Word: manifestos
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Communist manifesto hurts East-West relations
...trouble began earlier this month when the West German weekly Der Spiegel published a 30-page manifesto issued by a group of underground dissenters in East Germany who called themselves the League of Democratic Communists of Germany. The document denounced the Soviet Union for "brutal exploitation and suppression" of East Germany. With bitter sarcasm, the anonymous authors called their country "a pathetic imitation of a Soviet Republic whose worst features have been reinforced by German thoroughness." Noting that Stalin had concentration camps even before Hitler, the manifesto charged that the "barbaric" Soviet system had since 1945 claimed "more victims...
...manifesto also attacked corruption and greed in the government of Party Chief Erich Honecker. "These Politburo-crats are sick with conceit," the document declared. "No ruling class in Germany has ever sponged on others the way the two dozen ruling Communist families have, using our country like a self-service store." Accused of living in "golden ghettos," the leaders were said to have "enriched themselves shamelessly in special shops and by privately ordering goods from the West." The worst offender was Honecker himself, who, the manifesto charged, had "stuffed the homes of his relatives from cellar to roof with...
Alarmed by broadcast stories about the manifesto on West German TV, which is watched by 80% of East Germans, Honecker called a Politburo meeting to deal with the crisis. The party leadership closed Der Spiegel's East Berlin bureau, the first such Communist action since East and West Germany agreed to exchange journalists in 1972. A wide-scale press campaign in the East tried to discredit the manifesto as a "malicious concoction" of West German intelligence. Initially some Communist-propaganda experts in Bonn had suspected the document's authenticity. Now, however, there is agreement that the manifesto...
...another move to counter the impact of the document, the Communists stepped up their accusations that the Federal Republic had been guilty of spying on the East. Immediately after the manifesto's publication, the East German news agency A.D.N. reported that Günter Weinhold, 40, a senior official in the West Berlin government finance department, had been arrested in East Germany for espionage. Last week courts in East Berlin meted out sentences of seven to twelve years to three West Germans charged with spying. Meanwhile, Bonn believes, the East Germans are stepping up their intelligence activities...