As the enforcement arm of the German Democratic Republic's Communist
Party, the Stasi at its height in 1989 employed 91,000 people to watch
a country of 16.4 million. A sprawling bureaucracy almost three times
the size of Hitler's Gestapo was spying on a population a quarter that
of Nazi Germany.
Unlike the prison camps of the Gestapo or the summary executions of
the Soviet Union's KGB, the Stasi strove for subtlety. "They offered
incentives, made it clear people should cooperate, recruited informal
helpers to infiltrate the entire society," says Konrad Jarausch, a
historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "They
beat people up less often, sure, but they psychologically trampled
people. Which is worse depends on what you prefer."
That finesse helped the Stasi quell dissent, but it also fostered a
pervasive and justified paranoia. And it generated an almost
inconceivable amount of paper, enough to fill more than 100 miles of
shelves. The agency indexed and cross-referenced 5.6 million names in
its central card catalog alone. Hundreds of thousands of "unofficial
employees" snitched on friends, coworkers, and their own spouses,
sometimes because they'd been extorted and sometimes in exchange for
money, promotions, or permission to travel abroad.
For such an organized state, East Germany fell apart in a decidedly
messy way. When the country's eastern bloc neighbors opened their
borders in the summer of 1989, tens of thousands of East Germans fled
to the West through Hungary and Czechoslovakia. By autumn, protests
and riots had spread throughout East Germany, with the participants
demanding an end to restrictions on travel and speech. In the first
week of October, thousands of demonstrators in Dresden turned violent,
throwing rocks at police, who broke up the crowd with dogs,
truncheons, and water cannons. The government described the thousand
people they arrested as "hooligans" to state-controlled media.
But on October 9, the situation escalated. In Leipzig that night,
70,000 people marched peacefully around the city's ring road — which
goes right past the Stasi office. Agents asked for permission from
Berlin to break up the demonstration, but this was just a few months
after the Chinese government had brutally shut down pro-democracy
protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, to international condemnation.
The East German government didn't want a similar bloodbath, so the
Stasi did nothing. A week later, 120,000 people marched; a week after
that, the number was 300,000 — in a city with a population of only
530,000.
In November, hundreds of East and West Berliners began dismantling the
wall that bisected the city. But the communist government was still in
power, negotiating with dissidents and hoping to hold on. Inside the
Stasi, leaders hoped that if they weathered whatever changes were
imminent, they'd be able to get back to business under a different
name. But just in case, the head of the Stasi ordered the agency to
start destroying the incriminating paperwork it had on hand.
In several small cities, rumors started circulating that records were
being destroyed. Smoke, fires, and departing trucks confirmed the
fears of angry Germans, who rushed in to their local Stasi offices,
stopped the destruction, and spontaneously organized citizen
committees that could post guards to secure the archives.
Demonstrators spray-painted the walls with slogans like "The files
belong to us" and "Stasi get out." Finally, on the evening of January
15, 1990, thousands of demonstrators pushed in the front gate of the
Stasi's fortified Berlin compound.
At headquarters, agents had been more discreet than their colleagues
in the hinterlands. Burning all those files would tip off angry
Berliners that something was up. When the first destruction orders
came in, they began stacking bags of paper in the "copper kettle," a
copper-lined basement designed as a surveillance-proof computer room.
The room quickly filled with bags of shredded and torn paper. Today,
even the people gathering and archiving the Stasi files express
grudging admiration for the achievement. "Destroying paper is shit
work," says government archivist Stephan Wolf. "After two days your
joints hurt. They ripped for two months."
But a few days after demonstrators breached the Stasi front gate, the
archives still hadn't been found. A citizen group coalesced,
determined to track them down. Among the searchers was a 23-year-old
plumber named David Gill, a democracy activist barred from university
because his father was a Protestant minister. He was secretly studying
theology at an underground seminary in Berlin.
Accompanied by cooperative police, Stasi agents led Gill and his
compatriots through twisting alleys and concrete-walled courtyards,
all eerily empty. Finally they arrived at a nondescript office
building in the heart of the compound. Inside, there was more paper
than he had ever imagined. "We had all lived under the pressure of the
Stasi. We all knew they could know everything," Gill says today. "But
we didn't understand what that meant until that moment. Suddenly it
was palpable."
Gill and his crew of volunteers preserved whatever they could,
commandeering trucks and borrowing cars to collect files from Stasi
safe houses and storage facilities all over Berlin. Most of it was
still intact. Some of it was shredded, unrecoverable. They threw that
away. But then there were also bags and piles of hand-torn stuff,
which they saved without knowing what to do with it. "We didn't have
time to look at it all," Gill says. "We had no idea what it would
mean."
Bertram Nickolay grew up in Saarland, a tiny German state close to
Luxembourg that is about as far from East Germany as you could go in
West Germany. He came to West Berlin's Technical University in 1974 to
study engineering, the same year Ulrike Poppe was placed under Stasi
surveillance on the other side of the Berlin Wall. A Christian, he
felt out of place on a campus still full of leftist radicals praising
East German communism and cursing the US.
Instead, Nickolay gravitated toward exiled East German dissidents and
democracy activists. "I had a lot of friends who were writers and
intellectuals in the GDR. There was an emotional connection," he says.
Today, Nickolay is head of the Department of Security Technology for
the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology.
Fraunhofer is Europe's largest research nonprofit, with 56 branches in
Germany alone and an annual budget of more than $1 billion.
(Fraunhofer researchers invented the MP3 audio codec, which netted the
society more than $85 million in license fees in 2006.)
In 1996, Nickolay saw a TV news report on an unusual project. A team
working for the Stasi Records Office (BStU), the newly created
ministry responsible for managing the mountain of paper left behind by
the secret police, had begun manually puzzling together bags full of
documents, scrap by scrap. The results were explosive: Here was
additional proof that East Germany sheltered terrorists, ran national
sports doping programs, and conducted industrial espionage across
Western Europe. BStU's hand-assembly program also exposed hundreds of
the Stasi's secret informants — their ranks turned out to include
bishops, university professors, and West German bureaucrats.
But the work is painfully slow. Gerd Pfeiffer, the project's manager,
says he and a dwindling staff have reassembled 620,500 pages of Stasi
secrets in the 13 years since the project began. That works out to one
bag per worker per year — 327 bags so far — and 700 years to finish.
That TV segment resonated with Nickolay — he had opposed the East
German regime, and he had the necessary technical expertise. "This is
essentially a problem of automation," he says, "and that's something
Fraunhofer is very good at." He sent a letter to the head of BStU
offering his help.
The government was hesitant, but eventually the BStU issued a
proof-of-concept challenge: Anyone who could digitally turn 12 pieces
of ripped-up paper into a legible document or documents would get a
grant. About 20 teams responded. Two years later, Nickolay's group was
the only one to succeed, earning a contract for a two-year, 400-bag
pilot project.
On a gray day last fall, I sat in front of two wall-mounted Sharp
Aquos flatscreen TVs hooked up to four networked computers. Next to
me, Jan Schneider, Nickolay's deputy and the manager of the Stasi
document reconstruction project, booted up the machines. (This was
just a demo: Nickolay refused to show me the actual lab, citing German
privacy law.)