Stasi postal control, Radio Luxembourg, and the fan mail that took forty years to arrive
The request was simple. A song, a name, a greeting to a friend. Written on a postcard in East Germany, addressed to Radio Luxembourg.
It never arrived. Neither did hundreds of others.
Stelle 12
Article 31 of the constitution of the German Democratic Republic guaranteed the secrecy of post and telecommunications.
In the country’s fifteen mail distribution centres, the Ministry for State Security ran its own rooms. Inside the post office they were called Stelle 12. The department behind them was Abteilung M. In 1953 it employed 639 people. In 1989, about 2,200.
According to the Stasi Records Archive, district reports put the number of letters opened at around 90,000 a day, not counting parcels.
Letters were opened with steam. Parcels with photographs went through cold-vapour machines, so nothing would show. Mail was allowed a delay of twelve hours before the Deutsche Post delivered it as if nothing had happened.
Between January 1984 and November 1989, Abteilung M removed 32.8 million Deutschmarks in western currency from the post. The letters that had carried the money were destroyed. Cassettes from western parcels were reused to record telephone calls. Postcards to western radio competitions were taken out of circulation.
In April 1979, two young women in the GDR wrote to a friend in the West. One line of their letter survives in a Stasi case file named Zwillinge, “Twins”: “Hoffentlich lieĂźt jetzt keiner diese Zeilen und versaut uns wieder unsere Illusionen!” Hopefully nobody is reading these lines now and ruining our illusions again.
Someone was.
The valley of the clueless
Around Dresden, western television could not be received. East Germans called the area the Tal der Ahnungslosen: the valley of the clueless.
Radio reached further than television. At night, on long wave, Radio Luxembourg came in. Presenters like Camillo Felgen and Frank Elstner played what the state stations would not.
The listeners wrote back.
What the letters say
Michael Teupel, a curator and contemporary witness, went looking for a single envelope: one he had once seen in a display case at the Bundesarchiv in Halle, addressed to RTL and confiscated by the Stasi. His request led the Bundesarchiv to 595 archive records from the former Stasi files of the Dresden area, the valley of the clueless, dating from 1984 onwards. How many letters they hold cannot be counted exactly. Teupel estimates around five hundred letters and postcards. All of them were intercepted. None reached the station.
According to Teupel, the letters are entirely apolitical. Listeners asked for their favourite songs. They voted in the charts. They asked for autographs. They thanked the station for its programmes.
Rostock, 1959
One earlier case is documented in full by the Bundesarchiv. In September 1959, eighteen-year-old Rolf K. from Rostock wrote to Radio Luxembourg with a friend. East German radio, the letter said, was too political. “Wir sind sehr erfreut ĂĽber ihre Sendungen”: we are very pleased with your broadcasts. They asked for signed photographs.
About two weeks later, a card came back from Camillo Felgen: “Herzlichen Dank fĂĽr alles; fĂĽr Rolf trotz allem alles Gute! Camillo.” Many thanks for everything. For Rolf, despite everything, all the best.
The Stasi found the card with a third friend. Rolf K. was prosecuted and sentenced to one year in prison.
Eisleben
From Lutherstadt Eisleben, another case survives. A single music request led to a Stasi interrogation, exclusion from school examinations, and imprisonment.
When Radio Luxembourg learned of such arrests, Frank Elstner advised that the names of East German listeners should no longer be read on air.
The station protected its listeners the only way it could. It stopped saying who they were.
The transmitter
Radio Luxembourg’s long-wave transmitter stood in Junglinster. It had carried voices into Germany before.
In the last months of the Second World War, after American troops reached Luxembourg in September 1944, the US Army used the Junglinster transmitter for a station called Sender 1212. It broadcast at night, in a Rhenish-Hessian dialect, and presented itself as a German station. Its programmes mixed true reports with invented ones: Allied breakthroughs that had not happened, resistance groups that did not exist. It went off the air in April 1945 with a staged “capture”.
The same tower that later carried chart hits east had first carried a lie in German accents. Every side that reached the transmitter used it.
Delivered
After 1990, criminal complaints were filed over the opening of the mail. No Stasi officer was convicted.
More than four decades later, the letters may yet reach their address. A search for further material from other regions of the former GDR is under way. On 13 April 2027, the Luxembourg City Library will host “Forbidden Waves – Radio Luxembourg in the GDR” (Verbotene Wellen – Radio Luxemburg in der DDR). Michael Teupel plans to present a selection of the letters there, together with Dr Dominique Santana, who created Ghosts of the Villa, the exhibition on Radio Luxembourg’s history at the Villa Louvigny.
Somewhere in the collection is a postcard asking for a song.
The request still stands.
In the same week the letters resurfaced, the Bundestag was debating 609 pages of new intelligence law.
