Summary of John O. Koehler's Stasi

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 After the Berlin Wall was torn down, the German government was faced with demands that the communist officials who had ordered, executed, and abetted crimes against their own people be prosecuted.

#2 The Stasi, the East German communist police force, had more spies than any other totalitarian government in history. The Soviet Union’s KGB employed 480,000 full-time agents to oversee a nation of 280 million citizens, which means there was one agent for every 5,830 citizens.

#3 The Stasi was the secret police of East Germany, and they were everywhere. They knew no limits, and had no shame when it came to protecting the party and the state. They were the sinister side of deutsche Gründlichkeit, or German thoroughness.

#4 The crimes committed by the communists were not as heinous as the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews, but their brutal oppression of the nation by means including murder alongside legal execution put the SED leadership on a par with Hitler’s gang.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: May 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822526105

IRB Media

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Insights on John O. Koehler's Stasi

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 9

Insights from Chapter 10

Insights from Chapter 11

Insights from Chapter 12

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

After the Berlin Wall was torn down, the German government was faced with demands that the communist officials who had ordered, executed, and abetted crimes against their own people be prosecuted.

#2

The Stasi, the East German communist police force, had more spies than any other totalitarian government in history. The Soviet Union’s KGB employed 480,000 full-time agents to oversee a nation of 280 million citizens, which means there was one agent for every 5,830 citizens.

#3

The Stasi was the secret police of East Germany, and they were everywhere. They knew no limits, and had no shame when it came to protecting the party and the state. They were the sinister side of deutsche Gründlichkeit, or German thoroughness.

#4

The crimes committed by the communists were not as heinous as the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews, but their brutal oppression of the nation by means including murder alongside legal execution put the SED leadership on a par with Hitler’s gang.

#5

The East German regime fell, and German judicial authorities made great efforts to be fair. They suspended legal action while requesting rulings from the supreme court on possible constitutional conflicts.

#6

The enormity of the task facing judicial authorities in reunified Germany becomes starkly evident when you examine the actions they have taken in all five former East German provinces and in East Berlin. There have been only 132 convictions in the past five and a half years.

#7

The German government has extended the statute of limitations for prosecuting crimes committed under the East German government, and the limits are five years for most crimes, but double that time limit for more serious crimes.

#8

The German supreme court ruled that the DDR’s penal code does not apply in reunified Germany, and that all Germans are subject to West German laws. However, the one nation principle was not upheld.

#9

Those who have tried to apply the statute of limitations to communist crimes have drawn comparisons to the infamous Nazi orders to execute Soviet Army political commissars upon their capture and the extermination of Jews.

#10

Until 1989, the DDR had imposed the death penalty for a number of capital crimes, including murder, espionage, and economic offenses. But after the mid-1950s, nearly all death sentences were kept quiet and executions were carried out in the strictest secrecy.

#11

The East German criminal code was designed to safeguard the dignity of humankind, but certain sections were applied perversely, landing countless East Germans in maximum security penitentiaries.

#12

The Stasi used millions of informers to gather information on antistate sentiments, but the East German party chiefs also created a law that made the failure to denounce fellow citizens a crime punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment.

#13

The Stasi files law, which allowed victims to see their files, made it possible to vet parliamentarians for Stasi connections. Hundreds were fired or resigned when it was discovered that they had been Stasi informants.

#14

The Party of Democratic Socialism, which was the renamed version of the Communist Party, won 4. 4 percent of the vote in the 1994 general election. Had it not been for the votes electing four people by direct mandate, the PDS would have been excluded.

#15

One of the PDS members who kept his seat in parliament was Hans Modrow. He was a veteran communist who was SED district secretary in Dresden. He was a vital cog in the apparatus of state repression.

#16

The PDS, the successor party to the SED, was allowed to keep some of the SED’s money. However, Peter Gauweiler, a member of the Christian Democratic Party, demanded that the PDS and the DKP be outlawed. He said that every month we learn of new crimes committed by the SED.

#17

Gauweiler called for the communist parties to be outlawed, and for the funds used to pay victims of communist oppression to be taken from the PDS and DKP. He argued that the West was guilty of not doing enough to help the people of East Germany during the 1953 uprising, 1956 Hungarian invasion, and 1961 Prague Spring.

#18

The fall of the communist dictatorship in East Germany was another blow to the supporters of the regime, as it proved that the DDR was not equal to Western nations. The final insult was the photograph of Erich Honecker, the dictator of the DDR, seated between American President Gerald Ford and West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt at the 1975 Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

#19

The Stasi, the German secret police, was also involved with international terrorism. They trained hundreds of German, Arab, and Latin American terrorists. The Stasi officers who did such things were not acting on their own initiative, but they were following orders from Honecker and Mielke.

#20

The Stasi was not independent from the Ministry for State Security, as Wolf claimed. It was an integral part of the