A Brief History of the Stasi
Exploring how the Stasi became one of the most ruthless and oppressive secret polices of the 20th Century.
The spoils of war
As Berlin fell at the hands of the allied forces marking the end of the Second World War, the Americans, Brits, and Soviets were already earmarking how a defeated Germany would be split in this new, postwar order. Later, at the Potsdam Conference in August 1945, an agreement was formally put in place between Churchill (and then Attlee), Truman, and Stalin – Germany would be carved up into four zones, occupied respectively by the French, the British, the United States, and the Soviet Union. The same would go for Berlin. As relations soured between the West and the Soviets ceding to the Cold War, by 1949 Germany would become two countries, a democratic and capitalist West Germany (Federal Republic of Germany), and a communist East Germany (German Democratic Republic, or GDR).
A strong postwar recovery in West Germany, thanks to US financial support, accentuated the disparity between the two nascent nations – now no longer just ideological but economic. Seeing their prosperous neighbours flourish whilst having their personal liberties curtailed by the Soviet puppet government at home, East Germans moved en masse across the border. So much so that a porous border that existed in the abstract was about to become physical.
By the early 1960s, an estimated four million East Germans had fled to West Germany. These were mostly young, educated, professionals, and they did this predominantly through Berlin, which, although situated in the East, was still under its postwar four-power agreement. This meant that whilst the area was militarised, there was free travel between the zones. A loophole for defectors.
In 1961, after some sabre-rattling between the Soviets and the US, Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party, demanded the total withdraw of allied troops from West Berlin. A demand his US opposite, John F. Kennedy, couldn’t and wouldn’t acquiesce to.
Meanwhile, Walter Ulbricht, the GDR’s head of state, in a bid to quell the westward defections – now a national embarrassment – and with the Kremlin’s backing, began plans to erect a wall. They secretly stockpiled the materials, all the while publicly denying any intention to do so. When the wall did go up – first as a barbed wire fence – it took many, both domestically and internationally, by surprise. It was a force majeure that held little regard for families on either side of the divide. Over time, it became 96-miles long, 13-feet tall, and overseen by 302 watchtowers, enforced with sharpshooters, mines, and barbwire.
The Staatssicherheitsdienst
The Staatssicherheitsdienst, or Stasi, was the GDR’s answer to the KGB. Founded in the 1950, it mostly concerned itself with perceived foreign threats. However, after the uprising of 1953, when workers demonstrated against unfair work quotas which were only quelled by armed Soviet intervention, the GDR realised that existential dangers could come from within as well as outside. From then on, its own citizens were as likely to be the subject of dossiers as foreign agents. This was mostly achieved by the use of informants – neighbours, friends, families, coworkers, lovers – keeping the Stasi abreast of any dissent. In this febrile atmosphere, gossip, betrayal, paranoia, and profiteering, any information – no matter how mundane – became weaponised. The almost unimaginable officiousness and granularity of this surveillance still exists, at least in part, with a paper trail 111km long. In the last days of the GDR, a concerted attempt was made to destroy the most incriminating evidence, but even that became too burdensome a task for the industrial shredders. What wasn’t shredded was burnt, before being abandoned altogether. But more on this later.
Whilst the Soviet playbook had moved somewhat beyond the brutality of Stalinist purges just a decade before, and even a degree of contrition (by Soviet standards anyway) was expressed, the fear of being interrogated by the Stasi and the recriminations for even a perceived lack of fealty towards the regime were very real. Torture and imprisonment weren’t off the table, but in these more insidious times, you were more likely to encounter their ‘Zersetzung’ (decay or corrosion) tactics. This was a form of harassment and sabotage that aimed to destabilise one’s work and social life, making compliance all the more likely.
The Stasi made their presence known – subtly or overtly. You were being watched. Your family and friends were being watched. By inserting themselves so thoroughly and stiflingly into your day-to-day existence, political agitators or movements were defenestrated, civil disobedience quelled, and the regime remained unchallenged. By some counts, one in sixty were said to be involved with the Staatssicherheitsdienst.
They also preoccupied themselves with ever smaller and difficult to detect listening devices and cameras. Some of these have been preserved for prosperity in the Stasi Museum in Berlin.
More thorough details of life both under and working for the Stasi can be found in Anna Funder’s excellent ‘Stasiland’, which draws on extensive interviews with those who lived through it.
The beginning of the end
As the Cold War trudged into the late 1980s, the Kremlin’s grip over the USSR began to cede and states that found themselves behind the Iron Curtain after the Warsaw Pact, began to protest for their independence.
Compared to its free market western counterpart, communism had fallen far behind. And as tales of living standards, advancements, and life outside of crushing censorship made their way through, demands for a freer, more modern, and affluent life soon followed. The experiment, as it were, had failed.
Tentative yet unconvincing talk of reforms on behalf of Moscow wasn’t enough.
In short, the Soviet Union was in its death throes, and rebellions in the Caucasus and Baltics were dangerously undermining their authority.
Arguably, it took the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 – long a symbol of the divide – to precipitate the eventual and formal dissolution of the USSR in 1991.
Putting the pieces back together
Germany’s reunification has meant, for some at least, putting the pieces back together – both figuratively and literally. The Stasi Records Agency began the laborious task of attempting to reassemble documents that weren’t outright destroyed. No small feat given that there around 16,000 bags of torn records to reassemble. The task has now been passed to the German Federal Archives, which hopes that tech advancements rather than manual reassembly can clear the backlog. It is, of course, feasible that the will or resources to recover the past yield and it is never accomplished.
It is possible to view one’s own files, if they’ve been recovered or were never tampered with at all.
With so many incriminating secrets, there are others, of course, who’d much prefer that the past stayed just that.
Moscow is silent
Someone whose worldview was coloured by the fall of the Berlin wall and German reunification and has an outsized influence on modern geopolitics is one Vladimir Putin. He was stationed in Dresden as a young KGB officer. The nearby Stasi headquarters had already been stormed by protestors, knowing that the local KGB headquarters would be next, he phoned a Red Army tank unit for support. Their answer: no interventions without Moscow’s say-so, and ‘Moscow is silent’.
This episode is often cited as a formative experience for Putin, one which haunted him and goes some way to explaining his preoccupation with irredentism and Russia’s perceived strength on the global stage. He also talks longingly and often about the Russian imperialism of yore, and his invasion of Ukraine is long seen as a restoration to these previous heights.
Given his close ties to the Stasi and the GDR and his background as a KGB officer, the effect is clear on his domestic and foreign policy outlook, and the means to which he polices and curtails Russians’ liberties.
The spirit and methods of the Stasi through Putin (and others) are well and truly alive in the 21st Century.
