East-Germany – The Stasi and a racist pogrom in Erfurt

Posted by Thomas Klikauer

This is the story of something that was not supposed to exist. Almost to the day, fifty years ago, a racist pogrom took place under the ever-watchful eyes of East Germany’s Stasi – the secret police.

The race riots occurred in the city of Erfurt, in the East German state of Thuringia. Today, both are strongholds of the neo-fascist AfD, with 33% of voter support. Thuringia is also the home of AfD Führer Björn Höcke.

Back in 1975, even the almighty Stasi – East Germany’s extremely feared and all-powerful secret police – misjudged the mood in Erfurt that led to the riots.

Yet in East Germany’s highly fabricated officialdom, the racist hunting of non-Germans was not supposed to occur. But it did. A veil of silence erased the pogrom from public memory – in Erfurt and beyond. Until now – fifty years on.

For five decades, almost all public memory of the racist riots in Erfurt had vanished, even though on August 10th, 1975, several hundred Germans chased Algerian contract workers through the city. It was a racist manhunt.

It is puzzling how the story of hundreds of xenophobic rioters hunting Algerian workers through Erfurt could have been almost completely forgotten.

Yet in Erfurt – a major German city – several hundred people armed themselves with wooden clubs and knives. The racist mob attacked dormitories of Algerian workers, besieged a post office, and even assaulted police officers.

All of this didn’t happen in a single night, but across two, three, four days. You’d expect such events to have left a deep imprint in public memory. Perhaps even in the collective memory of East Germans.

The opposite was true. Nobody talked about it – until now.

Germany remains a country where people often prefer to look the other way. Just 35 years before the Erfurt Race Riots, Germans claimed they hadn’t known about Nazi concentration camps, even when their neighbours were being loaded onto cattle trains bound for Auschwitz.

German myth-making continued with the post-war hallucination that 1945 was a so-called Stunde Null – Hour Zero. At that hour, all Nazis supposedly returned to Mars, from whence they came.

In reality, Nazi ideology continued well into East Germany – and even more so in West Germany.

In Erfurt, very few historians ever dared to mention the 1975 racist riots. Things changed somewhat after 1990. Over the last 15 years, there have been:

• A few minor radio pieces;
• A TV documentary (2020); and
• A commemorative pylon with a barely visible inscription.

Nevertheless, the riots in Erfurt marked the first known mass hunting of foreigners in Germany after what Germans still prefer to call the Second World War – a term that conveniently avoids naming what it really was: Nazism.

In a recently published article, one of the co-authors – who grew up in Erfurt – admitted she had never heard of the riots now known as “Erfurt ’75.” Erfurt ’75 does sound better than the Erfurt Race Riots, doesn’t it?

In 1975, not even the Stasi – officially, the Ministry for State Security – could determine exactly how the riots began.

Today, we know the “where” and the “when.” It was the evening of August 10th, 1975, at Erfurt’s main square – the Domplatz, in front of the cathedral. There was a local summer fair with carousels, food stalls, and rides.

Among the crowd was Hamad, an Algerian worker who had arrived in June 1975. In two days, he would turn 21. About 150 Algerian men had been recruited to work in three local companies as part of East Germany’s overseas labour program. In total, around 8,000 foreign workers were in the country at the time, helping fill labour shortages.

Hamad and his colleagues were building houses – still standing in Erfurt today – and a bridge. On that August evening, they wandered the fair, won toys, and shot at moving targets in carnival booths.

There were German and Polish women nearby. Suddenly, Germans shouted: “Hookers!” “Sluts!” Hamad still remembers those insults – and another: “Camel herder.”

Then a German man spat in the face of one of Hamad’s friends. Hamad slapped him. More Germans joined. The mob grew. Shouts. Screams. Blows.

Realising they were outnumbered, Hamad began to run. Fifty years on, his memory is clear. He starts with “écoute” – French for “listen!” Some details are hazy – as they would be after five decades – but others are vivid.

He remembers running about a mile from Domplatz to the train station and a nearby café where he hoped to find refuge. The mob followed. The Stasi later recorded that 150 rioters had cornered the Algerians at the square.

The angry crowd swelled to over 300 people. That figure appears repeatedly in the Stasi files. The MfS (Ministry for State Security) – which spied, monitored, discredited, arrested and tortured – had no officers present that evening. They didn’t expect a race riot.

The files describe “chasing of Algerians” and an “angry, pogrom-like mood.”

Two days later, they note: “individual thugs had armed themselves with clubs and metal bars stolen from construction sites and market stalls.”

Hamad remembers crossing Willy-Brandt-Platz. The train station was on the right, the café on the left. The café owner refused to let him in. Then, something hit Hamad on the head. His memory ends there.

He did not witness a German cut an Algerian with a razor blade and boast about it. Or the tram incident, where a 20-year-old German bricklayer dragged an Algerian off a tram and beat him to the ground. The tram couldn’t move – the mob blocked the tracks.

One group of about 50 Germans broke into hunting squads. One such group found five Algerians in a tunnel. They hurled one against the wall. He collapsed. Others escaped using stones and wooden planks to defend themselves. One Algerian fell – tripped by a German – and was beaten by five or six others.

Sixty Germans set off to attack the Algerians’ dormitory in the north of Erfurt. They were intercepted by the Volkspolizei (VoPo), East Germany’s “People’s Police.”

Hamad woke up later in a local hospital. His colleagues had experienced the worst manhunt in post-Nazi Germany.

Then the story vanished.

In East Germany, only the ruling SED party and the Stasi controlled historical narrative. Both chose silence.

In the days following the riots, Stasi investigators produced contradictory reports. In one version, it was a German-Algerian brawl. In another, a dispute between two Algerians and a young German at the fair.

Eventually, the Stasi concluded, “it is not possible to determine with certainty who started the brawl.”

There’s also the matter of police dogs.

Several files mention the VoPo releasing dogs that seriously injured three Algerians – one bitten on the head. At that point, the crowd had swelled to 300. The mob began shouting: Beat the Algerians to death!

The Erfurt city council transcript later acknowledged that the VoPo were reprimanded for their brutal use of dogs. Yet their actions targeted the Algerians, practically encouraging the German mob.

But racism, in East Germany’s ideological worldview, could not exist. Hence, there could not have been a racist pogrom. Ideology and reality did not match. The Stasi was flabbergasted.

Since open political discussion or press freedom didn’t exist in East Germany, neither could racism. Thus, all such violence had to be reframed as apolitical hooliganism.

Stasi files also reveal that in the weeks prior to the riots, Erfurt was awash with false rumours about Algerian crimes – rape, murder, throat-slashing. The Stasi confirmed that none of these crimes occurred. They were invented. But they inflamed public sentiment.

Even after August 10th, assaults continued. Algerian workers stayed in their dorms, afraid to leave. Some compared the VoPo’s brutality to Rhodesia, one of the last white minority regimes in Africa.

In the aftermath, the Stasi arrested 57 people. 27 received prison sentences. 8 were fined. The focus fell on 5 so-called ringleaders. They were described as lazy bums and brutal, negative elements. No mention of racism.

They were unskilled petty criminals, some with records for bodily harm and theft. During their trials, a mob gathered outside the court shouting: “Hand over the Algerians – we want to hang them!”

Stasi officials feared the West would learn of the trials. A veil of silence descended. On August 19th, the Erfurt court sentenced five men. Two days later, a tiny note appeared in a local paper titled: Hooligans Sentenced.

That was all the people of Erfurt would ever read about the racist violence of August 1975. Until the end of East Germany in 1990, not a single word more was said.

Several of the racists convicted have since died. One, still alive, was part of the group that sought to attack the Algerian dorm. He admits to chasing and beating an Algerian but claims he avoided the “real blood hunt.”

He was released early and now considers applying for a pension as a victim of the Stasi regime.

From SS guards to neo-Nazis, German perpetrators have often done well with state pensions – unlike their non-Aryan victims.

Hans Globke, co-author of Hitler’s race laws and a key architect of the Holocaust, received a state pension. As will, it seems, the unofficial Führer of the AfD – Björn Höcke – as a former teacher (Oberstudienrat/Gymnasiallehrer) and current parliamentarian.

Photo: Everyday racism in East-Germany: “hunting people in Erfurt – hand them over we want to hang them” (source: East-German Public TV: https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/thueringen/mitte-thueringen/erfurt/rassismus-ddr-gastarbeiter-stasi-100.html)

Subscribe to Cross-border Talks’ YouTube channel! Follow the project’s Facebook and Twitter page! And here are the podcast’s Telegram channel and its Substack newsletter!

Like our work? Donate to Cross-Border Talks or buy us a coffee!

About The Author