The publication is a collection of 50 articles by Rainer Hildebrandt which regularly appeared in the daily press during the years 1949 to 1993 and provide an overview of the Soviet NKVD-camps on political arrest in the GDR, from the people’s uprising of “June 17”, 1953, escapes from the GDR and the construction of the Wall on “August 13”, 1961 to the non-violent movements of the eighties and nineties. The former Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher wrote in his foreword: “The fact that today, in Europe, we stand at the beginning of a new chapter in history and that a new culture of living together has now become possible in a Europe founded upon the equality of birth and of rights is, not least, due to people like Rainer Hildebrandt“.