One of my favorite German-language movies is Das Leben der Anderen (“The Lives of Others”), about the way the East German “Stasi” (German-style acronickname for Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS, Ministry for State Security) spied on the German “Democratic” Republic’s subjects. [Here is a good little video on its genesis and early history.]
They could, of course, only dream of the technological means of surveillance that CCP China has at its disposal, so the process was extraordinarily labor-intensive. At its peak, one in every twenty-two East Germans was engaged in spying upon the others — either as an informant for the Stasi or as a direct employee.
This story is reasonably well-known outside Germany, though not as well as it should. Aside from stuff I already knew (e.g., about the Stasi’s use of so-called “Romeo” agents to seduce secretaries of West German ministers and senior officials, or on how Chancellor Willy Brandt’s personal secretary was actually a Stasi agent) I learned a few new things from this video though:
(a) I had always been a little puzzled by the death of German student protestor Benno Ohnesorg at the hands of the West German police — which inspired the West German “1968”er student movement, out of which would spring not just free love culture and freewheeling, experimental music — but also the sinister domestic terrorist group that called itself the Red Army Faction and is known to others as the Baader-Meinhof Gang.
Turns out that the cop who shot Ohnesorg for no good reason, Karl-Heinz Kurras (detailed German Wikipedia page) was actually… a longtime Stasi mole in the West German police, under the code name Otto Bohl . Was he a rogue cop who also happened to be on the take, or… was he acting as an agent provocateur? Bohl’s Stasi file contains no reference to a direct order, but clearly was incomplete. Who knows?
That the Baader-Meinhof gang itself got support from the Stasi and other Eastern Bloc intelligence services has meanwhile been established.
(b) When the Berlin Wall came down and the East German regime was collapsing, Stasi personnel were given orders to start destroying files. The shredders could not cope, however, so they were told to fill buckets and bathtubs with water and immerse the documents in them. When even that capacity ran out, they tore up pages into pieces by hand… but, being methodical and creatures of habit, the pieces were put in the same bag… and today, equally methodical German researchers from the MfS memorial site are puzzling together and reassembling these millions of documents. (Yes, people can go visit the former Stasi archives and request to see their files there.) Here is a video from the Fraunhofer Institute (Germany’s applied science research organization) about the process and technological means mustered for it
Let me give the last word to commenter “Richard Garrison” on the last video:
I got my Stasi file, all 300 pages of it, and it is a whole new world. It tells more about the Stasi and the whole East German mindset than it does about me. They were convinced that I was up to something, and anything that was a bit strange prompted more investigation. Absence of anything substantive seems to have prompted more investigation. A delayed suitcase on a flight out of London was examined. They also checked my automobile and found and translated some letters from my parents. Now I know how my father would have sounded if he spoke German, which he did not. After a week or so I realized that there were gaps in their reporting, things that would reasonably have been of interest. How did they miss that? For example that I took the Trans Siberian Railroad and got an East German [visa?] just a couple of years earlier. Also many day trips to East Berlin, and one declined visa application to accompany a school group on a tour. They correctly noted a good relationship with one supervisor, and a strained relationship with another. My German language ability was rated both “gut” and “sehr gut.” Language teachers in both the US and Germany would have disputed those rankings, but who are we to argue with the Stasi? Those guys are the professionals so we must take their word, right? My file came with a bill for Euro 10.00 for photocopying charges, and I paid it in person in Berlin. The receptionist asked me if I wanted to talk with my “Facharbeiter”, the person who pulled the file together. I said yes, and the man came down. He remembered the file because it was weird. He was the most understanding, polite, and sensitive German official, East or West, I have ever met. Admittedly, those are not normal qualities for any German official, but he was like a social worker or counselor. He also suggested that I check back every year or so, since they continue to find boxes of stuff in attics and basement rooms. The last update had some new legalese in it saying that just because it is in the Stasi files does not mean that it is true. So, my contribution to Cold War Victory was to tie up a bunch of folks following me around, digging into my car, suitcases, and mail, and then writing reports. We sometimes hear that East Germany had full employment, nobody out of work. I also contributed to achievement of that party objective.
Spin, strangeness, and charm 