Stasi (Ministry for State Security)

When the Stasi's officers knew the end was coming in late 1989, they tore up paper by hand. The torn pages were stuffed into sacks to wait for the shredders and furnaces. About 16,000 of those sacks survived, each holding 2,500 to 3,500 fragments, and archivists in Berlin have spent three decades piecing pages back together⁴.

Founding

On 8 February 1950 East Germany's parliament, the Volkskammer, unanimously passed a bill creating a Ministry for State Security. The ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) had decided on it in secret at the end of January. Wilhelm Zaisser became minister and Erich Mielke his permanent secretary. No parliamentary oversight was provided for².

In practice Soviet officers of the MGB, the forerunner of the KGB, held the reins: each head of a Stasi department had a Soviet "instructor." The ministry began with about 1,100 staff and nearly doubled in 1952 to about 8,800. Its early methods, by the account of the Stasi Records Archive itself, were arbitrary arrest and confessions extracted by night interrogation and torture^2,1.

After the uprising of 17 June 1953, which the Stasi had failed to foresee, the ministry was demoted to a state secretariat inside the Interior Ministry and Zaisser was replaced by Ernst Wollweber. It regained ministry rank later in the decade, and on 1 November 1957 Mielke took charge. He stayed until November 1989^1,8.

Shield and sword

The ministry described itself as the "shield and sword of the Party." It answered only to the SED leadership and combined a secret police, an investigative authority with its own prisons, its own armed units and a foreign intelligence service¹.

It grew fastest in the 1970s, when détente brought more contact with the West and the Stasi responded with new grounds for surveillance. By 1989 it had about 91,000 full-time employees. Its most important tool, in its own words its "key weapon," was the network of unofficial collaborators, or IMs: about 189,000 of them in 1989, roughly one for every 90 East Germans^1,3.

Its methods changed over time. In the 1950s the Stasi kidnapped opponents from West Berlin and staged show trials. From the 1970s, with East Germany seeking international recognition, it favored quieter methods that the Stasi Records Archive calls "psychic demolition" (in Stasi German, Zersetzung): rumors, manipulation and engineered failures meant to isolate and discredit targets, often without their realizing who was behind it^1,8.

Main Directorate A

Foreign espionage belonged to the Hauptverwaltung A (HV A), led by Markus Wolf from the early 1950s until 1986. It concentrated on West Germany: the Chancellery, the parties, the ministries, NATO and industry. By 1989 it had some 4,600 to 4,800 staff and about 1,550 informers in West Germany; over forty years roughly 6,000 West Germans are estimated to have worked for it^1,5.

Its best-known agent, Günter Guillaume, rose to become an aide to Chancellor Willy Brandt. His arrest in April 1974 preceded Brandt's resignation in May; American diplomats in Bonn reported that Brandt saw the spy case as "the last factor" in a political situation already going against him^5,6. See the Guillaume affair.

The Stasi cooperated closely with the other Warsaw Pact services. In 1977 they agreed on a joint database, known by its Russian acronym SOUD, which by 1987 held records on more than 188,000 people considered dangerous¹.

The end

Mielke resigned on 7 November 1989. On 17 November the government renamed the ministry the Office for National Security; under pressure from the Round Table it ordered that office dissolved on 13 January 1990. Citizens' committees occupied Stasi offices across the country from December, and on 15 January 1990 demonstrators entered the Berlin headquarters to stop the destruction of files⁸.

The HV A was allowed to dissolve itself in 1990 and used the opportunity to destroy most of its records^1,4.

On 14 November 1991 the Bundestag passed the Stasi Records Act, which opened the files to the people they concerned and set the rules for their use by researchers and the press⁷.

Operations in these files

1956 – 6 May 1974 The Guillaume affair An East German intelligence officer, planted in the West in 1956, rose to become an aide to Chancellor Willy Brandt. His arrest in April 1974 was followed two weeks later by Brandt's resignation. May 1981 – April 1989 Operation RYAN The KGB–GRU intelligence alert launched in May 1981 to detect a feared American nuclear first strike, its indicator lists, and the long argument over whether Moscow's fear was real. OPERATION · 1983 17 July 1983 – 1989 Operation INFEKTION The 1980s KGB and Stasi campaign to persuade the world that the US military had created AIDS at Fort Detrick: how the story was planted, spread and disowned, and what its codename really was.