East Germany operated a state-run program selling political prisoners to West Germany from 1963 to 1989. The German Democratic Republic transferred 33,755 dissidents in exchange for hard currency that totaled $3.4 billion. Prices began at 40,000 Deutsche Marks per prisoner and rose to 95,847 marks by the end. Stasi archives contain detailed invoices treating individuals as commodities, including entries for one dissident journalist and three church activists. West German officials and church groups negotiated the transfers. The East German command economy could not manufacture export goods valued on world markets, so the regime relied on this human trafficking to obtain foreign exchange needed to keep the state running. The operation exposed the dependency of socialist systems on capitalist resources despite official ideology claiming the opposite. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, yet the episode illustrates how central planning repeatedly turned to parasitic extraction from market economies to survive.
East Germany operated a state-run program selling political prisoners to West Germany from 1963 to 1989. The German Democratic Republic transferred 33,755 dissidents in exchange for hard currency that totaled $3.4 billion. Prices began at 40,000 Deutsche Marks per prisoner and rose to 95,847 marks by the end. Stasi archives contain detailed invoices treating individuals as commodities, including entries for one dissident journalist and three church activists. West German officials and church groups negotiated the transfers. The East German command economy could not manufacture export goods valued on world markets, so the regime relied on this human trafficking to obtain foreign exchange needed to keep the state running. The operation exposed the dependency of socialist systems on capitalist resources despite official ideology claiming the opposite. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, yet the episode illustrates how central planning repeatedly turned to parasitic extraction from market economies to survive.
SOURCE: https://x.com/Handre/status/2065761349540470894 SOURCE (mirror): https://xcancel.com/Handre/status/2065761349540470894