The History of the Stasi

By Antonella Colonna Vilasi

The Stasi meant to East Germany, and historically means to the entire world, four decades of repression and prosecution carried out in the name of justice, which only ended in 1989. The word relates to the special secret police agency that was founded on February 8, 1950, by its first executive, Wilhelm Zaisser, and took the complete name of Ministerium fr StaatSichereit or MfS (Ministry for State Security), which Stasi is the abbreviated form resulting from its phonetic contraction. It was formally dependent on the government, but actually referred to the intelligence of the SED Central Committee. The very purpose of the Stasi was to endorse and impose the power of the SED by catching and destroying any dissident man or woman who tried to escape, plot, and work against the party or, simply, was differently thinking. Every little suspect could turn to the evidence of a crime against the government, either being real or nonexisting; any single attempt of rebellion should be prevented not to turn to real uprising. The way to make it possible was the careful monitoring of the population with the utmost secrecy to the purpose of collecting as much information as possible about individuals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Mar 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504937054

Antonella Colonna Vilasi

Antonella Colonna Vilasi is president of the Research Center on Intelligence–UNI. She is the author of “The History of M16,” “The History of the CIA,” “The History of the Italian Secret Services,” and “The History of Mossad.”

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© 2015 Antonella Colonna Vilasi. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 02/03/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-3703-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-3704-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-3705-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015901858

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CONTENTS

Foreword

Chapter I Historical Background

1.1 The Eastern Bloc and the Cold War

1.2 A short history of the SED

1.2.1 A back step: What the Comintern was

1.3 The Leadership of the SED and its responsibility about the Stasi

1.3.1 Walter Ulbricht (1950-1971)

1.3.2 Erich Honecker (1971-1989)

Chapter II The Stasi goals and structure

2.1 Organization, Jurisdiction and connections to K.G.B.

2.2 The recruitment: collaborators and infiltrators

2.2.1 Some alleged infiltrators

2.2.2 The "Zersetzung"

2.3 The Archives

Chapter III The Stasi main chiefs

3.1 Wilhelm Zaisser (1950-1953)

3.2 Ernst Wollweber (1953-1957)

3.3 Erich Mielke

3.3.1 The years before the Stasi

3.3.2 The years of Decline

3.4 Wolfgang Schwanitz (1989-1990)

3.5 MarKus Wolf (1953-1986)

3.6. Erich Mielke and Markus Wolf main activities

Chapter IV Crime and punishment

4.1 Three Main Prisons: Hohenschönhausen, Bautzen I and Bautzen II

4.1.1 Hohenschönhausen

4.1.2 The Prisons in Bautzen

4.2. Detention methods and instruments

4.2.1 The cells

4.2.2 The strange case of the Expulsions System

4.3 The Capital Pain

Chapter V The Stasi famous victims

5.1 A brief premise

5.2 Werner Teske (April ²4th, 1942 –June ²6th, 1981)

5.3 Walter Linse (August ²3rd, 1903 –December15th,1953)

5.4 Rudolf Bahro (November ¹8th, 1935 – December 5th, 1997)

5.5 Wolf Biermann (November ¹5th, 1936 - living)

5.6 Alfred Willi Rudi Dutschke (March 7th, 1940 – December ²4th, 1979)

5.7 Jürgen Fuchs (December ¹9th, 1950 – May 9th, 1999)

5.8 Lutz Eigendorf (July ¹6th, 1956 –March 7th, 1983)

5.9 Vera Lengsfeld (May 4th, 1952 – Living)

Chapter Vi Latests Events

6.1 After The Fall Of The Berlin Wall

6.2 Current situation

6.2.1 History reassessment

6.2.2 The Stasi Survivors

6.2.3 Memorial museums

6.2.4 Ostalgie

Appendix

Bibliography

FOREWORD

TheStasi meant to East Germany, and historically means to the entire world, four decades of repression and prosecution carried out in the name of justice which only ended in 1989. The word relates to the special secret police agency that was founded on February 8th 1950 by its first executive, Wilhelm Zaisser, and took the complete name of Ministerium für StaatSichereit or MfS (Ministry for State Security),¹ which Stasi is the abbreviated form resulting from its phonetic contraction. It was formally depending by the government, but actually referred to the intelligence of the SED² Central Committee. The very purpose of the Stasi was to endorse and impose the power of the SED by catching and destroying any dissident man or woman who tried to escape, plot and work against the party or, simply, was differently thinking. Every little suspect could turn to the evidence of a crime against the government, either being real or non-existing; any single attempt of rebellion should be prevented not to turn to real uprising. The way to make it possible was the careful monitoring of the population with the utmost secrecy to the purpose of collecting as much information as possible about individuals.

The Stasi really started a campaign against any politically incorrect attitude, through practical or almost-subliminal methods. Any political meeting always became the occasion to warn people against the danger of a different thought or a critical position. Usual habits or simply peculiar gestures could lead a man from precautionary detention to torture or even to death. Whoever was watched by this secret police would surely lose his credibility at work as well as in his social order, then in his own family life. The potential criminal was actually isolated till his final collapse. At this stage, the Stasi could enlist as an informant a person whom nothing was left to.

The Stasi agency was so secret that some of its representatives were left entirely in the dark about the orders given by some other ones. It was the same for normal employees who fulfilled the orders without knowing what they were for, so they could reveal no meaningful details not even by chance. Every operation was led separately from another by specific supporting divisions, each one dealing in a different sector and, for those cases of complex areas of competence, referring to a superior department. Possibly, every trace of whatever action against privacy had to be shelved and, surely, all information had to be filed to be used whenever required as necessary to frame a human being. The state secret was covering all the Stasi activities and was so efficient that not even the Intelligence of West Germany ever knew exactly how many of its citizens had been working for East Germany as infiltrators. All Stasi’s movements stood a true mystery for the inhabitants of the German Democratic Republic, who did not suspect the violence of its methods until they had to experience them personally.

Erich Mielke, the third Minister of the Stasi since 1957, was thinking that anybody could be a potential risk for the state, so people’s privacy had to be systematically violated in so many ways, starting from the secrecy of correspondence and the interception of the phone conversations by the use of sophisticated bugs or cameras expressly camouflaged. Every detail, every hint, every breath of a target citizen became part of his personalized file. Even any little comment from a man was analyzed by the Stasi experts. Stasi needed to PREVENT any crime against the State. It needed to know EVERYTHING. As normal consequence, everybody had better to be classified in an exasperated way. It was common use, when questioning a suspected, to make him sit on a cloth that should gather his perspiration. This biological secretion was successively closed into a jar. It was also practiced to sequester a people clothing, preferably underpants, in order to allow dogs to detect the owner by nose, if required.

Aside the political victims of the Stasi who had to stand a long series of cruel physical procedures having no other goal than extorting a confession, there were regular citizens who had to be persuaded to become the MfS informants. Among all methods, there was a sort of occult, psychological pressure: the so-called technique of the decomposition, Die Zersetzung, that wore out any rebel will. The conversion of normal people to informants had to be made at any cost; it was a mission and a duty that lead to the imprisonment of something more than 330,000 people and the death of thousands of people whose exact number stays unknown. The Stasi wanted to gather such a number of information to keep the society under control, before someone could really become a danger for the SED. It seemed mandatory to find out what a man was thinking behind his daily mask. Stasi could not wait until some real attack held place.

East Germans learnt little by little that they were under surveillance; they increasingly became aware that the air they breathed was heavily infected by thousands and thousands of informants all around them and they daily lived in an atmosphere permeated of fear. In the Nineties, following the opening of the Stasi files to the citizens, so many families found out with great surprise and disappointment that their own relatives, obviously sharing their same life, were informants who referred to the MfS about their familiars’ intimate thoughts. The entire population was prey to a hunter State.

It is no coincidence that the Stasi's motto was Shield and sword of the party.³ (Schild und Schwert der Partei) This was perfectly resuming the idea of defense and attack, but also implying that the MfS was legitimised to act in every way to achieve the good of the Nation.

CHAPTER I

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

1.1 The Eastern Bloc and the Cold War

On May 14th, 1955 the Warsaw Pact⁴ allowed the Soviet Union to affiliate seven Central and Eastern European communist countries⁵ that agreed the reciprocal defense in case of attacks from any other non-member states. The subsequent political and military unit, constituted by U.S.S.R. and its newly acquired countries, was then named The Eastern Bloc or Soviet Bloc by those states that, six years earlier, had joined the NATO and endorsed the same kind of agreement with the U.S.A. governement. Thus, these states were called at their turn The Western Bloc as being the counterpart of the Soviet one.

The reason for this important decision involving an entire continent political set-up was the direct consequence of the Conference of Yalta, held in this Crimean town⁶ where three world greatest powers representatives officially met in 1945. The U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the U.S.A. President Franklyn Delano Roosevelt and the Soviet Premier Isif Stalin had been spending one week to give an issue to the Second World War and debate about the destiny of the devastated European countries.

At the end of the Second World War, Germany was defeated for the second time after losing the First One too. It was considered a real danger for itself and the neighbouring countries, as able to reiterate attempts of invasion once set free again. That’s why the four super powers U.S.A., U.S.S.R., U.K. and France rather decided to keep it under control by sharing it in four different zones they did occupy and administrate as well. In the light of these changes, Germany border was reinstated as it was till December, 31st 1937 before Hitler’s occupation: a huge part of territory, about one fourth, came back to former conditions and any German population left out from such border was posted within it. Germany was then seen by the western super powers as the perfect instrument for the Cold War, that strongest rivalry between the NATO⁷ allies and the Soviet Union that would be extended also to its satellite countries by the Warsaw Treaty onwards. It was named cold after the absence of any international armed fighting, even if both parties were equipped with the atomic bomb.⁸ The very intention to overwhelm each other was the cause for a tangible tension having all war's features except weapons. The remembrance of the too much recent Second World War and the two strongest coalitional Blocs were a deterrent against any official, violent aggression. Each Bloc rather preferred to rule the other through a super-competition in all fields, with the final result of improving and make society evolving with discoveries and progresses in many important fields, including the development of the aerospace era.

Among several regulations already carried out in Germany, the introduction of the New Mark⁹ as the new currency in 1946 largely contributed to strengthen the nation. The Russians could not stay idle hands, so they reacted by an offensive and closed off West Berlin, forcing the allies to resort an airlift¹⁰ to get the city, not without a new fighting. The Berlin blockade lasted from June 24th, 1948 till May12th, 1949. Stalin deliberated to cut off West Berlin from any kind of vital supplies. U.S., U.K., France, Canada, Australia and some other countries arranged the intensive Berlin airlift, to provide the city with food and all indispensable goods. But, at last, the Russians had to capitulate to the Americans who turned the guarantors of the European safety and finally, on October 7, 1949, Germany was officially divided in two countries: the western Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the eastern German Democratic Republic (GDR).¹¹ Following the Warsaw Pact, six years after the split of Germany in two separate states, the border between West and East Germany¹² would became the virtual door linking Europe with the Eastern Bloc. Actually, the separation was not that virtual or a matter