I was recently watching a video meant for British travellers travelling by car from Helmstedt to Berlin across East Germany. The video generally explains the procedure for crossing the Soviet and Alied checkpoints and what you should do in between, but something I found interesting was the repeated insistence throughout the entire video that you should not interact with GDR police or authorities in any way at all. They stress several times that if you are stopped or if an accident or breakdown happens, you should wait for either allied assistance or a Soviet soldier, but never under any circumstances to show any documents or provide any information to anyone representing the GDR. They even say you can pay road fines to Soviet officers but not GDR officers.
My question is why is that? What was the effective difference between these two groups in the GDR? If the Soviets had the same (or greater) control, then why was there any difference between giving information to the Soviets vs giving information to the GDR?
Thank you. This is the video in question: https://youtu.be/QS1xvtLV8Xw
The explanation lies in the nature of political meaning of military personnel (the travel video is for British military personnel only).
From the Western legal perspective, East Germany was the Allied Soviet Occupied Zone of Germany. The Soviet claim that East Germany's government enjoyed international legal sovereignty over its territory was disputed by the West. Hence, any UK soldier accepting an East German official as exerting Soviet allied rights in East Germany could lead to a slippery slope of the West as a whole agreeing to a permanent German division as it would have entailed recognizing a form of East German national sovereignty.
West Germany had heavily diplomatically campaigned among the Western allies to never let this pass, as it would grant East Germany sovereign claims over its territory in the eyes of the world, thereby giving it potential rights to also claim its airspace, and in effect granting the Communist East German government the right to deny Western allies as a whole the right to pass through East Germany to West Berlin, which would have opened a huge flank for the Soviets and East Germans to conduct a second (and this time successful) Berlin blockade.
(The West German international campaign to isolate East Germany this way was called the Hallstein Doctrine, named after West German foreign office civil servant Walter Hallstein, but actually constructed by international law expert Professor Wilhelm Grewe, a German Foreign Office official, and also for a time West German Ambassador to the United States).
East Germany in fact tried in many ways several times to play this game, on occasion sending their patrol officers to suddenly show up in lieu of Soviet personnel, and it was also part of the game played in October 1961 at the infamous Checkpoint Charlie standoff. For UK soldiers to fail to follow this rule could have had major international repercussions from a legal perspective, and was therefore to be avoided at all cost, especially as the West German government was highly sensitive to the issue (UK foreign office personnel actually did not care that much, as various sources have shown, but they had to acquiesce on the matter, as the US saw this equally as problematic).
The highpoint of these East German attempts to "lure" the West into accidentally accepting East German sovereignty claims were 1961-1965, and the international detente agreements of 1970-2 calmed things down quite a bit (effectively ending the doctrine, as both German states agreed on the diplomatic formula that there were "two states in one nation", delaying a resolution of the sovereignty question); after this the issue somewhat subsided, but Western military personnel had to always be on the lookout for such little tricks all the way until 1989.