An Archive Built for All the Wrong Reasons: The Stasi Files

       My interest in World War II can date back to my undergrad years as a history major.  One of the most fascinating subjects to me that came from “the big one” was the East German State Security Service or better known as the Stasi, one of the most repressive secret police forces in history.  The Stasi built an enormous archive in which they were able to organize, file, and locate thousands of records efficiently; but it was built for all the wrong reasons.

      By the end of their regime the Stasi had 91,015 full time employees with an additional 189,000 unofficial collaborators.  With the East German population being roughly 16.4 million in 1989, the ratio of Stasi employees to citizens was more than 1 to 180.  Compare that to Russia’s secret police at the time, the KGB, whose ratio was about 1 to 595.  The Stasi collected intelligence and surveillance on nearly everything including personal finances, medical records, sexual habits, and even books checked out of libraries the Stasi were always watching and listening.   

BStU

      After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Stasi seemed to disappear without a fight, leaving only hundreds of thousands of feet of files; files that dug into the deepest secrets of those living in East Germany.  This Peaceful Revolution signaled the beginning of a social and political debate that culminated with the files of the dreaded secret police being opened up in accordance with a new law, the Stasi Records Act. The Stasi Records Act addresses privacy rights and open access of one of the largest archives in Germany that provided insight into the lives of those under surveillance during one of the world’s most suspicious periods in history.  The department established to uphold this new set of laws, abbreviated in German as BStU, had one of the toughest jobs after the Stasi fell, which was to save as many files as possible.  

Mail sacks of shredded records.

 As the Peaceful Revolution began, many Stasi officers began shredding and destroying every kind of record from paper documents to audiovisual holdings.  Thankfully protesters, and the luck of several shredding machines breaking, the Stasi were not able to complete their final mission of destroying every secret-bearing record.  The Stasi officers did manage to make a dent in their collection of secret information with nearly 16,000 mail sacks of shredded material saved today in the archives waiting to be pieced back together.  To the public they destroyed possible memories; to the archivist they destroyed provenance and original order.  The BStU and the German citizens could not be more pleased in how many records they were able to preserve.  As of 2011 the archives encompasses nearly fifty miles of documents and 1.4 million photographs.  One of the most important, and most challenging, responsibilities of the BStU is to essentially piece together one of the world’s largest puzzles.

Three additional resources:

• A fantastically gripping movie that depicts the surveillance of the Stasi along with some insight on how they maintained these records is The Lives of Others. See the trailer here.
• Here is a great article that shows how today’s Germany is putting together the lost records: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/13/east-germany-stasi-files-zirndorf
• A shocking and detailed account of a victim of the Stasi surveillance is historian and author Timothy Garton Ash’s book, The File.

-Jordan Radke