page_title: Matthias Domaschk
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Matthias Domaschk / Life
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Am Rähmen 3, Jena, Deutschland; ehemaliges Wohnhaus von Matthias Domaschk (abgerissen am 3. März 2014)English: Am Rähmen 3, Jena, Germany; the house where Matthias Domaschk lived (demolished 3 March 2014)
context_page_description: Matthias Domaschk was a member of the civil rights movement within the German Democratic Republic and a victim of the Stasi.
context_section_description: In September 1974, Domaschk began an apprenticeship as a precision machinist  with VEB Carl Zeiss Jena. From 1975 on, he was involved in the Junge Gemeinde Jena-Stadtmitte (evangelical youth organization). In 1976 after his participation in protests against the expatriation of Wolf Biermann from the GDR, he was interrogated for the first time by the Stasi. In 1977, he organized a relief action of letters and packages for opposition figures arrested in Jena and travelled with his partner Renate Groß to Prague, where they were both were among the founders of Charter 77 and reported on the events in Jena. This trip was regarded by the GDR authorities as an act of conspiracy. Because of his political activities, he was expelled from his Abitur class four weeks before the final oral examination and could not complete his last school year. This made it impossible for him to move on and study geodesy at a university level as he had intended.
  From the autumn of 1977 until 1979 he performed military service for the National People's Army and then worked as a machinist at ZIMET (the Central Institute for Microbiology and Experimental Therapy) in Jena. In 1980 he took part in meetings of the peace group SoFd (Sozialer Friedensdienst, "Social Peace Service") in addition to an East-West meeting in Poland between former residents of Jena and current members of the Jungen Gemeinde. With his friend Peter Rösch (also from Jena) he visited Gdańsk, where he made contact with the Solidarity movement. A Stasi spy reported on 23 March 1981 to his commanding officer Roland Mähler that Domaschk had won the support of the dissident philosophy student Siegfried Reiprich to be the "ideological head" of a terrorist group along the lines of the Italian Red Brigades. The report was false.
  On 10 April 1981, Domaschk was travelling with Rösch to a birthday celebration in East Berlin. On the same weekend, the Tenth Party Congress of the SED was to be held. On orders of the Stasi, Domaschk and Rösch were arrested on the train and after a first interrogation in Jüterbog, they spent the next day in the Stasi detention center in Gera. They were accused of having planned disruptive activities during the Congress.
  On April 12, after many hours of interrogation, Domaschk wrote a handwritten pledge to employees of the Stasi. He was scheduled for release at 2:00 p.m. but died in the visiting room of the detention center under unclear circumstances. Stasi files offer conflicting reports on the time of death, varying by 15 minutes. The official Stasi report cites suicide as the cause of death; this is strongly doubted by Domaschk's friends and acquaintances.
caption: Former residence of Matthias Domaschk and Renate Groß (Am Rähmen 3, Jena)
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