The Ministry of State Security (German Departmentium für Staatssicherheit, MfS), commonly known as the Stasi (short German for Staatssicherheit, meaning state security), was an official intelligence agency in the German Democratic Republic established on February 8, 1950. It is described as one of the most effective and repressive in the world.
The headquarters of the Stasi (GDR) was in East Berlin, with the largest complex in the Lichtenberg district and several smaller ones in other parts of the city. Its motto was Schild und Schwert der Partei ("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 Internal Affairs (MVD of Russia). The formations mentioned in brackets replaced the pre-war NKGB and NKVD.
Wilhelm Seisser became the First Minister of the Stasi. After the uprising in June 1953, he was forced to leave this post becausetried unsuccessfully to replace SED general secretary W alter Ulbricht. The latter was approved by Ernst Wollweb as leader of the Stasi. In 1957, after a SED dispute between Ulbricht and Erich Honecker, the latter refused to resign and was replaced by his former deputy, Erich Mielke. The Stasi is, in fact, precisely his brainchild.
Cooperation with the KGB
Although the Stasi was given the green light as early as 1957, until 1989 the Soviet intelligence service KGB, founded in 1954, continued to create its own liaison officers in all eight Stasi directorates. Cooperation between the two services was so close that the KGB invited the Stasi to set up operational bases in Moscow and Leningrad to monitor the visits of East German tourists to the Soviet Union. In 1978, Mielke officially granted the East German KGB officers the same rights and powers as his subordinates in the Soviet Union. The Stasi is a kind of branch of the KGB.
Number and composition
Between 1950 and 1989 the Stasi had a total of 274,000 recruited to eradicate "class enemies". At the time of the dissolution of the secret service, 91,015 people were fully employed, of which 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 informants in the country and 1,533 in West Germany.
While these employee numbers are from official records, according to the federal commissioner,responsible for the Stasi archives in Berlin, due to a number of destroyed records, some researchers speculatively increase the number of intelligence officers to 500,000. Some go even further - up to two million.
Scope of activity
Stasi officers were present at all major industrial sites. 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 filmed people with special cameras. Schools, universities and hospitals were completely filled with spies.
Recruitment
The Stasi had an official categorization for each type of informer, as well as official instructions on how to get information from anyone. Intelligence functions were distributed among those who were already involved in some way in state security (police, army), dissident movements and the Protestant church. The information collected from the last two groups was used to divide or discredit individuals.
Whistleblowers have made this important depending on material or social incentives that are hampered by a sense of adventure. According to official figures, only 7.7% of them were forced to cooperate. Most of them 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 incountry
The Stasi's position rose 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 faith.
In the same year, the number of intelligence officers rose to 180,000, varying from 20,000 to 30,000 in the early 50s, reaching 100,000 in 1968 in response to the so-called Ostpolitik ("Ostpolitik", normalization relations between West Germany and Eastern Europe). The Stasi also acted as a KGB representative for activities in other Eastern Bloc countries such as Poland, where there was also a highly visible Soviet presence.
The Stasi penetrated almost every aspect of life in the GDR. In the mid-1980s, the intelligence network began to grow in both German countries, and continued to expand until East Germany fell in 1989. In its best years, the 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.
Repressions
People were jailed by the Stasi for a variety of reasons, from wanting 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 methods of the Stasi? This special serviceperfected a technique for psychologically harassing the country's enemies known as Zersetzung, a term borrowed from chemistry for something like corrosion.
Post 1970s The Ministry of the Interior began to gradually abandon persecution and torture. They realized that psychological harassment was far less effective than other covert operations. Victims should not even be aware of the source of their problems, or even of their real nature. This is the secret of effective work of the secret police.
Tactics within the Zersetzung were generally a violation of the victim's private or family life. Typical German intelligence operations at the time often included home invasions, searches, product swaps (in cases where someone needed to be put to sleep or poisoned), etc. Other activities included campaigns to undermine reputation, unfounded accusations, provocations, psychological pressure, eavesdropping, mysterious phone calls. Usually the victims did not connect all this with the actions of the Stasi. Some people were driven to mental breakdowns and even suicide.
The big advantage of this type of harassment was that, due to its covert 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 "Zersetzung" technique was also adopted by other security services in Eastern Europe, as well as the modern Russian FSB. The Stasi is the prototype of many modernspecial services.
Beginning of the end
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, starting a period of growing unrest, as well as spreading knowledge about the activities of this notorious intelligence agency. At the time, the Stasi leaders tried to prevent the emerging economic problems from turning into a political collapse, but failed to do so.
The Stasi officers controlled and "directed" the transformation of the public image of East Germany towards the idea of it as a democratic, capitalist state of the West. According to Ion Mihai Pacepi, head of security intelligence in communist Romania, security intelligence services in similar communist regimes in Eastern Europe had similar plans.
On March 12, 1990, the German newspaper Der Spiegel reported that the Stasi was indeed trying to implement a plan to transform Germany and change its power. The aforementioned Pacepi also noted that the events in Russia, when the former KGB colonel Vladimir Putin came to power, are reminiscent of this plan.
On 7 November 1989, the Stasi sent a letter to Erich Mielke in response to the rapidly changing political and social situation in the GDR. On November 17, the Council of Ministers (Ministry of GDR Affairs) renamed the Stasi the State Security Office (Amt für Nationale Sicherheit - AfNS),the leadership of which was transferred to Colonel General Wolfgang Schwanitz. On December 8, the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Denmark, Hans Modrow, ordered the dissolution of the local intelligence agency AfNS, which was approved by the Council of Ministers on December 14 of the same year. The leadership of the GDR eventually followed the example of Denmark.
Scandal
During a parliamentary investigation into public funds that disappeared after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was found that the East German leadership handed over large sums of money to Martin Schlaff through accounts in Vaduz, the capital of Liechtenstein, in exchange for goods in accordance with the Western embargo. In addition, the senior officers of the former Stasi continued their careers in managerial positions in Schlaff's factories. Investigations concluded that "Schlaff's business empire played a key role" in the Stasi's efforts to secure the financial future of its agents and maintain the intelligence network.
During the political turmoil known in Germany as "Wende" and the peaceful revolution in the fall of 1989, the Stasi offices were filled with many protesters. It is assumed that by that time Stasi managed to destroy about 5% of all their documents. The volume of documentary material is estimated at 1 billion sheets of paper.
Fall of the GDR
When the state policy of East Germany began to drift towards Perestroika and de-Sovietization, this also affected the Stasi. Large quantities of documents were destroyed manually and with the help of crushers. As these actions worsened, the protestserupted in front of the Stasi buildings. On January 15, 1990, a large group of people gathered in front of the secret service headquarters in East Berlin to stop the destruction of documents. They believed that all these papers should be available and used to punish those who were involved in 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 this crowd, as were former unofficial Stasi colleagues who wanted to destroy the documents. Despite the violence, some people managed to get into the archives and take away a number of documents, which were subsequently used in the search for former members of the secret police.
After German reunification
After the merger of East and West Germany on October 3, 1990, the Office of the Stasi Federal Commissioner for Archives began a discussion about whether they should be kept closed or open to the public.
Those who opposed the opening of the archives cited privacy as the reason. They believed that the information in the documents would cause negative emotions among 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 imprisonment would lead to bloodrevenge directed against them. Prime Minister Lothar de Maizières even predicted the murders 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 the organization. Some thought that almost everyone was to blame.
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 allowed greater access to and use of documents. Parallel to the decision to keep the archive at the secret police's central office in east Berlin, he also determined who could have access to the documents, allowing everyone to see their dossier. In 1992, the German government abolished the secrecy of the archives and decided to open them.
Further fate of 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 get documentation.
The fate of the Stasi staff
Despite the repressions of the new government against former intelligence officers, the charges against them could not be connectedexclusively with membership in the organization. The person under investigation must be involved in illegal activities, and not just registered as a Stasi agent. Erich Mielke and Erich Honecker were among the dignitaries on the list of accused. Mielke was the Minister of State Security of the GDR from 1957 to 1989
In October 1993, he was sentenced to six years in prison for the murder of two policemen in 1931. He died in May 2000 in a Berlin nursing home. Erich Honecker was President of the State from 1976 to 1989. During his trial and brief imprisonment, he was simultaneously treated for liver cancer. Due to his impending death, he was allowed to leave for Chile, where he died in May 1994. Stasi ID cards are quite expensive today and highly valued by collectors.
