East German Secret Police

The Ministry for State Security, commonly known as the (),An abbreviation of . was the state security service of the East Germany from 1950 to 1990.

The Stasi's function was similar to the KGB, serving as a means of maintaining state authority, i.e., the "Sword and Shield of the Party" (). This was accomplished primarily through the use of a network of civilian informants. This organization contributed to the arrest of approximately 250,000 people in East Germany. The Stasi also conducted espionage and other clandestine operations abroad through its subordinate foreign intelligence service, the Office of Enlightenment, or Head Office A (german: Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung). They also maintained contacts and occasionally cooperated with West German terrorists.

The Stasi was headquartered in East Berlin, with an extensive complex in Berlin-Lichtenberg and several smaller facilities throughout the city. Erich Mielke was the Stasi's longest-serving chief, in power for 32 of the 40 years of the GDR's existence. The HVA (), under Markus Wolf, gained a reputation as one of the most effective intelligence agencies of the Cold War.

After German reunification, numerous officials were prosecuted for their crimes and the surveillance files that the Stasi had maintained on millions of East Germans were unclassified so that all citizens could inspect their personal file on request. The files were maintained by the Stasi Records Agency until June 2021, when they became part of the German Federal Archives.

Creation

The Stasi was founded on 8 February 1950. Wilhelm Zaisser was the first Minister of State Security of the GDR, and Erich Mielke was his deputy. Zaisser tried to depose SED General Secretary Walter Ulbricht after the June 1953 uprising, but was instead removed by Ulbricht and replaced with Ernst Wollweber thereafter. Following the June 1953 uprising, the Politbüro decided to downgrade the apparatus to a State Secretariat and incorporate it under the Ministry of the Interior under the leadership of Willi Stoph. The Minister of State Security simultaneously became a State Secretary of State Security. The Stasi held this status until November 1955, when it was restored to a ministry. Wollweber resigned in 1957 after clashes with Ulbricht and Erich Honecker, and was succeeded by his deputy, Erich Mielke.

In 1957, Markus Wolf became head of the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA) (Main Reconnaissance Administration), the foreign intelligence section of the Stasi. As intelligence chief, Wolf achieved great success in penetrating the government, political and business circles of West Germany with spies. The most influential case was that of Günter Guillaume, which led to the downfall of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt in May 1974. In 1986, Wolf retired and was succeeded by Werner Grossmann.

Relationship with Soviet Intelligence Services

Although Mielke's Stasi was superficially granted independence in 1957, the KGB continued to maintain liaison officers in all eight main Stasi directorates at the Stasi headquarters and in each of the fifteen district headquarters around the GDR. The Stasi had also been invited by the KGB to establish operational bases in Moscow and Leningrad to monitor visiting East German tourists. Due to their close ties with Soviet intelligence services, Mielke referred to the Stasi officers as " Chekists". In 1978, Mielke formally granted KGB officers in East Germany the same rights and powers that they enjoyed in the Soviet Union.

Operations

Personnel and recruitment

Between 1950 and 1989, the Stasi employed a total of 274,000 people in an effort to root out the class enemy. In 1989, the Stasi employed 91,015 people full-time, including 2,000 fully employed unofficial collaborators, 13,073 soldiers and 2,232 officers of GDR army, along with 173,081 unofficial informants inside GDR and 1,553 informants in West Germany.

Regular commissioned Stasi officers were recruited from conscripts who had been honourably discharged from their 18 months' compulsory military service, had been members of the SED, had had a high level of participation in the Party's youth wing's activities and had been Stasi informers during their service in the Military. The candidates would then have to be recommended by their military unit political officers and Stasi agents, the local chiefs of the District ( Bezirk) Stasi and Volkspolizei office, of the district in which they were permanently resident, and the District Secretary of the SED. These candidates were then made to sit through several tests and exams, which identified their intellectual capacity to be an officer, and their political reliability. University graduates who had completed their military service did not need to take these tests and exams. They then attended a two-year officer training programme at the Stasi college (''Hochschule'') in Potsdam. Less mentally and academically endowed candidates were made ordinary technicians and attended a one-year technology-intensive course for non-commissioned officers.

By 1995, some 174,000 ''inoffizielle Mitarbeiter'' (IMs) Stasi informants had been identified, almost 2.5% of East Germany's population between the ages of 18 and 60. 10,000 IMs were under 18 years of age. From the volume of material destroyed in the final days of the regime, the office of the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records (BStU) believes that there could have been as many as 500,000 informers. A former Stasi colonel who served in the counterintelligence directorate estimated that the figure could be as high as 2 million if occasional informants were included. There is significant debate about how many IMs were actually employed.

Infiltration

The main entrance to the Stasi headquarters in Berlin
Full-time officers were posted to all major industrial plants (the extent of any surveillance largely depended on how valuable a product was to the economy) and one tenant in every apartment building was designated as a watchdog reporting to an area representative of the Volkspolizei (Vopo). Spies reported every relative or friend who stayed the night at another's apartment. Tiny holes were drilled in apartment and hotel room walls through which Stasi agents filmed citizens with special video cameras. Schools, universities, and hospitals were extensively infiltrated, as were organizations, such as computer clubs where teenagers exchanged Western video games.

The Stasi had formal categorizations of each type of informant, and had official guidelines on how to extract information from, and control, those with whom they came into contact. The roles of informants ranged from those already in some way involved in state security (such as the police and the armed services) to those in the dissident movements (such as in the arts and the Protestant Church). Information gathered about the latter groups was frequently used to divide or discredit members. Informants were made to feel important, given material or social incentives, and were imbued with a sense of adventure, and only around 7.7%, according to official figures, were coerced into cooperating. A significant proportion of those informing were members of the SED. Use of some form of blackmail was not uncommon. A large number of Stasi informants were tram conductors, janitors, doctors, nurses and teachers. Mielke believed that the best informants were those whose jobs entailed frequent contact with the public.

The Stasi's ranks swelled considerably after Eastern Bloc countries signed the 1975 Helsinki accords, which GDR leader Erich Honecker viewed as a grave threat to his regime because they contained language binding signatories to respect "human and basic rights, including freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and conviction". The number of IMs peaked at around 180,000 in that year, having slowly risen from 20,000 to 30,000 in the early 1950s, and reaching 100,000 for the first time in 1968, in response to '' Ostpolitik'' and protests worldwide. The Stasi also acted as a proxy for KGB to conduct activities in other Eastern Bloc countries, such as Poland, where the Soviets were despised.

The Stasi infiltrated almost every aspect of GDR life. In the mid-1980s, a network of IMs began growing in both German states. By the time that East Germany collapsed in 1989, the Stasi employed 91,015 employees and 173,081 informants. About one out of every 63 East Germans collaborated with the Stasi. By at least one estimate, the Stasi maintained greater surveillance over its own people than any secret police force in history. The Stasi employed one secret policeman for every 166 East Germans. By comparison, the Gestapo deployed one secret policeman per 2,000 people. As ubiquitous as this was, the ratios swelled when informers were factored in: counting part-time informers, the Stasi had one agent per 6.5 people. This comparison led Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal to call the Stasi even more oppressive than the Gestapo. Stasi agents infiltrated and undermined West Germany's government and spy agencies.

In some cases, spouses even spied on each other. A high-profile example of this was peace activist Vera Lengsfeld, whose husband, Knud Wollenberger, was a Stasi informant.

''Zersetzung'' (Decomposition)

The Stasi perfected the technique of psychological harassment of perceived enemies known as ''Zersetzung'' () – a term borrowed from chemistry which literally means " decomposition".

By the 1970s, the Stasi had decided that the methods of overt persecution that had been employed up to that time, such as arrest and torture, were too crude and obvious. Such forms of oppression were drawing significant international condemnation. It was realised that psychological harassment was far less likely to be recognised for what it was, so its victims, and their supporters, were less likely to be provoked into active resistance, given that they would often not be aware of the source of their problems, or even its exact nature. International condemnation could also be avoided. ''Zersetzung'' was designed to side-track and "switch off" perceived enemies so that they would lose the will to continue any "inappropriate" activities.'The MfS dictionary summarised the goal of operational decomposition as 'splitting up, paralysing, disorganising and isolating hostile-negative forces in order, thorough preventive action, to foil, considerably reduce or stop completely hostile-negative actions and their consequences or, in a varying degree, to win them back both politically and ideologically.' Anyone who was judged to display politically, culturally, or religiously incorrect attitudes could be viewed as a "hostile-negative" force and targeted with ''Zersetzung'' methods. For this reason members of the Church, writers, artists, and members of youth sub-cultures were often the victims. Zersetzung methods were applied and further developed in a "creative and differentiated" manner based upon the specific person being targeted i.e. they were tailored based upon the target's psychology and life situation.

Tactics employed under ''Zersetzung'' usually involved the disruption of the victim's private or family life. This often included psychological attacks, such as breaking into their home and subtly manipulating the contents, in a form of gaslighting i.e. moving furniture around, altering the timing of an alarm, removing pictures from walls, or replacing one variety of tea with another etc. Other practices included property damage, sabotage of cars, travel bans, career sabotage, administering purposely incorrect medical treatment, smear campaigns which could include sending falsified, compromising photos or documents to the victim's family, denunciation, provocation, psychological warfare, psychological subversion, wiretapping, bugging, mysterious phone calls or unnecessary deliveries, even including sending a vibrator to a target's wife. Increasing degrees of unemployment and social isolation could and frequently did occur due to the negative psychological, physical, and social ramifications of being targeted. Usually, victims had no idea that the Stasi were responsible. Many thought that they were losing their minds, and mental breakdowns and suicide were sometimes the result. There is on-going debate as to the extent, if at all, that weaponised directed energy devices, such as X-ray transmitters, were also used against victims.

One great advantage of the harassment perpetrated under ''Zersetzung'' was that its relatively subtle nature meant that it was able to be plausibly denied, including in diplomatic circles. This was important given that the GDR was trying to improve its international standing during the 1970s and 80s, especially in conjunction with the ''Ostpolitik'' of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt massively improving relations between the two German states. For these political and operational reasons ''Zersetzung'' became the primary method of repression in the GDR.'In the age of detente, the Stasi's main method of combating subversive activity was 'operational decomposition' (''operative Zersetzung'') which was the central element in what Hubertus Knabe has called a system of 'quiet repression' (''lautlose Unterdrukung''). This was not a new departure as 'dirty tricks' had been widely used in the 1950s and 1960s. The distinctive feature was the primacy of operational decomposition over other methods of repression in a system to which historians have attached labels such as post-totalitarianism and modern dictatorship.'

International operations

After German reunification, revelations of the Stasi's international activities were publicized, such as its military training of the West German Red Army Faction.

Examples

* Stasi experts helped train the secret police organization of Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia.
* Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba was particularly interested in receiving training from the Stasi. Stasi instructors worked in Cuba and Cuban communists received training in East Germany. Stasi chief Markus Wolf described how he modelled the Cuban system based on the East German one.
* Stasi officers helped in initial training and indoctrination of Egyptian State Security organizations under the Nasser regime from 1957 to 58 onwards. This was discontinued by Anwar Sadat in 1976.
* The Stasi's experts worked to help create secret police forces in the People's Republic of Angola, the People's Republic of Mozambique, and the People's Republic of Yemen (South Yemen).THE FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE-GATHERING OF THE MfS' HAUPTVERWALTUNG AUFKLÄRUNG
Jérôme Mellon. 16 October 2001.
* The Stasi organized and extensively trained Syrian intelligence services under the regime of Hafez al-Assad and Ba'ath Party from 1966 onwards and especially from 1973.
* Stasi experts helped to set up Idi Amin's secret police.Gareth M. Winrow. ''The Foreign Policy of the GDR in Africa'', p. 141
* Stasi experts helped the President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, to set up his secret police. When Nkrumah was ousted by a military coup, Stasi Major Jürgen Rogalla was imprisoned.
* The Stasi sent agents to the West as sleeper agents. For instance, sleeper agent Günter Guillaume became a senior aide to social democratic chancellor Willy Brandt, and reported about his politics and private life.
* The Stasi operated at least one brothel. Agents were used against both men and women working in Western governments. "Entrapment" was used against married men and homosexuals.
* Martin Schlaff – According to the German parliament's investigations, the Austrian billionaire's Stasi codename was "Landgraf" and registration number "3886-86". He made money by supplying embargoed goods to East Germany.
* Sokratis Kokkalis – Stasi documents suggest that the Greek businessman was a Stasi agent, whose operations included delivering Western technological secrets and bribing Greek officials to buy outdated East German telecom equipment.
* Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof Group) – The terrorist organization which killed dozens of West Germans and others received financial and logistical support from the Stasi, as well as shelter and new identities.
* The Stasi ordered a campaign in which cemeteries and other Jewish sites in West Germany were smeared with swastikas and other Nazi symbols. Funds were channelled to a small West German group for it to defend Adolf Eichmann