The Rigged Vote - Neues Rathaus
This ornate town hall was the seat of a mayor who was later convicted of election fraud. On 7 May 1989, while Dresden's citizens cast their votes, officials systematically falsified the No vote tallies before passing the results up the party chain.
Sobre este lugar
On 7 May 1989, East Germany held its local council elections, a carefully choreographed ritual in which a single approved list appeared on the ballot and near-total approval was the expected result. Behind the scenes, election committees across the GDR were instructed to count every No vote meticulously, and then reduce the total before reporting it upward. In Dresden, SED mayor Wolfgang Berghofer presided over this machinery of falsification. When the Wall fell months later and Germany reunified, the observer tallies citizens had quietly kept were compared to the official figures, and the gap was decisive. Berghofer was indicted in May 1991 and convicted in 1992, receiving a one-year suspended sentence and three years probation. His superior, SED district boss Hans Modrow, who briefly served as the last communist prime minister of East Germany, was convicted at Dresden's regional court in 1995, receiving nine months suspended and a fine of five thousand deutschmarks. The federal court upheld both verdicts on appeal.
Datos clave
- 1989 year — The year of the GDR local elections whose results were systematically falsified by SED officials, with No votes counted and then quietly reduced before reaching party headquarters.
- 1992 conviction — Mayor Wolfgang Berghofer was found guilty of instigating election fraud, one of the first high-level convictions of communist officials in reunified Germany.
- 20 protesters — The 'Gruppe der 20', a delegation of twenty civic activists, were received by Berghofer in this building in October 1989, months after the falsified ballot, in a rare direct dialogue between the regime and its critics.