fully informed about his venture, the MfS refrained from taking any
immediate action.
After seeing no viable alternative, Domaschk completed his
compulsory military service and returned to Jena in spring 1979.
His protest activities continued to be closely monitored by the MfS.
On 10 April 1981, while en route to a birthday celebration in East
Berlin, he and his friend Peter Rösch were arrested on the train and
transferred to a MfS pretrial detention center in Gera. Presumably
this action was taken to prevent any disruption of the Tenth Rally
of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands scheduled in East
Berlin that weekend. Domaschk underwent a grueling interrogation
under the supervision of Horst Köhler (his initial examiner in Jena),
eventually signing an agreement to serve as an informer (code name
peter paul). Yet on 12 April, immediately prior to his scheduled
release, MfS officials discovered his body hanging in his cell from
an overhead heating pipe.
Domaschk’s death was officially declared a suicide, a not uncom-
mon occurrence in these facilities. His friends and relatives rejected
this explanation outright, and Domaschk became a poignant symbol
of state repression among dissidents. Praised for his “imaginative-
ness” in dealing with young students and clerical groups in Jena,
Köhler advanced in 1985 to a new position in domestic counterintel-
ligence at the main East Berlin headquarters. Following reunification,
legal action against Köhler and the other MfS personnel involved re-
sulted only in small monetary fines. A street in Jena, however, came
to bear Domaschk’s name.DOMBROWSKI, SIEGFRIED (1916–1977). An East German
military intelligence officer who defected to the West, Siegfried
Dombrowski was born on 13 October 1916, the son of a delivery
driver. A communist activist in his youth, he was given illegal as-
signments in 1933 but was arrested and imprisoned by the Nazis
four years later. In 1944, after the Russians took command of the
Maidanek (Majdanek) concentration camp, Dombrowski and some
25 other German communists were brought to the Soviet Union to
attend the Antifa school in Krasnogorsk. With his return to Ger-
many in September 1945 came a series of administrative positions
in the Berlin and Neubrandenburg areas. In 1951, he became an
DOMBROWSKI, SIEGFRIED • 87