College and Research Libraries Secret Dissertations in the German Democratic Republic Wilhelm Bleek and Lothar Mertens Early in 1995 the editorial boards of C&RL and its German counterpart, Zeitschrift fur Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie (ZfBB), agreed to ex- change articles, each selecting, translating, and publishing a 1994 ar- ticle from the other's publication. This year's choice-our first-is a piece that had been published as a follow-up to an article that had appeared in the ZfBB in 1992. C&RL has decided to publish them both. 1 Partly in order to convey the sense the originals give of research unfolding in a contemporary historical context, we are publishing them in the form in which they originally appeared (minus one table and the footnotes). The results are sketchier and more tentative than is normally the case in C&RL-and in the ZfBB. But in their very incompleteness they give a sense of a process of discovery and revelation that tells a powerful story. Since the original publication of these articles, the authors have pub- lished a book on their research, as well as a bibliography listing the suppressed dissertations. 2·3 The articles are clearly "different" from the usual C&RL fare, but that's also the point. It is our hope that they will not only provide insight into recent events in Germany, but that they might help stimulate research on the. interactions, direct and indirect, open and covert, between political structures and the research enterprise in our own country and elsewhere. II uring its 41 years of existence, the German Democratic Re- . public (GDR) harbored among its state secrets thousands of dissertations from East German institu- tions of higher education. Until now, one could only speculate as to their number and content. After 1988, and particularly since the GDR' s democratic revolution in the fall of 1989 and the unification of Ger- many in October 1990, this secret area began to open up. In a project supported by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forsch- ungsgemeinschaft) the authors are cur- rently investigating the classification of those dissertations designated as secret. This article focuses on their content and on the institutions at which they were written, as well as on the various levels of secrecy, and on their eventual release from classified status. The principal re- sources for this project were the library files at Berlin's Humboldt University Li- Wilhelm Bleek and Lothar Mertens, Ruhr-Universitiit Bochum, Fakultiit fUr Sozialwissenschaft, Sektion Politische Wissenschaft I, Universitiitsstr. 150, 44780 Bochum, Germany. The editor wishes to thank John Cullars for translating the original German articles, and Heidi Hutchinson, Stephen Lehmann, and Sem C. Sutter for helping to prepare the manuscript for publication. 381 382 College & Research Libraries brary, which list the dissertations and their secrecy levels. We have profited in addition from the gracious cooperation of Gottfried Rost of the Deutsche Biicherei Leipzig, who permitted access to the more than 6,800 dissertations recorded in the confidential catalogs and classified as "Official Use Only" (Levell) and "Confi- dential Official Matters" (Level II). In the following article we present the first re- sults of our work with these sources from Leipzig. The Legal Background In compliance with the "Regulations for the Protection of Official Secrets" (1971), the GDR's Ministry of Higher Education began to remove dissertations from nor- mal circulation in the early 1970s. An ad- ditional set of "Regulations on the Ar- chiving of University Publications with Official Secrets" (1977) designated the national library, the Deutsche Biicherei in Leipzig, as their repository. The use of these dissertations, even for scholarly purposes, was further impeded by a di- rective of October 4, 1977, from the Min- istry of Higher Education, forbidding the Deutsche Biicherei to list them in its nor- mal catalogs and bibliographies. Ex- cluded from the German national bibli- ography and the annual index to German dissertations, they were listed only in special catalogs, and interested patrons could consult only that part of the cata- log relevant to their topic. Further, citi- zens of the GDR had to present the au- thorization of the director of the Deutsche Biicherei; citizens of other countries needed the permission of the Minister of Higher Education. The accession catalogs of the Deutsche Biicherei listing the Level II dissertations were themselves treated as Level II. In spite of the legal requirement to sub- mit the dissertations no later than four weeks after completion to a central col- lection at the Deutsche Biicherei known as the Department of Special Research Literature, it often took several years for September 1995 the universities to comply. This negligent and halting delivery had some strange consequences. For example, a 1977 dis- sertation from the Engineering College in Wismar, classified as Level II, was not listed in Leipzig until August 27, 1979, only for the classification to be canceled just one day later. The various univer- sity libraries would often involuntarily provoke forceful reminders of their de- pository obligations by sending letters to the central collection in Leipzig ordering that classifications be changed or can- celed, only to find that, contrary to the requirements, they had never deposited the theses in the first place. A governmental resolution of January 15, 1987, on the protection of state secrets ordered a review of the classification of all dissertations that were still restricted. Thereupon, until September 1988, numer- ous dissertations that had been secret were made publicly accessible, and the number of new dissertations requiring secret classification was also reduced. The last secret dissertation, entered on Octo- ber 10, 1988, in the Level II accession book, shows once again how ambiguous and problematic the entire process of classifi- cation was. Although the principal vol- ume of this dissertation from Ilmenau was officially accessible, its Appendix 3, approximately five pages, was classified Level II. This appendix contained three data processing programs described in the dissertation. These three FORTRAN programs contained 47, 55, and 100 lines respectively; they were simple compared to other freely available FORTRAN ap- plications that often contained thousands of lines of programming, but they were apparently considered sufficiently signifi- cant to be designated Level II. Percentage of Dissertations Declared Secret The annual index of German dissertations (Jahresverzeichnis der Hochschulschriften) (JVH) for the years 1978-1987lists 34,383 dissertations from the various East Ger- Secret Dissertations 383 TABLE1 man institutions of higher learn- ing. The Deutsche Biicherei' sac- cession catalogs for secret dis- sertations lists 6,824 disserta- tions for the same period that for reasons of secrecy could not be listed in the German national bibliography or in the index of dissertations. The combined to- tal for all the doctoral theses produced in the GDR between 1978 and 1987 is thus 41,207. The percentage of dissertations classified as Level I or II is 16.6 percent, more than one-eighth of all dissertations. SECRFI' DISSERTATIONS, LEVEL I AND LEVEL ll, 1978-1987 Year Total Secret Diss. Levell Levelll 1978 399 235 164 1979 m 375 353 1980 621 '1:19 342 1981 541 283 258 1982 766 289 477 1983 552 228 324 1984 713 263 450 1985 662 268 394 1986 1,143 400 743 1987 699 249 450 Total 6,824 2,869 3,955 The classified dissertations from 1978 to 1987 were assigned to Levels I and II as illustrated in table 1. (Source: Figures compiled from accession catalogs of the secret dissertations in After a few years, some of the Level II dissertations were ei- the Deutsche Biicherei, Leipzig) ther lowered to Level I or declassified en- tirely. Conversely, a dissertation classified as Level I in July 1986 at the Deutsche Biicherei was reclassified to Level II six months later. A study of suicides in the East German city of Gorlitz, it was ap- parently considered too explosive by the authorities at the Medical Academy in Berlin. Differences Among Graduate Institutions An examination of secret dissertations grouped by the graduate institutions at which they were written reveals appre- ciable variations among different acad- emies, universities, and colleges. This disparity is equally true of the to- tal number of secret dissertations at indi- vidual institutions and of the proportion of secret dissertations to the total pro- duced at each institution. Of the 2,869 entries in the accessions catalog of the Deutsche Biicherei for dissertations clas- sified as Level II, 2,778 (96.8%) also list the degree-:granting institution. The total number of Level II dissertations for indi- vidual institutions from 1978 to 1987 is shown below in relation to the number of dissertations listed for those years in the annual dissertation index (JVH). As the data show in table 2, in addi- tion to the differences in the total num- ber of classified dissertations by institu- tion, the percentage of Level II disserta- tions granted at each institution varies greatly. Clearly the total number of Level II dissertations in no way depends on the size of the institution and thus not on the total number of successfully defended dissertations. For instance, the University of Leipzig awarded over 1,000 more Ph.D.s than the University of Halle, but the number of secret dissertations was greater at Halle; its total number of dis- A study of suicides in the East German city of Garlitz ... was apparently considered too explosive by the authorities at the Medical Academy in Berlin. sertations was six times that of the Agri- cultural Academy, but its Level II disser- tations numbered ten percent fewer. 384 College & Research Libraries September 1995 TABLE2 • LEVEL ll DISSERTATIONS FROM SELECfED INSTITUTIONS, 1978-1987 Institution Dissertations Total Listed in diss. Listed only in catalogs No. index of secret dissertations at Deutsche Buchere~ Leipzig No. % Academy of Sciences 1,431 1,326 105 7.3% Agricultural Academy 597 377 220 36.9% Architectural Academy 66 36 30 45.5% Medical Academy, Berlin 2,009 1,965 44 2.2% Mining Academy, Freiberg 751 599 152 20.2% Humboldt University, Berlin 5,383 4,981 402 7.5% University of Greifswald 1,202 1,123 79 6.6% University of Halle 2,797 2,556 241 8.6% University of Jena 1,903 1,804 99 5.2% University of Leipzig 3,922 3,722 200 5.1% University of Rostm;k 1,990 1,875 115 5.8% College of Economics, Berlin 726 440 286 39.4% Commercial College, Leipzig 242 175 67 27.7% (Source: Figures compiled fromlahresverzeichnis der Hochschulschriften (German dissertation index), 1978-1987 and accession catalogs of secret dissertations in the Deutsche Bucherei, Leipzig) *See Table 7 for updated figures on some institutions. The Architectural Academy (Bauak- ademie) and the Institute for Economics i~ Berlin pursued the classification of dis- sertations as "secret" with particular zeal. The fact that economic research seemed to be especially worthy of protection is also shown by the figures from the Com- mercial College in Leipzig. Especially striking is the disproportion between the number of theses listed in the annual in- dex of dissertations and the number of secret dissertations from the College of Economics in Berlin between 1978 and 1980. In many cases, the university and de- partmental classification of dissertations cannot be explained solely by the need for state secrecy based on their content. One must also consider the various au- thorities and experts in the decision chain, as well as the particular institutional poli- tics regarding secret dissertations. These discrepancies are documented in tables 3 to 5, which compare the numbers of se- cret dissertations by type of institution (technical universities, engineering schools, and teachers colleges). In addition to the technical universi- ties in Dresden and Magdeburg (full uni- versities since 1985, technical colleges before that) and the technical colleges in Ilmenau, Karl-Marx-Stadt, and Leuna- Merseburg, table 3 includes the Transpor- tation College, Dresden. Surprisingly, in both absolute numbers as well as percent- ages, the greatest number of secret dis- sertations is not from the technical uni- versities in Dresden and Magdeburg, but from the three technical colleges. It is noteworthy that the earliest Level II clas- Secret Dissertations 385 sification for Magdeburg is from as late as 1982, and that the first for Dresden is 1983. The results from the engineering schools (see table 4) also illustrate the lack of rigor in the assignment of the secret classifications. The explanation for the comparatively high percentage for Berlin- Wartenberg and Mittweida may lie, per- haps, in the desire of these small schools to emphasize their significance and "ex- clusivity" through a large number of se- cret works. Unlike the technical and engineering schools, the teachers colleges did not pro- duce dissertations relevant to state secu- rity or the economy (see table 5). Their proportion of classified theses, not sur- TABLE3 * SECRET DISSERTATIONS FROM SELECTED TECHNICAL SCHOOLS, 1978-1987 Institution Dissertations Total Listed in diss. Listed only in catalogs No. index of secret dissertations at Deutsche Biichere~ Leipzig No. % Universities Dresden 3,101 3,052 49 1.6% Magdeburg 789 751 38 4.8% ~ Ilmenau 683 588 95 13.9% Karl-Marx-Stadt 1,250 1,029 221 17.7% Leuna-Merseburg 639 5U U7 19.9% Other Transportation College, Dresden 464 426 38 8.2% (Source: Figures compiled fromlahresverzeichnis der Hochschulschriften {German dissertation index), 1978-1987 and accession catalogs of secret dissertations in the Deutsche Biichere~ Leipzig) *See Table 7 for updated figures. 386 College & Research Libraries September 1995 TABLE4 SECRET DISSERTATIONS FROM SELECfED ENGINEERING COLLEGES, 1978-1987 Institution Dissertations Total Listed in diss. Listed only in catalogs No. index of secret dissertations at Deutsche Biicherei, Leipzig No. % Berlin-Wartenberg 45 31 14 31.1% Dresden 103 95 8 7.8% Mittweida 48 35 13 27.1% Warnemiinde 62 58 4 6.5% Wismar 109 101 8 73% Zittau 132 91 41 31.1% (Source: Ftgures compiled fromlahresverzeichnis der Hochschulschriften (German dissertation index), 1978-1987 and accession catalogs of secret dissertations in the Deutsche Biicherei, Leipzig) prisingly, lay below the national average. Nonetheless, one finds differences among the teachers colleges in their assignment of classifications. While the Teachers Col- lege in Potsdam, the largest such institu- tion in the GDR, classified only thirteen of its dissertations between 1978 and 1987 as Level IT, the Giistrow Teachers College, one-fourth its size, classified fourteen dis- sertations as secret. And at the Erfurt- Miihlhausen Teachers College only two dissertations were classified secret, both in 1979. Review of Secret Classifications The governmental resolution of January 15, 1987, on the protection of official state secrets led to a review of the levels of se- crecy for all classified dissertations. This review produced some surprising results. In a letter addressed to the General Di- rector of the Deutsche Biicherei on March 16, 1988, the Chancellor of the Zwickau Engineering College wrote, " ... all the dissertations classified as Level I from the Zwickau Engineering College are imme- diately declassified and may be treated accordingly." In a letter of June 8, 1988, the Vice-Chancellor of the Engineering College at Wismar reported that all the dissertations from that institution desig- nated Level I and held at the Deutsche Biicherei were immediately declassified. The Level I accession catalogs of the Deutsche Biicherei show that between February and September 1988 a total of 642 dissertations were declassified: 257 from Halle, 87 from Zwickau, 63 from Greifswald, 43 from Wismar, 144 from Rostock, and 48 from Ilmenau. In addi- tion, the Academy of Sciences declassi- fied 83 Level IT dissertations in August. Thus, in the space of only seven months, more than 700 dissertations were declas- sified and made publicly available based on the January 1987 resolution. Clearly, the large number of declassi- fications was due in part to the extremely broad interpretation of the guidelines for classification that had been in effect-this in spite of the fact that Section 4 of the "Regulations for the Archiving of Univer- sity Dissertations with State Secrets" (1977) required, "at appropriate inter- vals," a review concerning "the continu- ation or the cancellation of the secret clas- sifications." In actual practice, however, these universities and colleges took their good time to review classified material, seemingly because of the considerable costs involved. And only rarely were dis- sertations, such as the one from Halle in 1987, assigned a date in advance for lift- ing the classification. The assumption of an uncritical attitude towards continuing the secret classifications is confirmed by reactions to isolated inquiries from the Deutsche Biicherei concerning long- standing classifications: very frequently such dissertations were declassified only in response to the queries from Leipzig. Because there was hardly any reaction from the colleges and universities to the regulation of January 15, 1987, requiring the review of declassified dissertations, Secret Dissertations 387 these institutions were asked by the Deutsche Biicherei in the summer of 1988 to take a position on the matter. As a re- sult, most Level I and many Level II dis- sertations were finally declassified. They are all stamped "Canceled" and bear the date September 2, 1988. All the remaining dissertations, par- ticularly those classified Level II, were still formally secret until October 3, 1990, al- though as of November 1989 they were in fact available to users. The last official declassifications in the Deutsche Biicherei occurred in March and April1990 for two dissertations from the Zittau Engineering College. Table 6 shows that individual institutions differed greatly in declassifying dissertations, just as they had in classifying them. The greatest number of declassified dissertations from secret categories is found at the Academy of Sciences and the . Agricultural Academy, which had, re- spectively, declassified 85.7 percent and 50.9 percent of all secret dissertations by September 1988. With the exception of the University of Rostock, the universities were much slower to declassify than the TABLES SECRET DISSERTATIONS FROM SELECI'ED TEACHERS COLLEGES, 1978-1987 Institution Dissertations Total Listed in diss. Listed only in catalogs No. index of seaet dissertations at Deutsche Biichere~ Leipzig No. % Dresden 387 381 6 1.6% Erfurt-Miihlhausen 447 445 2 0.4% Giistrow 1JJ7 193 14 6.8% Potsdam 806 793 13 1.6% (Source: FJgUI'es compiled fromJahresver.zeichnis der Hochschulschriften (German dissertation index), 1978-1987 and accession catalogs of secret dissertations in the Deutsche Biichere~ Leip2ig) 388 College & Research Libraries September 1995 TABLE6 DEClASSIFICATION OF SECRET DISSERTATIONS AT SELECTED INSTITUTIONS AS OF SEPTEMBER 1988 Institution Level II Dissertations Total No. Declassified No. % Academy of Sciences 105 90 85.7% Agricultural Academy 220 112 50.9% Architectural Academy 30 3 10.0% Medical Academy, Berlin 44 - - Mining Academy, Freiberg 152 12 7.9% Humboldt University, Berlin 402 18 4.5% University of Greifswald 79 7 8.9% University of Halle 241 10 4.2% University of Jena 99 - - University of Leipzig 200 15 7.5% University of Rostock 115 25 21.7% College of Economics, Berlin 286 44 15.4% Commercial College, Leipzig 67 33 49.3% Technical Schools Ilmenau 95 37 39.0% Karl-Marx-Stadt 221 8 3.6% Leuna-Merseburg 127 14 11.0% Magdeburg 38 5 13.2% En&!neering Colleges Wismar 8 4 50.0% Zittau 41 4 9.8% Total 2,869 460 16.0% (Source: Figures compiled from accession catalogs of secret dissertations in Deutsche Biicherei, Leipzig) academies. The Technical University of Karl-Marx-Stadt, for example, assigned secret classifications generously, but de- classified them slowly. The Commercial College in Leipzig often assigned declassification dates to its Level II dis- sertations, whereas the opposite was true of the College of Economics in Berlin, which often not only took up to a decade to deliver its Level II dissertations to the Deutsche Biicherei, but also declassified hardly any. Summary We can draw the following provisional conclusions from our interim report: (1) In spite of the directions of the Min- istry of Higher Education, the actual clas- sification of dissertations was handled very differently by different institutions. (2) The reasons for assigning classifi- cations of secrecy to particular disserta- tions are to be found not only in their rel- evance to issues of state security or eco- nomics, but in the individual institution's academic self-perception and need for political prestige. Secret Dissertations 389 (3) Librarians could implement the procedures mandated by government and Party policy regarding secret disser- tations only at great bureaucratic expense, and at the cost of their primary responsi- bilities, i.e., the development of collections accessible for research. (4) It will surely take a number of years for libraries to overcome this inheritance from the GDR, that is, to integrate the se- cret dissertations into the general collec- tions and the standard bibliographic tools. Postscript: Further, Still More Secret Dissertations Lothar Mertens By 1994, as our research project was being concluded, almost 9,000 secret dis- sertations had been identified biblio- graphically (2,200 more than in 1992). Further, in addition to the two levels of secrecy described in the original article, two even more secret levels have been discovered. Additional Secret Classifications There were two higher levels of secret classifications of dissertations that could not even be held in the special stacks of the university libraries. Nor could they be forwarded to the Deutsche Biicherei in Leipzig. Rather, they were held in steel vaults by the central administration of the institutions at which they were written. Only a very small number of department heads and selected professors were per- mitted access to dissertations classified as Level III ("Confidential Matters"), and an even smaller number of selected high- level administrators had access to disser- tations classified as Level IV ("Top Secret Matters"). Obviously, as had been the case with Level I and Level II dissertations, such top secret dissertations were not listed in the German national bibliography, nor in the annual dissertation index. The University of Greifswald and es- pecially the College of Economics in Ber- lin assigned a relatively high proportion of dissertations to Levels ill and IV (see table 7). In Greifswald, dissertations from the Department of Military Medicine were classified accordingly, while at the East Berlin College of Economics, disser- tations were classified if they contained data from the Central Planning Commis- sion, the National Central Agency for Sta- tistics, or the state-owned armaments conglomerate. All the college's Level IV dissertations were written under the De- partment of Military Economy, which led a largely separate existence. The Depart- ment of Military Transport and Commu- nications at Transportation College in Dresden, where almost all the college's Level III and IV dissertations were de- fended, was similarly isolated. Nonuniversity Ph.D.-Granting Institutions In addition to the universities and col- 390 College & Research Libraries September 1995 TABLE7 SECRET DISSERTATIONS FROM SELECTED UNIVERSITIES Institution Dissertations Total Listed No. No. No. No. % No. in diss. classified classified classified classified kept index Levell Level II Level III Level IV secret Academy of Sciences 1,535 1,326 103 105 13.6% Agricultural Academy 637 377 40 220 40.8% Mining Academy, Freiberg 984 599 176 152 57 39.1% Humboldt University, Berlin 6,049 4,981 557 411 95 5 17.7% University of Greifswald 1,283 1,123 79 59 22 12.5% University of Halle 2,842 2,556 2 241 43 10.1% University of Jena 1,993 1,804 78 99 12 9.5% University of Leipzig 4,062 3,722 96 200 44 8.4% University of Rostock 2,015 1,875 14 115 11 6.9% College of Economics, Berlin 848 440 9 236 149 14 . 48.1% Technical Schools Dresden 3,294 3,052 183 49 10 7.3% Transportation College, Dresden 629 426 132 38 22 11 323% Ilmenau 795 588 95 95 17 26.0% Karl-Marx-Stadt 1,329 1,029 75 221 2 2 22.6% Leuna-Merseburg 1,005 512 364 127 2 49.1% Magdeburg 859 751 57 38 13 12.6% leges, educational institutes within the there becomes clear upon examining the army, police, and national security ser- titles of their dissertations. vices of the GDR also had the right to Organizations within the Socialist grant doctoral degrees, a fact left unmen- Unity Party that were responsible for edu- tioned in all governmental publications eating its members and providing scien- devoted to the subject of higher educa- tific expertise to the Party leadership also tion in the GDR. Most of the 2,000-plus held the authority to grant doctoral de- dissertations identified after the initial grees. They reported directly to the part of this study came from these insti- Party's Central Committee. With the ex- tutions (see table 8). ception of the Party Academy for the So- The course of specialized studies at cial Sciences, which listed about half its these institutions was comparable to that dissertations in the annual dissertation offered by the training schools ("Fach- index, the works of these Party and secu- hochschulen") and cannot be compared rity services graduate institutions did not to the offerings of a traditional university. appear in the standard bibliographies. The reason for the strict secrecy practiced Even the Deutsche Biicherei, then the na- tionallibrary of the GDR, does not own a single one of these dissertations written at military or Party institutions. These institutions did not forward any deposi- tory copies, even for works declassified to a lower level. Most of the dissertations written under the aegis of the National People's Army are, however, still in the Military Library at Dresden. The National People's Army main- tained a comprehensive educational sys- tem, which included eight additional col- leges for noncommissioned officers 'and four colleges for career officers. Its prin- cipal school was the Military Academy in Dresden, founded in 1959. Here offic- ers were trained for three to four years in subjects such as tactics, the leadership of troops, political activity, and military theory and doctrine. These studies con- cluded with either an examination or with graduation at the rank of Dr. rer. mil. (rerum rnilitarium), an academic degree granted only in the GDR. Given this mili- tary emphasis, dissertations centered around topics such as military tactics, Secret Dissertations 391 weaponry, and military history. Gradu- ates of the four officers schools of the in- dividual branches of the military (which did not have the authority to grant the doctoral degree) also received their doc- torates from the Military Academy. Military doctors for the National People's Army received their medical training at the Military Medical Academy at Bad Saarow in Mecklenburg, an · off- shoot of the Department of Military Medi- cine of the University of Greifswald. Mili- tary history was generally studied at the Military Historical Institute in Potsdam. A special service rank, the Political Officer, corresponding to a position in the Soviet Red Army, was established for the political instruction of soldiers and non- commissioned officers in the National People's Army. This officer was not sim- ply responsible for the troops' communist education, but he also served as the sec- ond-in-command to the Commanding Officer, acting as the Party's authority in the armed forces. Given the Political Of- ficers' special role, it is not surprising that TABLES Secret Dissertations from Nonuniversity Ph.D.-Granting Institutions Institution Total No. Security Police Legal College, Potsdam 174 Military Medical Academy, Bad Saarow 318 Military Academy, Dresden 502 Military Political College, Berlin 8 Military Historical Institute, Potsdam 61 Police College, Berlin 129 Party Academy for the Social Sciences 903 Karl Marx College 35 Institute for Marxism-Leninism 80 Academy for Political & Legal Science 382 Listed in diss. index 295 132 No. classified Levell 21 284 163 6 41 129 261 31 62 250 Dissertations No. No. classified classified Level n Level m 2 100 20 208 2 11 303 43 4 18 No. classified Level IV 51 14 131 % kept secret 100.0% 10.7% 67.5% 100.0% 32.8% 100.0% 67.3% 100.0% 100.0% 65.5% 392 College & Research Libraries they were trained separately from the other officers at the Military Political Col- lege in Berlin. If they didn't receive Level III or IV classifications, most of the dis- sertations written at these graduate mili- tary institutions were classified "For Use Only in the National People's Army," a classification comparable to Level II. One of the least known graduate insti- tutions in the GDR was the Police College in Berlin. Founded in 1962, it was granted the right to confer the Ph.D. in 1964. Se- cret dissertations of the People's Police in- clude, among others, "The Regulation of Street Traffic from the Perspective of the German People's Police" and "The Guar- antee of Public Order and Security Relat- ing to International Soccer Matches and Soccer Leagues as Related to the Opera- tions of the German People's Police." Given the low scholarly relevance of such topics, it isn't surprising that in the twenty-five years from 1965 to 1990 only 129 dissertations were defended at the Police College. In 1993, after the college was dissolved, these dissertations were given to the library at Humboldt Univer- sity in Berlin, where they are presently being added to the theses collection. One of the smallest and most mysteri- ous educational sites in the GDR was Potsdam's Security Police Legal College, which was founded in 1961. Only full- time employees who had served at least three years in the National Security Ser- vice were sent there to study. Its program emphasized detailed mastery and proper interpretation of the service's countless guidelines, regulations, instructions, and orders. Approximately 760 instructors taught about 500 participants in three departments. While the departments of Marxist-Leninist studies and jurispru- dence were comparable to similar pro- grams elsewhere in the GDR, instruction in the Department of Political Strategy served to educate the "Promoters of Peace" (as the GDR spies were designated in Party jargon) in matters relating to their "strategic work." September 1995 Graduates of the Legal College could also seek the rank of "Dr. jur." (doctor of jurisprudence) upon the successful completion of their legal studies, since the college had been granted authority to confer doctoral degrees in 1968. Alto- gether 17 4 dissertations were written by 478 doctoral candidates at this institution, with up to eight authors per title for team dissertations. The dissertations at the Le- gal College reveal a peculiar expansion of jurisprudence into the areas of crimi- nal justice, espionage, and intrastate re- pression. Such topics as "Criminal Bor- der Crossing by Youths and Adults Stud- ied Phenomenologically as well as in their Social and Psychological Determinism" or "The Political-Strategic Organization of Colleges in the Federal Republic of Germany and West Berlin" had little to do with legal issues. The dissertations from the Legal Col- lege were not just secret; they were almost all classified under the most secret' cat- egories. Only twenty-five of the 174 dis- sertations were classified Level II, 100 were designated Level III, and 51 as Level IV. Today most of these dissertations are in the Berlin Archive for Documents of the National Security Service of the for- mer GDR (the so-called Gauck Authority). Similarly inaccessible were the publi- cations of the educational institutions of the Socialist Unity Party, which were all formally subordinate to the Party's Cen- tral Committee. Their research consisted mainly of work commissioned for the Politbureau and for the Party's Central Committee secretariats. Thus the Central Committee's Academy for the Social Sci- ences, founded in 1951, functioned mainly as a think-tank that also zealously churned out dissertations. Founded in 1946, the year of the co- erced union of the German Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party, the Karl Marx College of the Central Com- mittee of the Socialist Unity Party as- sumed responsibility for the ongoing pro- cess of instructing the leading Party cadre. l The number of defended dissertations was correspondingly small. Presumably as a result of the 1972 law regulating the "protection of professional secrets," the annual index of German dissertations began with its volume 87 (1971) to list only "General Publications" of the Karl Marx College, thus excluding the dissertations. The Institute for Marxism-Leninism, founded in 1947 as the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, was responsible for the preser- vation of orthodox Communist teaching and for maintaining a scholarly basis to its ideology. Although many dissertations were submitted there each year, the insti- tute was not designated as a Ph.D.-grant- ing institution in the 1970s and 1980s in the German dissertation index. Only a very limited group of selected administrative cadres at these Party- sponsored Ph.D.-gianting institutions was allowed access to the dissertations classified as "Internal Party Material," which were held in the archives of these Party organizations rather than in librar- ies. Two-thirds (294) of the 574 disserta- tions not listed in the standard bibliogra- phies were placed at the Party's Academy of the Social Sciences in this classification, which was similar to the Level IT classifi- cation. Today all these dissertations are widely accessible in a library of a section Secret Dissertations 393 of the Federal Archive in Berlin devoted to Party activity in the GDR, while the du- plicates from the Academy of the Social Sciences, which were turned over to the library of the Humboldt University at the time of unification, are being stored (in a facility that was once a church) and have yet to be processed. Another large source of unlisted dis- sertations is the Academy for Political and Legal Science, Potsdam, which was re- sponsible for the instruction of adminis- trative cadres. Two-thirds of its disserta- tions were not registered. After the dis- solution of the academy under the Unifi- cation Treaty, its library, including the former secret dissertations, has become the Library for Law, Economics, and the Social Sciences, a branch of the univer- sity library of the newly founded Univer- sity of Potsdam. In closing, it should be recorded that, thanks to the circumspect activities of countless librarians and archivists, the majority of these almost 9,000 secret dis- sertations have been preserved and are available for use in libraries and archives. In most disciplines extensive work on the content of these secret dissertations still needs to be done, although they are al- ready beginning to play a role in some research projects. Notes 1. Wilhelm Bleek and Lothar Mertens, "Geheimgehaltene Disse_rtationen in der DDR," Zeitschrift fii.r Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie 39 (1992): 315-26; and Lothar Mertens, 'Weitere, noch geheimere DDR-Dissertationen," Zeitschrift fii.r Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie 41 (1994): 304-11. 2. --, DDR-Dissertationen: Promotionspraxis und Geheimhaltung von Doktorarbeiten im SED- Staat (Opladen, Germany: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994). 3. --, eds., Bibliographie der geheimen DDR-Dissertationen/Bibliography of Secret Disserta- tions in the German Democratic Republic (Munich, Germany: K.G. Saur, 1994). See also Hartwig Lohse's critical review in MITTEILUNGSBLAIT, Verband der Bibliotheken des Landes Nordrhein- Westfalen, 45,1 (March 1995): 91-92. A Library Manager's Guide to the Physical Processing of N onprint Materials By Karen C. Driessen and Sheila A. Smyth Sponsored by Online Audiovisual Catalogers, Inc. 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