Witness to history

As Germany lumbered towards reunification in those heady, scary days following the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had a unique viewpoint. My translation company, Translations Verbatim, earned the right to become translator of record for the German government’s Treuhandanstalt, the agency tasked with privatizing former East German companies.

Although Translations Verbatim engaged over 120 independent contractors to translate into and out of eighty or so languages, our primary focus was German to and from English. For the Treuhandanstalt project, I personally handled the financial portions of the prospectuses, while an Austrian engineer tackled the technical parts. We often managed turnaround of 48 hours for thirty-page brochures.

Technology then wasn’t what it is now. Gerhard and I spent hours talking on a landline and transmitting drafts via FTP on a blazing fast 2400 baud modem. We also “talked” via Prodigy, then the hot online service provider.

Most conversations centered on tricky words. The Treuhandanstalt had developed its own lingo. Initially we spent hours simply matching their awkward language and staying consistent within our own documents. Our biggest frustration, at least at first: The Treuhandanstalt’s expectation that our translations would sound better than their awful original documents.

Over time, we took note of the content of the documents. Even without 24-hour news cycles, we stayed current with news out of Germany. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl often spoke in glowing terms of the unbelievable success the Treuhandanstalt was having, of the vibrancy of German business in the former DDR.

But Gerhard and I were reading factual documents in which the Treuhandanstalt spoke of the impact of “temporarily” shuttering factories—generally in towns where that factory was the sole employer. It went beyond 100% unemployment in those towns. Very often that factory would never be reopened, because it had generated so much toxic waste, the town itself was unsafe for human habitation. Reopening the factory would require hazardous waste disposal that cost more than products the factory produced.

The prospectuses stated these facts, because American companies gullible enough to buy these dregs of former East German business would be saddled with clean-up and unemployment fallout. I’m sure some of the privatized companies made a great deal of money for their buyers. In general, the German government had already sold those corporations by the time we were retained. What Gerhard and I saw were the cases they could not unload in former West Germany.

In an apparent attempt to keep unemployment numbers artificially low, in many cases the German government kept paying the employees of those toxic companies their regular salary. They did not put them on unemployment. Simply kept paying them.

The toxic waste issue was beyond belief. One prospectus especially caught my attention. Although it was not for the tannery in Hirschberg near my great-grandfather’s hometown of Hof, I knew the statistics for that place would be the same.

The DDR had ignored health regulations that major countries like the United States, West Germany, and the UK had adopted. They simply dumped chromium, anthracene, formaldehyde, and arsenic into the town’s waste system, where these chemicals made their way into ground water and soil.

Of course leather produced in the former DDR was inexpensive by western standards. But it was anything but cheap. It cost entire communities their health and welfare. After the Wende, it cost them their employment and in many cases, their towns.

As part of this project, I attended two German-American Chamber of Commerce functions in Houston that I will never forget. The first was a hoity-toity event, the G7 Summit hosted by then-President George H.W. Bush in 1990. You may want to read it that essay. The frank discussions about what to do with Russia made it worthwhile.

The second occasion was low-key. As far as I know, it received no coverage from local newspapers, much less national ones. The German-American Chamber of Commerce hosted a meet-and-greet for directors of those former DDR companies who sought U.S. investors. I served as wandering interpreter, assisting whomever the GACC thought needed immediate help.

That night as I thought about the people I had met that day, I was troubled. To a person, these directors cared deeply about their factories and the people who had worked for them. They had done their best in a system that cared not one whit about factories, employees… or directors.

I will never forget one man who asked me to help him sell his vintage Mercedes. He hoped he could get $50,000 for it, $128,000 in 2026 currency. If he could raise that much money, he himself could purchase “his” factory from the German government and rehire his people. He knew the paychecks-for-no-work would not continue much longer.

I’ve never wished more that I had contacts in the vintage car business, or that I could raise $50,000 to help that man. At the same time, I also was aware that if the German government would sell it to him for $50,000, the business had significant problems. Beginning and not ending with toxic waste. It still hurt to see his sorrow and passion.

In all my moves since those years, I’ve kept that box filled with original documents, translations, and discussions of thirty-seven former East German companies seeking an American partner. I doubt many found takers.

In the intervening years, the Treuhandanstalt’s reputation has taken a major hit. To be fair, they were dealt a bad hand in the beginning. Established by the post-Wende government in the DDR—not in West Germany—they suddenly “owned” close to 10,000 companies with over four million employees. Few if any of those companies ever turned a profit.

Those assets and the people associated with them—never lose sight of the people—passed to reunified Germany in 1991. Imagine marrying someone you thought was single and wealthy, only to find they had ten children, lived in a shack in the hollers, and several million in debt.

Helmut Kohl engaged in rampant propaganda to keep West Germans happy about that family in the holler, while simultaneously dangling unimaginable wealth in front of former “Ossis.” As a result, there’s lingering bitterness between the two Germanys to this day. AfD has capitalized on that bitterness.

In April 1991 the first chair of the Treuhandanstalt was assassinated. His successor, Birgit Breuel, could never turn a profit off Treuhandanstalt assets. Year after year, that agency generated massive amounts of debt for newly-reunified Germany.

In 1994, reunified Germany officially shut down the Treuhandanstalt. However, it continued operations under new names, acting as caretaker for all those unsold businesses, all those devastated townships, all those unemployed workers.

Twenty-six years later, one such entity sold its interest to a fund based in Luxembourg. That particular entity managed former DDR’s industrial complex. Two other entities remain active. One administers agricultural property and other undeveloped real estate previously held by the East German government. The second serves as caretaker for approximately 1500 businesses that were never sold to Western interests.

The thirty-seven companies for which we translated the prospectuses were drops in the much larger bucket. They existed on the continuum somewhere between already-sold businesses that could easily be modernized, and hopeless cases.

One day I want to write a completely nonfiction book about those thirty-seven companies. I want to track them down from pre-November 1989 to whenever “present” is.

I’m frequently disturbed by the whitewashing of Helmut Kohl’s chancellorship in Germany from 1982-1998. U.S. publications like:

The Los Angeles Times (“Privatization of Former East German Firms Proceeding at Frantic Pace. Germany: The Kohl government is selling off thousands of former East German companies at the rate of 10 a day.”—November 17, 1991)
The Hoover Institution (“Helmut Kohl, Giant. His Cold War, his Germany, his Europe.”—August 1, 1999)
Reuters (“Kohl triumphed over skeptics to deliver German reunification and the euro.”—June 16, 2017)

German newspapers were even more complicit.

Almost everyone fêted Helmut Kohl, made it sound like he miraculously solved all the issues faced by reunification. Too few have written honestly about what really went on.

Recently I thought about this project, postponed but not abandoned. We are being fed a whole lot of propaganda these days from our current president, his cabinet, legislators, judges, and most especially, the media. We know it’s propaganda.

Just as I have saved these thirty-seven projects, knowing that they represent reality, so too we in the United States of America in 2026 should bear witness. Keep PDFs of your electric bills, your grocery receipts, your pay stubs. Track which businesses in your hometown close shop and how many employees are affected. Record increases in regressive taxation: Sales tax, gross sales tax, “modified business tax,” property tax, school tax, anything based not on income but on purchases or assets.

One day we will have honest historians, honest journalists, who may want your primary source documents for their research. Who knows? You may decide to parse it all into a publication of your own.

We need thousands more ProPublicas and NPRs, people not kowtowing to the current (or future) administration who want facts, not propaganda.

We can all bear witness to history. As it is being made.

Postscript: When working on White Rose History, Volume I, Chapter 3, I spent weeks doing a deep dive into the origins and evolution of propaganda. I wanted to understand how the very logical, rational German society could fall prey to Goebbels’ propaganda.

Unsurprisingly, it has a harmless origin, from the Latin propagare, to propagate. Gardeners engage in propaganda (in its earliest meaning) when they work with ‘propaganda,’ or the things which are to be propagated.

The Catholic Church was among the first users of the word in its current form. Essentially the same as “proselytization,” they used propaganda to mean spreading the Catholic faith in non-Catholic countries. Between 1622 (Catholic Church) and 1933, propaganda evolved into the notion of writing or speaking things meant to persuade an audience. Propaganda did not have to be true. It was supposed to convince.

Turn that notion loose on someone like Goebbels, and Leni Riefenstahl, and it becomes a lethal weapon, marginalizing enemies and destroying reputations. The only defense against that form of propaganda: Truth.

And that remains so in 2026. The only way we’ll fight the onslaught of propaganda, the so-called “flooding the zone,” is by documenting and firmly holding on to facts.

If we do not, I hate to think what future generations face.

COMMENTS WORTH KEEPING

An amazing, if disturbing, first person account. Thank you.

--John Sundman, February 20, 2026.

The part most people miss about propaganda, Denise... it doesn't survive because people believe it. It survives because the paperwork that disproves it gets lost. Prospectuses get shredded. Receipts disappear. Memos get classified. Kohl knew that. Every administration that floods the zone knows that. The bet is always the same... that nobody keeps the originals long enough for the historians to show up. Thirty-five years later you still have the box. That's not nostalgia. That's evidence.

--Vance Frost, February 28, 2026.

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Image credits: Top photograph--Panorama of Hirschberg, November 10, 2019. © 2019 Denise Elaine Heap. Second photograph--Abandoned business building in Hirschberg, November 10, 2019. I don't know if it was affiliated with the tannery. Hirschberg's tannery appeared to have been demolished by 2019. © 2019 Denise Elaine Heap.

Please contact me for permission to use any of these three photographs.

No part of this post may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the copyright holder, except for the “fair use” of quotations that are properly cited and credited, including identification of the translator if applicable. No part of this post may be included in any Large Language Model without proper licensing from the copyright holder, Denise Elaine Heap.