From Roter Morgen
Organ of the Communist Party of Germany
September 18, 1997

Former Planning Chief of the GDR
Praises the "Building Up of the East"

The former "planning chief" of the GDR [German Democratic Republic - former East Germany], Gerhard Schürer, sees in the "building up of the East" a great achievement. The transfer-achievements in the new states [of the former GDR] are a "positive thing, that should never be forgotten and deserves recognition," said Schürer at the Summer Academy of the Circle of Christian-Democratic Students in Wendgräben near Zerbst. Schürer, who was the chair of the State Planning Commission of the GDR for 24 years, praised the Treuhandel institution [agency for privatizing the former GDR economy] to the highest degree. It is no "slight achievement" to privatize a whole economy during a time of economic recession.

It is certainly macabre: a planning chief of an allegedly socialist economy praises the capitalist economy and its alleged successes to the skies. For decades this revisionist babbled about a planned economy in the GDR, which was supposedly superior to the murderous profit society, helped direct it and was partly responsible for its bankruptcy, and today this character praises the flattening of the GDR-economy as a success. The bourgeois media is overjoyed to present this "economic expert," who talks nonsense about the "grandiose achievements." Schürer is no unique case from the ranks of the SED [Socialist Unity Party] revisionists to praise fulsomely the capitalist system. Mr. Gysi still today longs for the FRG [German Federal Republic] the way it was until 1989. Moreover, Mr. Egon Krenz at that time called upon the GDR citizens to go proudly into unity, that is, he also welcomed the annexation.

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