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The Stasi Records Agency (German : Stasi-Unterlagen-Behörde) was the organisation that administered the archives of Ministry of State Security (Stasi) of the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany). It was a government agency of the Federal Republic of Germany. It was established when the Stasi Records Act came into force on 29 December 1991. Formally it was called the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic (German : Bundesbeauftragter für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik); the official German abbreviation was BStU. On June 17, 2021, the BStU was absorbed into the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv).
The Stasi was established on 8 February 1950. [2] It functioned as the GDR's secret police, intelligence agency and crime investigation service. It grew to have around 270,000 people working for it, including about 180,000 informers, or "unofficial collaborators". [3] It was renamed the "Office for National Security" (German : Amt für Nationale Sicherheit) on 17 November 1989. [4] It was dissolved on 13 January 1990. [5]
The Stasi spied on almost every aspect of East Germans' daily lives, and it carried out international espionage. It kept files on about 5.6 million people and amassed an enormous archive. [6] [7] The archive holds 111 kilometres (69 mi) of files in total. [8] About half of the material is held in the Stasi Records Agency's headquarters in Berlin, and the rest is in its 12 regional offices. As well as written documentation, the archive has audio-visual material such as photos, slides, film, and sound recordings. [9] The Stasi also had an archive of sweat and body odour samples which its officers collected during interrogations. [10]
The agency was formally known by the title of its lead official, the "Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic" (German: Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik). Due to the unwieldy name, the Commissioner was usually referred to as the "Federal Commissioner for Stasi Records" (German: Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Stasi-Unterlagen), abbreviated as "BStU". [11] The agency itself was commonly referred to using the last name of the sitting federal commissioner, i.e. "Gauck-", "Birthler-", and "Jahn Agency" (German : Gauck-, Birthler-, & Jahn-Behörde).
It has also been called the Stasi-Unterlagen-Behörde ("Stasi Records Agency" ). [12]
The former head office of the Stasi Records Agency was in the central suburb of Lichtenberg in Berlin, in what was part of the sprawling former Stasi headquarters compound. In addition to providing access to files, it also has exhibitions, tours and public events related to the Stasi and the history of the GDR. [13]
There were also 12 regional offices of the organisation in Dresden, Erfurt, Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, and Halle, Chemnitz, Gera, Leipzig, Magdeburg, New Brandenburg, Rostock, Schwerin and Suhl. [14]
The offices in Dresden, Erfurt, Frankfurt-an-der-Oder and Halle all had permanent and changing exhibitions, offer tours to the public and host events and educational programmes relating to the activities of the Stasi in their region. [13]
The agency was a member of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience, an organisation founded in October 2011 which brings together public and private institutions in 20 countries which focus on history of the totalitarian regimes in 20th century Europe [15]
The agency was headed by a Federal Commissioner, elected by the Bundestag.
After the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party stepped down on 3 December 1989, the Stasi became the last bastion of the dictatorship. Citizens were alert to the fact that the Stasi might try to destroy files and records, in order to cover up its activities. On the morning of 4 December, dark smoke was seen coming from the chimneys of the Stasi district headquarters in Erfurt, and it was deduced that files were being burned. With the help of other citizens, a women's group, "Women for Change" (German: Frauen für Veränderung) occupied the building and the neighbouring Stasi remand prison, where they stored files for safekeeping. [16] [17]
This instigated the take over of Stasi buildings all over East Germany. Citizens gained access to the Stasi headquarters in Berlin on 15 January 1990. [18]
After German Reunification in October 1990, Joachim Gauck was appointed Special Commissioner for the Stasi Records. When Stasi Records Act was passed in December 1991, he became first Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records, heading the newly created Stasi Records Agency. [19] The act sets out the rights of people to view Stasi Records, which they were first able to do on 2 January 1992. [13]
As at January 2015, over 7 million people had applied to view their own Stasi files. In January 2015 the Stasi Records Agency created a digital portal and made files available online, although for privacy reasons no files of living people are available digitally. The website includes information about the 1953 uprising in East Germany and the events leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall. [7] [20]
Controversy arose after an investigation, whose report had been leaked to the media, found out that the BStU at one point employed at least 79 former Stasi members and still employed 52 as of 2009. The great majority of these were hired from the "bodyguards" branch of the Stasi; some were former archivists and some were just technicians. There was suspicion that some of these former Stasi officers managed to manipulate records, so a rule was put in place that no former Stasi officers are allowed to enter the Stasi Archives by themselves. The report recommended, for several reasons besides the issue of former Stasi officers working for the BStU, to integrate the BStU into the German Federal Archives. It also reported there was a constitutionally questionable situation.[ citation needed ] In summer 2008, the German Parliament decided to found an expert commission to analyze the role and future of the BStU.[ citation needed ]
In the early 1990s the BStU began work on reconstructing documents that had been destroyed by Stasi officers and staff before the archives were secured by citizens occupying Stasi offices. [21] [22] The destruction had initially been performed using industrial shredders, but these soon broke down and officers resorted to tearing files by hand before stuffing the pieces into bags that were then meant to be burned or chemically treated. [23] [24] Approximately 16,000 such bags came to be held by the BStU, which estimated that each contained between 2,500 and 3,500 document fragments. [22] By early 2007 the contents of around 350 of these bags had been manually reconstructed by a small team of full-time workers, [23] a task that is being continued by the Federal Archives since it absorbed the BStU. [22] According to the archives, an additional "few thousand" bags containing very finely shredded paper were also secured by the BStU, but these were all disposed of by the agency in 1991 and so cannot be the subject of any attempts at reconstruction. [22]
As part of an effort to increase the speed of reconstruction, the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology was awarded a contract in 2003 to develop a computerised system for document reconstruction, which it refers to as "ePuzzler" and which it first deployed in 2007. [24] [25] This pilot project attempted reconstruction on the contents of 400 bags and demonstrated that the concept worked in principle, [24] [22] but a wider deployment was not undertaken due to limitations in scanner technology and concerns over cost efficiency. [21] [22]
The Rosenholz files are a collection of microfilmed Stasi files that have information on East Germany's foreign intelligence service employees and informers. They contain 320,000 agent cards and 57,000 spy reports. [26] They were acquired by the CIA shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in unclear circumstances. [8] Between 2001 and 2003 the United States gave the files it had, which were on 380 CD-ROMs, to the Stasi Records Agency. Since July 2003, these have been available for viewing. [27] They provide an insight into the Stasi's spying activities in western countries. [28] They have been used to identify Stasi spies and informers, including Lothar Bisky, the chairman of the Party of Democratic Socialism [26] and its successor Party of The Left.
The CIA passed on some of the material to the United Kingdom and other countries. In 2011, the German government asked the UK's MI5 to return the files they have, but they refused due to concerns that British Stasi spies could be exposed. [8]
The Ministry for State Security, commonly known as the Stasi, was the state security service and secret police of East Germany from 1950 to 1990.
The Rosenholz files are a collection of 381 CD-ROMs containing 280,000 files with information on persons who were sources and targets or employees and helpers in the focus of the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, the primary foreign intelligence agency of the former German Democratic Republic. At the beginning it was thought that the files mostly contain the real names of agents who worked for the HVA in the former West Germany, but later it became clear that at least 90% of the persons never worked for or with the HVA.
The Sportvereinigung Dynamo was the sport association of the security agencies of former East Germany.
Silke Maier-Witt is a German former member of the Red Army Faction who later became a trauma psychologist and welfare organiser. During 2000 she was recruited to work in Kosovo by Germany's Civil Peace Service in the aftermath of the Kosovo War. She subsequently settled in North Macedonia.
Marianne Birthler is a German human rights advocate and politician of the Alliance '90/The Greens. From 2000 to 2011, she served as the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records, responsible for investigating the past crimes of the Stasi, the former communist secret police of East Germany. In 2016 she was offered the nomination of the CDU/CSU and her own party for President of Germany, but after some time decided not to run; the parties would have had a majority in the Federal Convention, securing her the election.
The Stasi Museum is a research and memorial centre concerning the political system of the former East Germany. It is located in the Lichtenberg locality of Berlin, in the former headquarters of the Stasi, on Ruschestraße, near Frankfurter Allee and U-Bahn station Magdalenenstraße.
Roland Jahn is a German journalist and former East German dissident who took office as Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records in March 2011.
Andreas Schulze is a German political consultant for the Alliance 90/The Greens, and the designated Press Secretary of the President of Germany, Joachim Gauck.
The Commissioner of the Land of Brandenburg for the Study of the Repercussions of the Communist Dictatorship is responsible for advising residents of Brandenburg who were directly persecuted or indirectly affected by the communist rule during the period of Soviet occupation from 1945-49 and during the existence of the German Democratic Republic from 1949-1989. The agency is formally known as "die Beauftragte des Landes Brandenburg zur Aufarbeitung der Folgen der kommunistischen Diktatur“ and usually referred to as „Die Landesbeauftragte für Aufarbeitung“ or „Die Aufarbeitungsbeauftragte“.
Hildegard Johanna Maria Trabant was an East German woman who became the fiftieth known person to die at the Berlin Wall. Trabant was shot and killed by East German border guards during a crossing attempt, one of only eight women victims of the Berlin Wall, and was the only escapee victim known to have a record of loyalty toward the East German regime.
Zersetzung was a psychological warfare technique used by the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) to repress political opponents in East Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. Zersetzung served to combat alleged and actual dissidents through covert means, using secret methods of abusive control and psychological manipulation to prevent anti-government activities. People were commonly targeted on a pre-emptive and preventive basis, to limit or stop activities of dissent that they may have gone on to perform, and not on the basis of crimes they had actually committed. Zersetzung methods were designed to break down, undermine, and paralyze people behind "a facade of social normality" in a form of "silent repression".
Helmut Müller-Enbergs is a German political scientist who has written extensively on the Stasi and related aspects of the German Democratic Republic's history.
An unofficial collaborator or IM, or euphemistically informal collaborator, was an informant in the German Democratic Republic who delivered private information to the Ministry for State Security. At the end of the East German government, there was a network of around 189,000 informants, working at every level of society.
Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk is a German historian and author. His work is focused on the German Democratic Republic and its Ministry for State Security.
Heinz Fiedler was a major general in East Germany's Ministry for State Security (Stasi). Between 1970 and 1990 he was in charge of the organisation's Department VI which gave him responsibility for border security and tourist traffic. In December 1993 he hanged himself.
Ehrhart Neubert is a retired German Evangelical minister and theologian.
Bernhard Elsner was a Major general in the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi). During the course of a long career with the quasi-military ministry, between 1972 and 1987 he was Commander of the Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment.
Stefan Wolle is a German historian. A focus of his socio-historical research is on the German Democratic Republic which is where, before reunification, he lived and worked.
The Memorial and Education Centre Andreasstraße, is a museum in Erfurt, Germany, which is housed in a former prison used by the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi). It is informally known as the Stasi Museum.
Gerhard Riege was a respected East German law professor.
Beim BStU arbeiten 1.313 (Stand 1. Januar 2021) Beschäftige an 14 Standorten.[Work at the BStU1,313 (as of January 1, 2021) employees at 14 locations .]
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