Berlin's police and the Stasi

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Berlin's police and the Stasi
http://www.upi.com/Emerging_Threats/...9981246320546/

BERLIN, June 29 (UPI) -- The Berlin police and other government-linked agencies and officials are under rising pressure to investigate their ties to the Stasi, East Germany's infamous secret police.

After significant pressure over the past weeks, the Berlin police may launch an official investigation into its possible links to the Stasi, the Berliner Zeitung newspaper reports. Many of Germany's parliamentarians have not been checked either -- calls are resonating louder that this should be done as well.

Organized after the Russian KGB service model, the Stasi -- by the time East Germany collapsed in 1989 -- employed 91,000 full-time workers and had built up a network of more than 150,000 civilian informants known as the Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs, Unofficial Collaborators), who spied on politically subversive citizens and activists, but also on anyone they were told to. Several IMs lived and worked in West Germany, among them politicians and other officials with ties to government circles.

After the country's unification, in 1990, the government vowed to prosecute former Stasi wrongdoings and created the BSTU, a government agency tasked with collecting Stasi files and organizing their release to the public.

The Stasi past was thought to be put behind until it surfaced last month that Karl-Heinz Kurras, a police officer from West Berlin, was a longtime Stasi spy. Kurras had his place in history as the fascist cop who shot an unarmed student, Benno Ohnesorg, in the back of the head at a demonstration in Berlin in 1967. The shooting sparked nationwide protests and strengthened the German left-wing movement, which went on to change Germany from a conservative country into the liberal society it is today.

"This shows that the Stasi has had greater influence on the political events in West Germany than many had previously anticipated," German Chancellor Angela Merkel told news magazine Der Spiegel.

Kurras' Stasi links did not surface for so long because people didn't believe that the Stasi had recruited its spies even among lower-tier officials. What many people here in Germany are now asking themselves: How deeply did the Stasi penetrate political parties, government agencies and companies? After reunification, only the institutions' top officials were checked.

The Stasi discussion is part of a greater problem tied to the country's coming to terms with its divided past.

More than half of people living in eastern Germany see the German Democratic Republic in a positive light, according to a study by German census group Emnid. Forty-nine percent of eastern Germans feel that the GDR, which walled in its people, had "more good than bad sides," with 7 percent saying it had "overwhelmingly good sides."

The study shows "that we must not be lax in reevaluating the history of the GDR," Wolfgang Tiefensee, the minister responsible for the development of the former East German states, told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper.

[Ralph P]

I have been following this issue now for a while and it is going to be interesting if there is going to be any follow up or investigations from the stand point if Kurras was an isolated person or if there was a bigger penetration by the MfS of the West Berlin police.

[Gordon Craig]

Ralph,

It will indeed be interesting to see if there is more research done in the STASI files to see how deep the penetration of the West Berlin police force was. The files have been open long enough that some categorizing should have been done and searching for specific information may be easier now than when the files were first opened.
The real question may be; Does the German government want to open this particular can of worms? The article hints at penetration of other govenment organizations and if they start digging in the Berlin police files they may have to do the rest of the Berlin administration. Since West Berlin was not considered part of West Germany the files for any West Berlin organization of governance the current government could invetigate only West Berlin rather than starting a witch hunt throughout the whole of Germany which I am sure they don't want to do.
The whole thing may just be put on the back burner until the next elections are over. This thing could be a real political nightmare for the Politicians running for office next time around.

Regards,

Gordon

[Dallasfan]

'' BERLIN, June 29 (UPI) -- The Berlin police and other government-linked agencies and officials are under rising pressure to investigate their ties to the Stasi, East Germany's infamous secret police.

Organized after the Russian KGB service model, the Stasi -- by the time East Germany collapsed in 1989 -- employed 91,000 full-time workers and had built up a network of more than 150,000 civilian informants known as the Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs, Unofficial Collaborators), who spied on politically subversive citizens and activists, but also on anyone they were told to. Several IMs lived and worked in West Germany, among them politicians and other officials with ties to government circles ''


I think that the Stasi was well infiltrated in all West German organisations .
Let's face it : in comparison to the Stasi , the CIA was like a boy scouts organisation !!







Regards , Johan

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A follow up article:

German Police Have More Than 1,000 Stasi Agents, Welt Says
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...d=aweEXq5.hRV8
By Leon Mangasarian

July 8 (Bloomberg) -- More than 1,000 ex-agents from former communist East Germany’s Stasi secret police are still serving in German law enforcement agencies, Die Welt reported.

The one-time agents of the East German Ministry for State Security -- dubbed the Stasi -- are serving both in eastern German police forces and in federal police units, the newspaper said, citing state officials and human rights activists.

Set up in 1950, the Stasi had almost 300,000 full-time agents and part-time informers when East Germany imploded amid mass protests in 1989 that led to the dissolution of the secret police, according to the Berlin Stasi museum Web Site. Germany was unified under Chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1990.

Interior Minister Joerg Schoenbohm of Brandenburg state has ordered a study on the role of ex-Stasi agents in the police after it was revealed that alone in his Federal Crime Bureau 58 of the 730 employees used to be full-time Stasi agents, Die Welt said.

[ETN]

Another fascinating article, thank you for posting it. It makes me wonder how many former SD/SiPo/Gestapo served in the West German police force? For that matter, did any possibly serve in the Stasi?

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Thousands of Ex-Stasi Still Work for German Civil Service
Der Spiegel
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...635230,00.html

Tens of thousands of former Stasi employees are still working for the German civil service, a respected newspaper has revealed. Experts say that background checks on civil servants were often cursory, while civil rights activists are calling for the ex-secret police to be dismissed.

The issue of former members of the East German secret police, the Stasi, occupying positions in German public life has long been a hot topic in post-Cold War Germany. Now it turns out that the civil service in the states of the former East Germany is apparently riddled with former Stasi employees.

According to a report in the Thursday edition of the Financial Times Deutschland, around 17,000 former Stasi employees are still working in the civil service -- despite background checks.

The newspaper gives figures for the numbers of Stasi still working in the civil service in former East German states. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania there are 2,247 ex-Stasi members in the civil service; in Brandenburg, 2,942; in Thuringia, 800; in Saxony-Anhalt, 4,400; in Saxony, 4,101; and in Berlin's administration, 2733.

"There's more to this than anyone knew," Klaus Schroeder, a historian from Berlin's Free University who specializes in the East German regime, told the FTD.

Schroeder told the newspaper that background checks on civil servants were "very standardized and superficial." For example, Stasi body guards were often treated very leniently as they were considered to be politically harmless, he said.

A new debate about the fate of former Stasi employees erupted in Germany last week after it emerged that around 100 former officers of the feared East German secret police were working at the State Office for Criminal Investigation (LKA) in Brandenburg. According to the German news agency DPA, there are still hundreds of former Stasi employees serving in the police forces of the eastern German states -- even 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

On Wednesday, Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) stated that after German reunification in 1990 they too had taken on some former Stasi employees -- and 23 of them still work there today. However the Interior Ministry stressed that that information wasn't new. "Every individual case was very carefully checked," a spokesperson for the ministry said.

Former Saxony Interior Minister Heinz Eggert told the regional newspaper Mitteldeutsche Zeitung that extensive checks were undertaken in his state. Around 1,000 police officers who had previously worked for the Stasi were dismissed after reunification, while 600 left of their own accord -- and this at a time when the state was short of 2,000 police officers, he said.

Reacting to the revelations about ex-Stasi in the civil service, experts and former East German civil rights activists have demanded concrete steps. Gerhard Ruden, who is responsible for the Stasi archives in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, believes that civil servants need to be submitted to new background checks. "It's a question of political hygiene," he told the FTD.

"The fact that they (the ex-Stasi employees) are working in the civil service is not the problem," Stephan Hilsberg, a Bundestag member for the center-left Social Democrats who specializes in civil rights, said in remarks to the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung. "The problem is where they end up." It's acceptable for them to work as janitors, he says, but if they end up in positions of authority, then it becomes a problem. The same goes for the education system, Hilsberg argued. A former Stasi employee could easily work as, say, a mathematics teacher, but it would be unacceptable for them to teach politics or history, he told the newspaper.

The Stasi secret police was one of the most repressive intelligence agencies in history. It kept the East German population under close supervision through its network of around 200,000 "unofficial collaborators" -- ordinary people who spied on their neighbors, co-workers or even on their own families.

The fate of former Stasi employees has occupied Germans since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Researchers continue to comb through the enormous Stasi archives for information about informants and their victims, and there have been several prominent cases where it turned out that well-known Germans had worked for the secret police.

cis -- with wire reports

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Outrage as Stasi agents have jobs in civil service

David Crossland, Foreign Correspondent
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs....09860/1013/ART

* Last Updated: July 20. 2009 10:10PM UAE / July 20. 2009 6:10PM GMT

Berlin // About 10,000 to 15,000 former members of East Germany’s feared secret police, the Stasi, still work in civil service jobs as police officers, teachers and administration staff, according to new research that has outraged the victims of the 41-year communist regime.

Many ex-Stasi officers were only superficially vetted after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and managed to remain in public employment, said a senior academic who has compiled figures on their presence in the civil service.

Some members of the Stasi, short for Ministry for State Security, have risen to high ranks in the police force, and one is even assigned to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s personal protection team.

The figure of up to 15,000, collected from data provided by the five eastern regional states, is far higher than thought, and has reinforced doubts about whether Germany has been rigorous enough in confronting its communist past.

The Stasi, which called itself the “sword and shield of the party”, had 91,000 employees and a network of around 189,000 civilian informants to spy on neighbours, co-workers and even relatives.

Its members psychologically tortured dissidents in secret jails using methods that included sleep deprivation and humiliation. Interrogators would threaten to make prisoners “disappear” or to imprison their relatives. Some former prisoners allege they were exposed to radiation to make them develop cancer.

The researcher who compiled the figures, Professor Klaus Schroeder of Berlin’s Free University, said Germany is repeating the mistake it made after the Second World War, when thousands of Nazi officials were allowed to remain in the civil service.

They obstructed attempts to bring war criminals to justice and delayed the country’s struggle to come to terms with its history.

“What I find disappointing is that the authorities pretended that they were making proper checks and that they had learnt from 1945. But in fact the checks were very lax and people weren’t properly vetted at all,” Prof Schroeder told The National.

“They were just waved through. People were just asked what department they worked in and from when until when, nothing more. Whole departments were declared clean,” he said.

“It’s just like after 1945 – the people who were at the top before are still there today.

“It’s saddening for the couple of hundred thousand victims who sat in prison, who were forbidden to work in their professions, who were deported or driven to escape.”

The number of Stasi officers allowed to transfer to the regional civil services in the 1990s totalled 20,000 to 30,000.

They have since been whittled down by retirement and death. Many who weren’t allowed to stay in the civil service found work as private detectives.

Groups representing Stasi victims said the findings were scandalous and demanded that staff be re-evaluated.

The Union of Victims of Communist Rule said it was shocked to learn that there are so many of them, and that they had no place in senior positions.

Mario Röllig, who was harassed and locked up by the Stasi for three months in 1987 after he tried to flee to the West, said he didn’t find the figures surprising and said all former Stasi officials should be dismissed from civil service jobs.

“For many years we’ve been seeing the same old faces who tormented us in East German times, they’re still working in public offices and the police force in Berlin,” Mr Röllig, who has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his time in jail, told The National.

“They’ve simply swapped the signs on their offices, have a different haircut, a modern suit or a new uniform. What we’re seeing in these figures now is the result of a failure to digest this second German dictatorship.”

Public employees in Germany are entitled to generous welfare benefits and pensions, a fact that makes the large number of former Stasi staff enjoying those perks additionally galling to many at this time of economic crisis.

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the legacy of the Stasi still haunts Germany because the organisation was such a huge, powerful and repressive force.

Today, a government agency manages the millions of files the Stasi kept on its staff, informants and victims. Ironically, that agency also employs former Stasi officials, said Prof Koehler.

Its files continue to reveal uncomfortable insights into the influence of the organisation.

Only in May, it emerged that the West Berlin policeman who shot dead Benno Ohnesorg, a Berlin student, in 1967 and thereby inadvertently helped trigger the 1968 student riots, was a Stasi officer.

The Stasi played a similarly strong role in its foreign intelligence operations. It managed to plant a “mole” in the office of the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, who had to resign in 1974 when the agent, Günter Guillaume, was exposed.

Under a law passed in 1991, Stasi members applying to stay in the civil service had to be vetted but they were free to be recruited if deemed suitable.

The eastern state of Brandenburg revealed this month that 58 of its 700-strong regional criminal police force – a senior unit that investigates major crimes – are former Stasi officers.

Eastern regional governments have rejected calls for fresh background checks of their staff and say it’s too late anyway because since 2006, authorities can only inspect a civil servant’s Stasi file if he or she has a very senior position.

Vera Lengsfeld, a politician and civil rights activist who was jailed by the Stasi, said: ”One has to ask how could this happen? It’s unacceptable. Evidently there was a lack of political will to investigate people thoroughly.

“The Stasi was never an intelligence service like any other,” said Ms Lengsfeld. “The public debate hasn’t focused on its monstrous criminal dimension. It’s high time that was done.”

Prof Koehler said he hasn’t collated figures on how many Stasi members are still working in national government departments, and that his proposal to check the number in employment offices, where many were transferred in the early 1990s, was refused.

“These people aren’t indispensable,“ said Prof Koehler. “We have enough of others who could do their jobs. No one’s stopping them from working in the private sector. But they shouldn’t be teachers or police officers, that’s just insensitive.”