In 1950 East Germany establishes a Ministry for State Security.
In 1957 Erich Mielke is named Minister Of State Security.
Mielke heads the Ministry till November 1989.
Number 1 is number 1.
Not first on the property, that has nothing to do with it.
When you enter you're on the ground floor.
Go up the stairs and you're on the upper ground level.
The next flight of stairs takes you to the first floor.
It wouldn't be proper for the Minister
to be on the second floor.
This is Floor 1 in House 1.
As Central Administration for the Protection
of the National Economy East Germany's first secret police
is established in 1949.
In 1950 it is transformed into the Ministry for State Security,
commonly known as Stasi.
It models itself on the Soviet secret police Cheka.
Stasi personnel proudly call themselves Chekists.
The Ministry's Central Headquarters occupy
an entire city block in East Berlin.
In the 1980s 20,000 employees work here for the Stasi.
In 1953 the Stasi suffers an unexpected shock.
It is caught completely off guard
by the national uprising of June 17th.
Soviet troops quell the revolt by force.
Now we're entering Mielke's private realm,
so to speak, where he could retreat.
Here we have this small office.
It's only notable feature are these Western television sets.
They would rather trust in Western
technology and not the clunky "Raduga"
colour sets from the Soviet Union.
As you can see, there's no trace of
golden water facets or other luxuries
withheld from mere mortals.
Such things simply won't be found here.
The Stasi is more than just the Ministry in Berlin.
In Berlin we have the Ministry headed by Erich Mielke.
Under it are 15 districts including Berlin
with a District Administration in each,
whose directors report directly to Mielke.
And under them are Local Administrative Offices,
in Leipzig it's 13, each with its own specialist departments.
Looking at their job descriptions, you won't find
a single area of public life that didn't fall
under the purview of one of these specialist departments,
to monitor and secure it.
The Local Offices ensured
total surveillance of the entire country.
15 District Administrations and over 200 Local Offices
blanket the whole country.
By the 1980's the Stasi has over 90,000 full-time personnel.
It is East Germany’s largest government agency.
The Stasi takes on more and more tasks.
Next to domestic security
it is responsible for foreign espionage and
counter intelligence, personal and site security,
and border and passport checks.
In a forest in northern Berlin, between
Bernau and Wandlitz,
is a location that can't be found on any East German map.
In the late 1950s the Stasi builds the "forest colony"
here, to guarantee the personal security of
the Party's ruling committee.
140 Stasi personnel guard the colony.
Another 600 attend to the 23 families of Party functionaries.
Erich Honecker lives in Hawk Lane number 5.
Erich Mielke lives one street further in number 1.
Mielke is not only Minister for State Security.
He's also head of SV Dynamo,
the sports club for police, customs and Stasi.
Mielke supports in particular
the soccer team Berlin Dynamo
and assigns the best players to Berlin.
In spite of its success, Berlin Dynamo,
known as the Stasi team,
never wins favour with East Germany’s soccer fans.
Espionage is one of the Stasi's primary tasks
during the Cold War.
In the Satellite Reconnaissance Centre in Biesenthal,
north of Berlin, Central Department III
uses 30-feet dish antennas
to intercept Western satellite signals.
Radio technology is of great interest to the secret service.
The Stasi monitors all companies
involved in constructing the TV tower
on Berlin's Alexander square.
After its completion, 7 employees of
Central Department XX remain active in the tower.
Along the West German border the Stasi
installs antennas to eavesdrop
on car phones and radio communications.
At the time, two thirds of all West German phone calls
are transmitted by wireless radio links.
One primary link between Hannover and Munich
crosses East German territory.
In good weather, the Stasi could pick up calls from
as far away as Frankfurt, Cologne and Bonn.
Together with the National Army, the Stasi also conducts
air reconnaissance near the border.
Eavesdropping stations are installed
in the freight holds of Antonow transport planes.
There Stasi personnel transcribe
the monitored radio communications.
In Operation DISKANT, the planes start
in Dresden and follow
the inner-German border up to the Baltic Sea.
Even though they wear Border Police uniforms,
it is exclusively Stasi personnel who
check travellers at East Germany's border checkpoints.
The Stasi becomes increasingly occupied
with finding qualified personnel.
People can't apply for positions on their own.
Every employee is approached and recruited by the Stasi.
People would come to the local office saying
"I'd like to work for you", as secretary
or such, because one could make more money
than in the regular economy.
As a rule these people were rejected,
it was always suspected they'd been sent by
foreign intelligence services.
So there were sometimes major personnel shortages,
and pressure to get a position filled in time.
Frequently the children of full-time employees
would be hired.
The reasoning was: we know their background,
they grew up in our culture
and are surely willing to work for us just as their parents do.
And so we sometimes find entire families
– father, mother, child –
in the personnel lists.
Stasi spies travel abroad under false passports.
The Ministry's Central Intelligence Administration
targets primarily the western neighbour
– the Federal Republic of Germany.
Not only East Germans, but some
2,000 citizens of the Federal Republic
are active in the West as Stasi agents.
The Stasi sees itself as East Germany's defender
in the Cold War, the worldwide conflict between
Socialism and, in its terms, Imperialism.
Therefore every criticism of the socialist system,
every dissenting opinion, must come from outside,
controlled by western imperialist forces.
Following this fatal logic, the Stasi starts
a sort of "cold civil war" against its own people.
Sometime in the 80s, the surveillance apparatus
was assessed to find out exactly
how many spies were under surveillance
here in the district.
How many were suspected of espionage
and how many were really spies.
And here in the report for the Magdeburg District,
it says that the result was sobering and disappointing:
No spies were found here at all.
Instead, only politically undesirable East German citizens
were being scrutinized the entire time.
Spy hunting, the essential secret service task,
was basically not taking place at all.
This focus on monitoring its own people
requires a massive expansion of the Stasi.
An even greater expansion was planned.
Significantly it took place during the period
of détente prescribed by the Party
and codified as the Policy of Peaceful Coexistence.
It meant that Western correspondents
had to be allowed into the country.
The apparatus had to be modified,
with harsh 50s-style repression used only as a last resort.
A whole new apparatus with a different orientation arises.
And when we speak of Stasi, we really mean the Party.
This Ministry of State Security was nothing else
than a subordinate agency of the Party.
We're talking about the Party's ruling apparatus here.
"Shield and Sword of the Party" is what the Stasi calls itself.
9 out of 10 employees are Party members.
Till the demise of East Germany, the Party dictatorship
dares not to face its opponents.
Instead, the Stasi has to keep
all dissenting opinions under control.
Dogs are trained to sniff out
the originators of critical pamphlets.
The Stasi collects scent samples of suspicious citizens.
It develops special machines to open,
copy if necessary, and reseal 90,000 letters
a day sent from or to suspicious persons.
Technical eavesdropping was
one of the Stasi's major sources of information.
Mail surveillance too but
primarily telephone wire-tapping.
And specifically targeted suspects would be bugged too.
In East Germany there is no free public expression of opinion.
To keep the Party informed of
the citizens' sentiment, the Stasi
probes with wire-tapping devices,
hidden cameras and covert agents.
For daily use, so to speak, there were
suitcases like this "Construction Worker" model
or the "Arab" model there.
These cases contained the basic equipment for
conversion to any specific type,
which could then be set up very
quickly in the woods or somewhere.
Calling on the Stasi soon become the preferred solution
to any problem in East Germany.
East bloc states were on the CoCom Embargo List
of countries to which the export of advanced
Western technologies was forbidden.
So it was attempted to bring computers
into the East German market by covert means, through
collaborators who worked in the West
or who had family connections to individual computer dealers.
That worked in some cases
but of course never enough
to satisfy East Germany's economic demand.
After 1990, Erich Mielke declares it as his
single greatest mistake,
that the Stasi became East Germany's "jack of all trades".
Dissatisfaction is widespread
among the East German population.
Yet the Stasi strives to create the impression
of the Socialist system's superiority
to that of the class enemy in the West.
It was of greatest importance to keep a lid on certain things.
Never to let serious criminal offences become
known to the general public, to create the illusion that
law and order rule in this country.
So officially there are no murderers,
no child molesters or the like.
But we do find cases - I found one myself,
from the 60s, a paedophile case handled by the criminal police.
The offender's file was taken from the police,
he was approached by the secret service
and blackmailed into acting as an informant.
Over time, the number of civilian
unofficial collaborators or IMs rises
in step with the number of full time personnel.
The method of recruitment changes too.
In the 1950s many people were pressured into collaboration.
Yet by the 1970s and 80s the preferred basis
for an IM's commitment to the Ministry
was conviction and personal contact.
So latest from the 60s onward,
the majority of civilian collaborators
was acting out of conviction.
In the end the Stasi numbers 90,000
regular personnel and 180,000 IM's.
The vast majority works within East German borders
against their own fellow citizens.
The basic motive for most unofficial
collaborators is the subjectively felt pressure
to conform to society.
The Secret Service used the phrase
"He works with us out of
political-ideological conviction".
This wording was meant to paraphrase that
motivation somewhat, and also veil the fact
that there was really a wide range of motives.
But basically, everyone asked to collaborate was
aware of the risks of refusal
– that the long arm of the political apparatus
could reach into their careers and private lives at any time
and sooner or later cause them personal harm.
And this is the reason, I think,
why most informers agreed to work with the Secret Service.
The percentage of those who did it out of greed
or for financial gain, or who were
blackmailed because of criminal offences
known only to the Secret Service, was rather low.
Ultimately, 2 of every 100 adults
in East Germany work for the Stasi.
Relative to population, it is the largest
secret service in the history of mankind.
In the 1970s, East Germany's desire for
international recognition
throws the Party and the Stasi into an irresolvable dilemma.
The use of raw physical force is increasingly shunned.
Yet Socialism can be kept in power only by repression.
More inconspicuous means are found to keep critics in check.
We're dealing with a government agency
here so naturally there's a directive
for this - Directive 1 from 1976,
the so-called Disintegration Directive.
In 60-odd pages it lays out in minute detail
the appropriate measures for disintegrating someone.
Disintegration means engineering personal
and job-related misfortunes, to destroy
the subject's self-esteem
without them ever finding out who's turning the screw.
In view of this, it's a fatal mistake
to think that East Germany was going
in a more humane direction.
After all, disintegration means destroying lives.
That should never be trivialized.
The Stasi establishes its own academy for training personnel.
The Stasi-Academy in Postdam-Eiche
taught the subject operative psychology.
There, primarily interrogators learned methods
of eliciting confessions from prisoners.
Graduates leave the School of Law
with a diploma or doctorate in jurisprudence.
Yet their education focuses on practical secret service work.
One of the academy's official goals
is the communist education of
chekist leadership personalities.
The Stasi had its own investigative department
which conducted proceedings autonomously.
It built up its own legal commentary
at the Ministry's School of Law,
designated as secret and confidential.
That means, on the one hand, there was
the regular commentary to the criminal code, readily
available at every library and book store
and which all prosecutors and judges had to go on.
And then there was the secret commentary
which the Stasi granted itself.
Which raises the question: why keep it
secret if it didn't codify illegal actions?
As an investigative organ the Stasi, like
the police and the State Prosecutors,
can investigate citizens and initiate
proceedings at its own discretion.
It maintains its own detention facilities
alongside the jails of the regular police.
That is why, in my opinion, comparisons to
other secret services simply fall short:
the Stasi always worked on three levels.
As a conventional intelligence agency, for one.
But also as a secret police against
its own people, and thirdly as an
autonomous investigative agency.
All of course, because Party rule was to
be maintained by all necessary means.
Especially after the uprisings of 1953
it became obvious that the population
had to be held in check politically
by an especially alert organization.
This investigative agency was just right for the purpose.
The Stasi classifies political opponents
as "hostile persons", "hostile-negative
persons" and – as the most dangerous group
– "hardened hostile-negative persons".
These individuals are considered "lost
to East Germany" and "not reclaimable".
They're subject to the strictest scrutiny
to prevent public actions on their part.
The Stasi maintains 17 facilities
for pre-trial detention.
The threat of imprisonment was always present.
Without it the apparatus could not have
worked, not had the impact it did.
But actually the goal was to stop what were
offences to the Party before they even took place.
Not to let them advance to the point of
imprisonment but nip them in the bud
through disintegration measures and such.
And likewise to sniff out every potential
stirring of criticism,
preferably before it was even thought of.
Political criminal law pursues not so
much actual acts as potential acts.
The Stasi develops detailed criteria
for determining when a suspicious individual
may be investigated.
The categories of suspects for which the Stasi
would initiate operative action, as they
called it, were precisely defined in terms
of what was of importance to the apparatus.
Yet when you peruse them from cover
to cover, you'll find that virtually
everything was of interest.
Often you'll find those classifications used in
the so-called "hand files", files on citizens
who were not under permanent scrutiny but were
being looked at for some particular cause.
They included everything from spy and former Party
member, over non-voter, to volunteer fire fighter.
And the catch-all category, that we
once found at a local office, was
"malcontent and chronic complainer".
That classification cleared the way for any
Stasi employee to open a file on someone.
SOUND OF A TYPEWRITER
Arrests were generally made in the early morning hours.
It wasn't common to be handed or shown an arrest warrant.
A person might be picked up off the street.
By law, an arrest warrant had to be issued
by a judge or court of law, but could also be
issued by a State Prosecutor or, in special
cases, by the investigating authority
which was Division IX of the Stasi.
And the Stasi itself decided what
qualified as a "special case".
That meant that for the Stasi,
the justification for arrests was not
determined solely by the courts.
Most arrestees are told only they are
detained for clarification of facts.
The Stasi conceals the location of detention facilities.
Adjacent buildings are inhabited only by facility personnel.
Vehicles used for detainee transport
are usually windowless and disguised
as bakery or laundry delivery vans.
For example, people were snatched off the street
in Rostock, put in a vehicle and driven around
the city and its surrounding area for 3 hours.
They were blindfolded, so afterwards
some of them thought they were in
Cottbus or Berlin or who knows where.
And it took them a whole while to realize
where they really were.
That they were still in the same
city where they'd been picked up.
DRAMATIC MUSIC
Apart from interrogations lasting for hours,
detainees are held in complete isolation.
The cells have no windows, only glass bricks.
Imprisonment is always depressing.
Yet here the reasons for it are intolerable as well.
In 1975, head of Party and State Erich Honecker
signs the Helsinki Accords, the Final Act of
the Conference on Cooperation and Security in Europe,
which brings citizens of East Germany
the possibility to act according to its Human Rights
Charta, which includes the right of unrestricted
movement, free travel and choice of residence.
After that point, most detainees here were
people who had tried to flee the country
or who had petitioned repeatedly for legal
emigration
and then taken up contact with
a Western human rights organization.
Or people charged with obstructing government agencies.
Or, as the Stasi called it, provocative
acts of public demonstration.
Prison staffers address the prisoners
only by number, not by name.
We know of detainees who for a very long time
didn't find out the reason for their detention.
We know that in one case, the detainee never did
learn the charges – charges which could've been
easily dismissed but weren't, to keep him here.
COUNTING IN GERMAN
Even prisoners are recruited as
unofficial collaborators, to collect
information on fellow inmates.
Usually prisoners were kept alone in a cell
for long periods.
Later they'd sometimes place a second detainee in the cell.
Not seldom the later arrival was there to act
as a cell snitch, to worm his way into the
trust of the cell mate and report everything
he thought and planned, how he expressed
himself about his interrogations and so on.
That wasn't uncommon.
Many detainees were made into unofficial
collaborators once they'd been thoroughly
worn down – sooner or later they'd sign their
consent out of fear of renewed imprisonment.
It's a tragic travesty of justice, how people were
stripped of their will and used as instruments.
MUSIC
Confession by the accused is the simplest
way to get a conviction in court.
Therefore a major goal of pre-trial interrogations
is to get a signed confession from the detainee.
Here they ran up and down the whole
scale, from a friendly, fatherly manner,
to bullying and threats of punishment
or retaliations toward family members.
And since often the interrogator was the only
human contact for a long time, some prisoners
even looked forward to interrogation
while at the same time fearing it.
Often the interrogations aren't sufficient.
Many a confession is signed after hours or
days in a soundproof and pitch-black cell.
SOUND OF A TYPEWRITER
Few trials last longer than one day.
One can't say that it was always
the case, but an independent judiciary
did not exist in East Germany.
We know cases where the Stasi proposed sentences directly.
Sometimes Erich Mielke personally would
determine a sentence and all that remained
for the judge to do was to carry it out.
In the course of the 60s, 70s and 80s, East
Germany perfected one thing: To present
itself to the outside world as a state with
a functioning judiciary, a functioning democracy,
industry, and market economy while everything
was really controlled from the inside.
After sentencing, the convicts are placed
in one of the East German prisons.
But the Stasi wants to keep certain prisoners under control.
The penitentiary Bautzen II, formally an ordinary
prison, is made into a special penal institute.
Starting in 1956, the Stasi places its
inmates and sets their terms of sentence.
Bautzen II, unlike other penitentiaries,
was never overcrowded.
On average, some 150 prisoners were
kept here though there were 203 places.
That shows that the Stasi followed its criteria
quite precisely.
Only hand-picked clients were
brought here to Bautzen.
At the same time there was a high number of staff.
This affected the daily routine.
Ultimately 80 staffers were working here.
So every attendant had only two prisoners to deal with.
Other institutions had a ratio of 1 to 7 or 8.
That means that surveillance could really be perfected.
No other prison was able to monitor inmates
with such detail.
An inmate's activity was noted every five minutes.
For instance, "15:55 hours: the prisoner is pacing.
16:00 hours: the prisoner starts reading".
So every five minutes someone would
be looking in through the peep-hole.
There wasn't a bit of privacy.
MUSIC
Officially there are no political prisoners
in East Germany.
"Espionage" is cited by the Stasi
as a main reason for imprisonment.
Real or alleged espionage and assisting in
escape from East Germany were the two main
offences for sentencing someone to Bautzen II.
Many were convicted of espionage for actions which
should have been allowed under human rights, such
as critical reporting and striving for reforms.
The Stasi can eavesdrop on cells from its
neighbouring local administrative office.
Visiting rooms are monitored with hidden cameras.
There was a dense network of informers here.
Some staff attendants were working for the Stasi,
and inmates were obligated to spy on each other.
Each Stasi division had its own network of informers.
Central Division IX had one, Division VII had theirs.
And on top of that, the division networks were set
against each other and there were even individual
prisoners who were obligated to spy on staffers.
The Stasi spies on prison staff.
The staff spies on the inmates.
The inmates spy on other inmates
– and the staff.
The goal is total surveillance.
Citizens are arrested by the Stasi
not only within East German borders.
In some cases, suspects are also abducted from the West.
To date we've found exactly 13 cases
where the Stasi snatched someone out
of West Berlin or West Germany.
A sham meeting would be set up with, say, a journalist.
There the person would be knocked out,
spirited across the border in a car
trunk and sentenced to prison.
Yet another way to end up in Bautzen II.
To avoid international criticism,
the incarceration rate is reduced during the 1970s.
Over 30,000 political prisoners are sold
to the Federal Republic of Germany.
"Good behaviour" is the official reason
for early release into the West.
From the 1970s onward, the desire to
live there is the main reason for
imprisonment in the first place.
Now we can put it in historical perspective:
In the 70s, it appeared to the West that its
policy of "Change Through Rapprochement", as
Willy Brandt's advisor Egon Bahr famously
phrased it, was working because the number
of political prisoners had decreased.
In fact, only the methods of applying
pressure to the population had changed.
The repression was still there but more
veiled so East Germany could avoid
defamation for holding so many prisoners.
The Stasi places only special prisoners in Bautzen.
That leads to special prison conditions.
Bautzen II is characterized by an enormous
change in conditions.
In the 1950s and 60s, conditions here were extremely harsh.
Sanitation was abysmal.
Inmates were in a miserable state, their
care and feeding wasn't fit for a dog.
That changed in the 1970s as a result of West
Germany's official recognition of East Germany.
Conditions here improved drastically.
In 1983 the cells even got warm running water.
That was without precedent in East Germany's penal system.
And all because so many foreigners were held here.
Spies and accessories to escape who'd
eventually be released back into the West.
For them, concessions were granted.
But the fact remains - surveillance,
scrutiny and demoralization were
practiced meticulously till the end.
Inmates had no legal representation,
they were helpless against the system.
That was true till the final days.
SOUND OF A TYPEWRITER
Till 1987, East Germany's penal code
also contains the death penalty.
The first execution here in Leipzig was
in 1960, a border guard who'd escaped
into the West and was brought back.
Here in the final report you can read
the Stasi lead investigator's formulation:
"The proceeding finds it appropriate to impose
the death penalty on Smolka for political reasons."
Erich Mielke signed his consent
and the execution takes place just like that.
The last execution in East Germany takes place in 1981.
The directive instructs "an unexpected shot
at close range to the back of the head".
Many of those condemned to death worked for the Stasi themselves.
In the late 70s and early 80s, it was
primarily former secret service employees,
especially Stasi personnel, who were
condemned to death here in Leipzig.
These executions were kept completely
secret from the public, but well known
within the particular security organization
and used internally as a deterrent.
An old janitor apartment in
the Leipzig Correctional Facility becomes
East Germany's secret site for executions.
The cell in which the condemned
awaits death measures 64 square feet.
In this room, behind this door was the cell
in which the condemned spent his final hours.
He was allowed to write one last letter.
These letters were not forwarded to the relatives,
they were found in the files after 1990.
In this room he was told that his
plea for clemency had been refused
and execution was imminent.
Inside here was yet another door, you
see only a remnant of door frame.
The executioner stood behind this
door bearing a pistol with silencer.
The condemned person was led into this room.
As he tried to get his bearings, because it
appears that this room leads somewhere else,
the executioner would approach from
the back and shoot him at close range.
This modern Party dictatorship is worth analysing.
It maintained a highly specialized division of labour.
That means that anyone working as one in a mass
felt few scruples, bore little responsibility.
That's how such a system works.
For those in power it has
the advantage that the individual plays
along with hardly any reservations.
Today, when you ask anyone who
participated in it, they'll tell you with
complete credibility: "What did I do?
I sat here at a desk all day,
researching something in the files.
To whom did I do any great harm, where's the problem?"
In the Stasi's view, the greatest national
threat is an attack by the West or another
popular uprising like in June 1953.
Bunkers are built to ensure operational
readiness in an emergency.
COUNTING IN GERMAN
The bunker itself was built between 1968 and 1972.
The mandate for its construction was
the State Security Minister's Directive 1/67,
which ordered that bomb-proof shelters were
to be built for every District Administration
and for the Central Divisions in Berlin.
From these the various administrative units could
conduct their Stasi operations even during war.
Over 20 bunkers are built for
the District Administrations and important
Central Divisions of the Ministry.
The bunker was on standby 24/7.
Every morning the bunker commander had to
report its readiness by phone to the Director
of the District Administration in Leipzig.
In Leipzig, the bunker compound is
disguised as a vacation colony.
Behind the door of what appears to be
a warehouse lies the secret bunker entrance.
Completely isolated, the bunker offers
protection for a few days only.
There's a document from the School of Law
in Potsdam about the aftermath of a nuclear
attack and how the Stasi was to deal with it.
This scenario ends with the reconstruction of East Germany.
And, to paraphrase the final sentence: "Yet
the question remains: for and by whom?"
But war is not the main reason for planning the bunkers.
The first considerations, which remained
in effect till the end, were made after
the popular uprising of June 17, 1953.
They show clearly that the purpose of
the bunkers was not the possibility of military
conflict with an outside force, but that
the entire planning for their mobilization was
focused on internal political crisis situations.
In August of 1989, Stasi head Erich Mielke
asks the District Directors: "Will
another June 17th break out tomorrow?"
The Stasi has been long in preparing for this dreaded day.
When it comes, dissidents are to be interred in isolation camps.
The plans for these camps were very precise.
They specified the camp locations in every district.
Materials had be stored for fencing it in
on short notice, and the people who were to be
brought to the compound had to be listed by name.
On Sunday, October 8 – one day before
the decisive Monday Demonstration here in
Leipzig – Erich Mielke directed all District
Administrations to update their lists, to
determine who actually was to be isolated.
There are plans for central isolation camps
in each of East Germany's 15 districts.
Following detailed instructions, historical
fortresses and fortifications are to
be converted to camps within one day.
Had it come to violent clashes here in
Leipzig on October 9th, I'm quite certain
that these measures would have been
used to beat down the demonstrations.
There'd have been no other way to restore order.
In spite of total surveillance: That the
East German majority desires a reality
far from the socialist ideals of
the Party, is unthinkable for the Stasi.
Many who were treated as enemies of
the state did not consider themselves as such.
While others who request to view their Stasi file
today say, "I was always against the system and
I engaged in small-scale acts of opposition".
Yet some of them will find that they
hadn't been watched at all – the apparatus never registered them.
For early 1989, the Stasi put the total
number of political enemies at 2,000 persons.
In October 1989, after East Germany's 40th
anniversary, 10,000 citizens take to
the streets and demand democratic reforms.
At the end of the month, over 300,000 gather in Leipzig alone.
Erich Honecker steps down.
In November, some one million people
demonstrate in East Berlin.
The Party opens the borders.
On the night of December 4th, citizens occupied
the Stasi's District Office in Rostock.
Why it was this day was clear.
Word had gotten out that files were being
destroyed in great quantities everywhere.
Mielke had given a special order to do so, which
was backed up by Prime Minister Hans Modrow.
For once East German technological
backwardness worked to our advantage because
the Ministry didn't have enough shredders.
So they'd started burning files in remote
Stasi offices and people took notice.
Internal status reports show how
Stasi employees feel abandoned by
their superiors and the government.
While the Party renames itself and continues to
exist as such, the Stasi sees itself made into
the scapegoat of the Socialist dictatorship.
Initially the plan was to convert the Ministry for
State Security into a national security agency.
The Stasi planned its own future.
But the Citizens' Committees strove
with all their might to prevent this.
Everywhere citizens are occupying Stasi buildings.
These citizens negotiated with the Stasi chief.
They insisted that a state prosecutor
should come and take Stasi
Lieutenant-General Mittag into custody.
The two knew each other well and he did
come and take him away in his car ...
but that's a different story.
More importantly, that same night the rebellious
citizens of Rostock demanded that the police take
custody of this building and secure all the files.
A group of citizens with police accompaniment,
combed it, sealed the rooms and disarmed
and discharged the Stasi personnel.
The weapons were handed over to the Army
and the employees sent home.
That was the end of Stasi work.
This citizens' group, which later formed
itself into Rostock's independent
investigative committee, then tackled
the enormous task of viewing the entire
body of documents left behind by the Stasi.
This, if you will, was the genesis of
the Federal Commission for the Stasi Records.
Fortunately - and almost mysteriously -
the Revolution proceeds without violence.
Destruction of its own archives remains the only
major resistance of the heavily armed Stasi.
Maybe the explanation is a trivial one:
The Party issued no orders to do otherwise.
It's estimated that roughly one third of
the entire Stasi material was destroyed.
Most of it dealt with the so-called
Western activities that the Central
Divisions for Intelligence conducted
in the former Federal Republic.
These files suffered most of the destruction.
After Germany's reunification, what the Stasi
has torn up by hand is reassembled by hand
by the Federal Commission for Stasi Records.
An employee here reconstructs about 10 pages a day.
If the puzzle pieces are fairly large,
a bag like this takes around 9 months.
If they aren't, it takes longer.
We've had bags with many small pieces that
a worker sat over for nearly two years.
Computers will do the painstaking task.
But the manually reconstructed originals
are still needed as evidence in court.
Significant material here.
There's the case of "IM Ingo", a bishop
of Thuringia who had been working as
an informal collaborator for years.
Then we have a university lecturer from
Kassel who worked with the Ministry.
And we discovered that Silke Maier-Witt, one
of the terrorists of the Red Army Faction in
the 1970s, was given a new identity by
the Stasi and was living in East Germany.
And we're still finding many more
IMs from East and West in here.
A single bag holds several tens of thousands paper scraps.
Some 15,000 bags are still in storage
in Magdeburg’s Central Archive.
In the 11 years of our existence,
we've reconstructed 320 or 321 bags.
Even East German law didn't allow, for
instance, wire-tapping by the Stasi.
Were any Stasi personnel prosecuted after 1989?
Criminal prosecution is irrelevant.
It's not worth mentioning.
That's the problem.
If you don't establish a dictatorship to replace
the one that ended – like East Germany did
after the Nazis - but if you decide to close
this chapter and start as a democracy.
Sometimes it stung, seeing how the
perpetrators got away, without
the consequences that we'd hoped for.
But in reverse it's all the more important
to talk openly about what was done.
If those responsible for the wire-tapping weren't
punished, one must at least be allowed to talk
about it as long as they live and beyond:
Who was responsible and how did they do it.
Would it be easier to just lay the past to rest?
To cut it off, push it away and
go blindly forward, I don't think
that's ever been done in human history.
Every society builds on its history
and just has to face up to it.
You can't run away from it even if it's unpleasant.
Nobody, I think, has managed that yet.
After the demise of East Germany,
no one wants to take the blame.
Party Leader Erich Honecker declares in 1990
that the Stasi’s country-wide expansion
went against all Party resolutions.
The Stasi was a state within the state.
Minister Erich Mielke counters: the Stasi was never autonomous.
The Party alone gave the Stasi its orders
and was informed of all activities.
The reality lies somewhere in between.
It's on record.
The Stasi files still hold much that waits to be discovered.