupying Soviet authorities and the communist East German government moved to halt the protests.
Steinmeier, speaking at a memorial ceremony in the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, said the reunited country’s current constitution now guarantees the freedoms which people demanded in 1953.
“That’s why I say very clearly: It’s a flimsy lie when the opponents of our democracy, when populists and extremists claim that even now it’s ‘just like back then,’ just like in the dictatorship,” said Steinmeier. “Anyone who speaks like that mocks the victims of the [East German communist] regime. Anyone who speaks like that abuses the names of those who risked their lives at the time.”
Bundestag President Bärbel Bas said that the movement for freedom that was brutally suppressed in 1953 found its belated completion in the peaceful revolution of 1989, which led to the fall of the East German government and the reunification of Germany in 1990.
“1953 and 1989 are part of the great democratic heritage that the people in the east of our country have achieved. It was a fight that the Germans in the west did not have to fight,” Bas said.
