The Ministry of State Security (German Departmentium für Staatssicherheit, MfS), commonly known as Stasi (the abbreviated German word Staatssicherheit, i.e. state security), was the official intelligence service in the German Democratic Republic, created on February 8, 1950. She is described as one of the most effective and repressive in the world.
The Stasi headquarters (GDR) was located in East Berlin, with the largest complex in the Lichtenberg area and several smaller ones in other parts of the city. Her motto was Schild und Schwert der Partei (“The Shield and Sword of the Party”), namely the ruling Socialist Party of German Unity (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED).
History
The Stasi is a relatively young intelligence agency. It was founded on February 8, 1950, following the example of the USSR Ministry of State Security (MGB of Russia) and the Ministry of the Interior (Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia). The entities mentioned in parentheses replaced the pre-war NKGB and NKVD.
The first Stasi minister was Wilhelm Seisser. After the uprising in June 1953, he was forced to leave this post because he unsuccessfully tried to replace the SED General Secretary Walter Ulbricht. The latter was approved by Ernst Wallweb as the head of the Stasi. In 1957, after a dispute in the EDMS between Ulbricht and Erich Honecker, the latter refused to resign and was replaced by his former deputy Erich Milke. The Stasi is, in essence, precisely his brainchild.
Cooperation with the KGB
Although the Stasi was given the green light back in 1957, until 1989, the Soviet KGB intelligence service, founded in 1954, continued to create its liaison officers in all eight Stasi departments. The cooperation between the two services was so close that the KGB invited the Stasi to establish operational bases in Moscow and Leningrad to monitor the visits of East German tourists to the Soviet Union. In 1978, Milke officially granted the KGB officers of East Germany the same rights and powers as his subordinates in the Soviet Union. The Stasi is a kind of KGB affiliate.
Strength and composition
Between 1950 and 1989 in Stasi, there were a total of 274, 000 people recruited to eradicate "class enemies." By the time the special services were dissolved, 91, 015 people were fully employed, of whom 2, 000 were informal employees, 13, 073 were soldiers, and 2, 232 were officers of the East German army. In addition to them, there were also 173, 081 informal informants in the country and 1, 533 in West Germany.
While these estimates of the number of employees are taken from official reports, according to the federal commissioner in charge of the Stasi archives in Berlin, some researchers speculatively increase the number of intelligence employees to 500, 000 due to a number of destroyed records. Some go even further up to two million.
Scope of activities
Stasi employees were present at all major industrial facilities. The extent of their control over these objects depended on their significance.
Small holes were drilled in the walls of apartments and hotel rooms through which Stasi cameras shot people with special cameras. Schools, universities and hospitals were completely crammed with spies.
Recruitment
The Stasi had official categorization for each type of scammer, as well as official instructions on how to get information from anyone. Intelligence functions were distributed among those who had somehow participated in state security (police, army), dissident movements, and the Protestant church. Information collected from the last two groups was used to separate or discredit individuals.
Informants made this important, depending on material or social incentives, which are hampered by a sense of adventure. According to official figures, only 7.7% of them were forced to cooperate. Most are members of the SED. A large number of informants came from conductors, parishioners, doctors, nurses and teachers. Milke believed that the best informants were those whose work allowed them to maintain constant contact with the public.
Role in the country
The Stasi’s position increased significantly after the Eastern Bloc countries signed the Helsinki Charter in 1975, which the then SED General Secretary Erich Honecker described as a threat to his regime, as it included mandatory respect for human rights, including freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief.
In the same year, the number of intelligence officers increased to 180, 000, varying from 20, 000 to 30, 000 in the early 1950s, reaching 100, 000 in 1968 in response to the so-called Ostpolitik ("Eastern Policy", normalizing relations between West Germany and Eastern Europe). Stasi also acted as representative of the KGB for activities in other countries of the Eastern Bloc, such as Poland, where there was also a very noticeable Soviet presence.
The Stasi penetrated almost every aspect of the life of the GDR. In the mid-80s, the intelligence network began to grow in both German countries, and was constantly expanding until the time when East Germany fell in 1989. In the best years, Stasi had 91, 015 employees and 173, 081 intelligence officers. This intelligence agency had more control over the population than any other secret police in history.
Repression
People were imprisoned by Stasi employees for various reasons: from the desire to leave the country to political jokes. The prisoners were kept in isolation and disoriented, they were deprived of information about events in the outside world.
What about the Stasi methods? This intelligence service improved the technique of psychological persecution of the country's enemies, known as Zersetzung - a term borrowed from chemistry, meaning something like corrosion.
After the 1970s The Ministry of the Interior began to gradually abandon harassment and torture. They realized that psychological harassment is far less effective than other covert operations. Victims should not even know the source of their problems or even their real nature. This is the secret to the effective work of the secret police.
Zersetzung tactics were typically a violation of the victim’s personal or family life. Typical German intelligence operations of the time often included house invasions, searches, food changes (in cases where it was necessary to euthanize someone or poison them), etc. Other activities included campaigns to undermine reputation, unfounded accusations, provocations, psychological pressure, eavesdropping, mysterious phone calls. Usually the victims did not associate all this with the Stasi. Some people were brought to mental breakdowns and even suicides.
The great advantage of such harassment was that, due to its secretive nature, everything could be denied. This factor was extremely valuable in connection with the attempts of the East German authorities to improve their image in the international arena in the 1970s and 1980s.
The Zersetsung technique was also adopted by other security services of Eastern Europe, as well as by modern FSB of Russia. The Stasi is a prototype of many modern intelligence services.
Beginning of the End
The recruitment of new informants became more difficult towards the end of East Germany, after 1986 their share began to decline. This had a significant impact on the Stasi’s ability to control the population, a period of growing unrest began, as well as the dissemination of knowledge about the activities of this odious intelligence agency. At that time, the Stasi leaders tried to prevent the emergence of economic problems from becoming a political collapse, but failed to do so.
Stasi officers controlled and "directed" the transformation of the public image of East Germany in the direction of representing it as a democratic, capitalist state of the West. According to Ion Mihai Pachepi, head of security intelligence in communist Romania, security intelligence in similar communist regimes in Eastern Europe had similar plans.
On March 12, 1990, the German newspaper Der Spiegel reported that the Stasi was really trying to implement a plan to transform Germany and change power in it. The aforementioned Pachepi also noted that the events in Russia, when the former KGB colonel Vladimir Putin came to power, resemble this plan.
On November 7, 1989, the Stasi sent a letter to Erich Milke in response to the rapidly changing political and social situation in the GDR. On November 17, the Council of Ministers (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the German Democratic Republic) renamed the Stasi to the Office of State Security (Amt für Nationale Sicherheit - AfNS), whose leadership was transferred to Colonel-General Wolfgang Schwanitz. On December 8, the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Denmark, Hans Modrov, ordered the dissolution of the local special service "AfNS", which was approved by the Council of Ministers on December 14 of that year. The leadership of the GDR eventually followed the example of Denmark.
Scandal
In a parliamentary investigation of state funds that disappeared after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was found that East German government donated large sums of money to Martin Schlaff through accounts in Vaduz, the capital of Liechtenstein, in exchange for goods under the Western embargo. In addition, senior officers from the former Stasi continued their careers in senior positions at the Schlaff factories. Investigations concluded that "Schlaff's business empire played a key role" in the Stasi’s efforts to secure the financial future of his agents and maintain an intelligence network.
During the political upheavals known in Germany as the “Wende” and the peaceful revolution in the fall of 1989, the Stasi offices were filled with many protesters. It is estimated that by then Stasi had managed to destroy about 5% of all of its documents. The volume of documentary material is estimated at 1 billion sheets of paper.
The fall of the GDR
When the state policy of East Germany began to drift towards Perestroika and desovietization, this also affected the Stasi. Manually and using crushers, agents destroyed large quantities of documents. When these actions worsened, protests broke out in front of the Stasi buildings. On January 15, 1990, a large group of people gathered in front of the entrance to the headquarters of the special services in East Berlin to stop the destruction of documents. They believed that all these papers should be accessible and used to punish those involved in the repression and surveillance.
The number of protesters grew to such an extent that they managed to break through the police wall and enter the headquarters. They broke down doors, smashed windows, broke furniture and tore down portraits of President Erich Honecker. Representatives of the West German government were also among the crowd, as were former unofficial Stasi colleagues who wanted to destroy documents. Despite the ongoing violence, some people managed to get into the archives and pick up a number of documents that were later used to search for former members of the secret police.
After the reunification of Germany
Following the merger of East and West Germany on October 3, 1990, the Office of the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives began a discussion about whether they should be kept private or open to the public.
Those who opposed the opening of the archives indicated privacy as a reason. They believed that the information in the documents would provoke negative emotions from the former members of the Stasi intelligence, and at some point lead to violence. Pastor Rainer Eppelmann, who became Minister of Defense and Disarmament after March 1990, believed that the release of former Stasi members from prison would result in blood feuds directed against them. Prime Minister Lothar de Mezieres even predicted the killing of former agents.
The argument against using documentation to prosecute the German Stasi was that not all former members were criminals and should not be punished solely because they were members of this organization. Some believed that almost everyone was to blame for something.
The decision on the status of the documents formed the basis of the merger agreement between the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. With further respect for East German law, the latter has made it possible to expand access to documents and their use. In parallel with the decision to keep the archive in the central secret police office in east Berlin, he also determined who could have access to the documents, allowing each person to see his dossier. In 1992, the German government removed the secrecy of archives and decided to open them.
The fate of the archives
Between 1991 and 2011, about 2, 750, 000 people, mostly citizens of the former East Germany, had access to their documents. This decision allowed people to create copies of them. One of the important questions was how the media can use the archives. They decided that the media should still be able to receive documentation.
