Stasi

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STASI.

East Germany's intelligence and security service, known as "the Stasi," was formally titled the Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatsicherheit or MfS) . Set up in 1950, it was dissolved, prior to German unity, in 1989–1990.

The Stasi was a highly professional secret service, perhaps the best in the Soviet bloc. Its spiritual father was Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), who held that terror and violence against real and potential opponents could underpin the state power won by communists in 1917 and accordingly, created the Cheka (the Soviet secret police) in that same year. Following the establishment of a Soviet zone of occupation in the eastern part of Germany in 1945, the imposition of communism there became a major priority. The Red Army and Soviet secret police began the task but after the formation of the East German state in October 1949 it became a German activity. The Stasi quite openly dedicated itself to core Chekist principles of "aggression through conspiracy." The MfS's one thousand officers (some from a Nazi background) assumed the role of "the executive organ of the dictatorship of the proletariat" articulated through the East German Communist Party (the Socialist Unity Party or SED). The fusion between the Stasi and the SED was so effective that the question of who controlled whom was never raised. The Stasi was the backbone of the party, ending up one and a half times the size of the East German army. It doubled in size between 1972 and 1989, increasing its numbers by about three thousand each year. By 1989 the service consisted of more than 90,000 official personnel and as many as 150,000 to 170,000 agents, known as IMs or "co-opted workers." It comprised both a security service and a secret foreign intelligence service called the HVA (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung), which was the largest single unit within the Stasi, working almost exclusively in the West. It had 3,819 officers, led until 1986 by Markus Wolf (b. 1923).

The Stasi's size and its huge financial assets (most of which were never recovered) provide some clues as to the extent of the repression it sustained. In the German Democratic Republic, there was one officer to 188 inhabitants. If the IMs are added to the officers, the result is astonishing: one Stasi member for every seventy people. At the height of Joseph Stalin's terror in the 1930s, there was one Soviet secret police officer to every 5,830 inhabitants—eighty-three times fewer than Stasi members per head of population. Some two million individuals, almost 12 percent of the East German population, had collaborated with the Stasi.

At home the Stasi attacked and persecuted all internal opposition to communism, often displaying great cruelty and sadism. Over the years, sheer brute force was usually replaced by psychological intimidation but repression remained the goal. From 1945 until 1989 some two hundred thousand Germans died either directly or indirectly as a result of communist policies, most deaths occurring before 1949. Even so, from 1950 to 1989 some 250,000 people were imprisoned, of whom 10 percent perished. This was the Stasi's work. Almost three million East Germans fled to the West to escape the police state. Those who resisted but stayed showed enviable courage. Ultimately, they vanquished the Stasi.

Abroad, the MfS sought secrets about the West's military and political strategy. It also supported international terror by training terrorists, particularly from the Middle East. West Germany and the United States were the primary targets of Stasi subversion. The former was riddled with thirty thousand spies who manipulated politics, foreign affairs, the media, academe, and sport. But the Stasi targeted all of Western Europe in its attempts to spy on, and steer, organizations and individuals whose activities involved them with domestic dissidents. Frequently it won as assets sympathetic left-wing Western intellectuals who regarded East Germany as "progressive" (and turned a blind eye to its abuses). The Stasi, always wholly within the KGB's orbit, increasingly became its surrogate, with some 50 percent of its intelligence going to the Soviet Union

The "ministry" called itself, and it was, "the sword and the shield of East German communism." Its militancy drove its readiness to fight its own people and its unquenchable thirst for secret intelligence. Historians agree that the Stasi made East Germany a real-life example of British writerGeorge Orwell's fictional totalitarian state of 1984, able to exploit the most pervasive and efficient secret police in the history of the world. What remains in the early twenty-first century are 178 kilometers of its files—and the trauma of its persistent inhumanity toward Germans in the East.

See alsoBerlin; Eastern Bloc; Espionage/Spies; Germany; Soviet Union.