The aim of this paper is to show how German grammar handbooks had been used as a means of indoctrination, especially in the former GDR. To analyze this problem, more than 350 sentences which were all chosen for their ideological character were collected in a database-like table. The next table column shows how the authors replaced those ideologically marked sentences with neutral ones. The great variety of possible replacements is staggering. The collected data may serve as a basis for further sociolinguistic and pragmatic studies on the so called newspeak, a quasi-language used for propaganda purposes in the Middle- and Eastern Europe under communist regimes.