(Newser)
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The wife of former East German dictator Erich Honecker loses no sleep over the policies she and her husband championed, including one that forcibly placed children of dissidents into other families or foster homes. “We lived good lives in our GDR,” Margot Honecker tells the Independent. More than 2,000 Germans still searching for children taken from them beg to differ. They “stole him from his bed,” one “enemy of the state” tells of her experience with forcible adoption.
Honecker, who lives in exile in Chile, is fed up with the criticism. “I have had enough of the persecution that is inflicted on former citizens of the German Democratic Republic,” she says. The modern state hasn’t “succeeded. Fifty percent of East Germans say we are worse off under capitalism.” Say what you like, Honecker cautions, but “more and more people are reminding themselves nowadays of what they had in the GDR.”
