Joachim Wilhelm Gauck is a German politician who served as President of Germany from 2012 to 2017. A former Lutheran pastor,he came to prominence as an anti-communist civil rights activist in East Germany.
Siegfried Reiprich is a German human rights activist and author. He was involved in the resistance against the communist regime of the German Democratic Republic (GDR),which led to him being expelled from university and eventually banished from the GDR. In 2009,he was appointed by the Government of Saxony as the Director of the Stiftung Sächsische Gedenkstätten. In 2011,he was elected as a member of the Executive Board of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience.
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.
Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk is a German historian and author. His work is focused on the German Democratic Republic and its Ministry for State Security.
Thomas Ammer was a German historian who as a young man studied to become a physician. He was arrested and imprisoned in 1958 for anti-government political activism in East Germany and he never qualified as a medical doctor. His 15-year prison sentence was cut short in August 1964 when his release was purchased by the West German government,and at the age of 27 he relocated to the German Federal Republic.
Ehrhart Neubert was a German evangelical minister and theologian.
William Borm was a German politician,of the Free Democratic Party (FDP). He was a member of the Bundestag from 1965 to 1972,and a member of the FDP National Executive Committee from 1960 to 1982. Several years after his death,it was revealed that since the late 1950s he had been an agent of the Stasi,the State Security Service of the German Democratic Republic.
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.
Katrin Hattenhauer is a German painter and civil rights activist. In the late 1980s she was a member of the GDR-opposition movement. On 4 September 1989 she demonstrated "For an Open Country with Free People",marking the beginning of the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig. Her paintings and social sculptures have been exhibited in Europe.
Ursula Fischer is a German former national politician (PDS).
Dagmar Enkelmann is a German politician of Die Linke party.
Stephan Krawczyk is a German writer and songwriter. Before 1989 he was a noted East German dissident.
Jutta Braband is a former German politician. In the German Democratic Republic she was a civil rights activist who after 1990 became a PDS member of the Germany parliament (Bundestag). Her parliamentary career ended in May 1992 after it had become known that fifteen years earlier she had worked for the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) as a registered informant.
Christa Luft is a German economist and politician of the SED/PDS. Luft joined the SED in 1958. From 18 November 1989 to 18 March 1990,she was the Minister of Economics in the Modrow government. From 1994 to 2002 she was member of the Bundestag for the PDS.
Dietmar Keller was an East German politician (SED/PDS) who served as Minister for Culture in the Modrow government. After reunification he sat as a member of the German parliament ("Bundestag") between 1990 and 1994.
Stefan Liebich is a German politician,who served as a member of the Bundestag for the Democratic Socialist party The Left between 2009 and 2021.
Harry Weibel is a German historian. His main topics are neo-Nazism,right-wing extremism and antisemitism in the GDR and racism in Germany from 1945 to the present.
Wolfgang Lesser was a German composer and music official of the GDR.
Werner Titel was a German politician and party functionary of the Democratic Farmers' Party of Germany (DBD).
