Political Prisoners in the former GDR

Due to strict secrecy of the statistics of prisoners and criminality on the side of the authorities of the former GDR, it is difficult to estimate the number of political prisoners. Earlier estimates differ significantly from each other depending on the used sources, definition of terms, estimation methods and on the investigation period. As a starting point the term ‘Political Prisoner’ in the DDR was defined and operationalized. Based on this conceptual term definition the explorative study then aims to estimate the number of political investigation proceedings, political crimes, political criminals and convicts between 1945 and 1990 in the SBZ/GDR. These numbers help to evaluate the number of political prisoners also with regard to the total number of prisoners. In the research process not only the number of political prisoners was searched but also social and demographical data for prisoners and statistics on the penal system and so on, in order to give possibilities for further research and to enable a deeper analysis. The upper boundary for potentially political prisoners is estimated with 280000, the lower boundary is estimated with 170000 political cases.