Word: wandlitz
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After the communist regime headed by Erich Honecker collapsed late last year, East Germans were appalled by what they discovered about the lavishly bourgeois life-style that the ousted party boss and his cronies had enjoyed at their well-guarded compound in the Berlin suburb of Wandlitz. Nonetheless, the new leaders in East Berlin have been slow to take legal steps against their predecessors, mainly because they have yet to resolve two difficult but related ethical issues: Who should be judged? Who should do the judging...
...uncovered so far in East Germany indicates plundering on a scale to rival world-class pillagers of national treasuries like the Marcos family of the Philippines or the Pahlavis of Iran. Honecker, along with other top party officials, lived a decidedly bourgeois life inside the walled luxury compound of Wandlitz, a few miles north of East Berlin. But last week it was revealed that he also had a $1.2 million vacation villa on the tiny island of Vilm in the Baltic Sea, previously thought to be an uninhabited bird preserve. Some of the perks claimed by East Germany's elite...
Krenz, almost pleading for credibility, faced an uphill struggle as popular demands for a reckoning grew. In East Berlin a government television team entered the so-called "forbidden city" of Wandlitz, situated on a lake outside Berlin, to show the public how the elite, including Krenz, had lived in luxury, enjoying servants, limousines and imported Western delicacies -- a life-style totally removed from the generally spartan existence of most East Germans. The compound is surrounded by a wall; no photographs of it have been published until now. Krenz moved from Wandlitz to a small apartment in East Berlin...
...from the Soviets, who maintain 20 combat-ready divisions in East Germany. The Russians, in fact, call him "nash chelovyek" (our man). Honecker's only known diversion is hunting, which he does alone. He lives outside Berlin in a villa in the heavily guarded government complex at Wandlitz with Margot and their teen-age son. A Communist diplomat who has visited the Honecker home describes it as "spotless, functional, unimaginative and stiff-just like Honecker...
Westerners speculate that the pragmatic Stoph is East Germany's "liberal," the man who could some day recast East German Communism's rigidly doctrinaire posture. Stoph, his second wife (he divorced his first in 1945) and four children live in Berlin's elite Wandlitz suburb, as do Ulbricht and other East German leaders. The Premier drinks and smokes little, and his chief relaxation is weekend walks in the woods. He is not considered an ideologue on the order of Ulbricht or Erich Honecker, the top man (after Ulbricht) in the Communist Party and Stoph's main...