February 10, 1953:400 armed People's Police officers storm hotels, pensions and restaurants on the East German coast. The order:to interrogate the owners of the objects and, if necessary, to arrest them. The "Action Rose" begins.
At that time, Gerhard Gühler lived in Bansin on the island of Usedom. His parents run the Hotel "Zur Post", the house has been family-owned for generations. Gerhard Gühler's happy childhood on the Baltic Sea ends on this winter's day when police officers also search his home.
"In my father's office," he recalls a few years ago on NDR, "there was an old typewriter and an Olympia from the West. And then this policeman asked:'Why do you have a machine from the West?' My father said:'Look, the guys are flying away from the VEB machine!' - 'Are you saying that our products are bad?' the policeman replied and grabbed my father's shoulder, who then slapped his hand away. They interpreted that as an attack on state authority and my father should go to Bautzen."
"Holidays for everyone" instead of holidays as a civic privilege
The "Strandeck" in Göhren on Rügen. This house was also nationalized as part of the "Operation Rose".The actual goal of the searches and arrests is to transfer the privately operated holiday homes on Rügen, Usedom, in Warnemünde and Kuehlungsborn into the economic structures of the GDR. The private providers are a thorn in the side of the Free German Trade Union Confederation (FDGB), which arranges vacation trips for the workers of the young socialist state.
In the state-controlled press, the "pushers" and "criminal elements" are hounded against a "rotting, petty-bourgeois-capitalist stratum". Officially, the "civil privilege of vacation travel is to be replaced by the idea of 'vacation for all'".
Sneaked in with government support
Unofficially, the documents of the Ministry of the Interior of the GDR state:"We are destroying the breeding grounds of imperialism that still exist on the coast of the GDR. Our fight is directed against the bourgeois-reactionary circles who are hindering our progress, who are trying through their machinations to to restore the fallen forces, thus sabotaging the achievements of the working class."
Since the end of January, preparatory squads of the People's Police have been investigating suitable objects. Have gained access to the hotels and guesthouses as construction or tax experts - equipped with ID cards from the Rostock district council. The access on February 10 should be surprising. The owners should not be given the opportunity to destroy possible evidence.
Not even a snowstorm can stop them
But not everything goes as planned. The emergency vehicles get stuck in snowdrifts. The radio link between the individual task forces was interrupted due to a heavy snowstorm. Only when the Central Committee of the SED sends 15 snow plows to the coast can "Action Rose" be continued.
"Action Rose"
The campaign to expropriate hoteliers and restaurant owners in the winter of 1953 was actually called a "holiday campaign". The name "Aktion Rose" is said to have only been handwritten on the action plan of the Ministry of the Interior of the GDR/German People's Police Headquarters. The construction of the Wall in 1961 was actually planned and carried out under the name "Action Rose".
But what are the 400 people's police officers looking for? They rummage through the pantries of hotels, guesthouses and restaurants - looking for "hoarded" groceries, for coffee from the West. They confiscate the guest books - perhaps you can find something in them about the "missing" of the hosts. They worm their way into the employees' trust in order to eavesdrop on them.
Dispossessed, arrested, convicted
On March 10, 1953 - after only one month - 440 hotels, guesthouses and restaurants were transferred to East German public property, their owners expropriated, 447 arrested, 408 sentenced on pretexts in summary proceedings, many forcibly evicted. For tax evasion, illegal importation of western goods, price crimes. At that time, Gerhard Gühler's family fled to the West and lost everything.
In the following years, not only the workers of the state-owned enterprises spend their holidays in the new FDGB homes. Soldiers of the National People's Army (NVA) are also accommodated in the expropriated hotels and guesthouses - in the new military "Baltic Sea Protection Zone". The GDR plans to expand northeast Rügen into a naval port similar to that in Soviet Murmansk. In the end, however, nothing comes of the plans.
Return after reunion
Only after reunification did a large number of the owners or their descendants get the hotels and guesthouses back. The unification contract provides for return before compensation for those who lost their property as a result of "Operation Rose". This also applies to Gerhard Gühler. He gets back the "Zur Post" hotel, which was stolen from his family by the GDR government. He moves with his family from Stuttgart to Bansin and rebuilds the run-down hotel in need of renovation.