"The politics of Germany’s Stasi archives".
Founded in 1950 as the Socialist party’s ‘sword and shield’, the Ministry for State Security, better known as the Stasi, spent its 40-year existence gathering information about real and imagined political opponents. It created one of the most comprehensive police states in the world, dwarfing even the Nazi’s infamous Gestapo. Where the latter operated at around one officer to 10,000 citizens, at its peak the Stasi had one officer to every 180 East Germans.
The scale of the GDR’s surveillance took on such proportions that the Stasi began to recruit hundreds of thousands of ‘unofficial’ employees, casual informants who could provide information about individuals or entire communities (emphasis - Paco). Such collaborators could be work colleagues, neighbors or friends and their motivations ranged from monetary incentives to personal vendetta. Many felt safe in the knowledge that their Stasi activities would remain forever concealed.
This is starting to sound disturbingly...familiar.
My wife met a group of East German students in the 1970s - all girls. She says they all knew which of them was the informer and to be careful what they said in front of her.
ReplyDeleteThe problem now is the internet makes spying and informing anonymous.
PS, haha, it wants me to confirm my ID, some keywords triggered? Whatever.
Exactly 50 years ago my wife arrived in W Germany as a teenage au pair for grand children of a Luftwaffe general. Those were different times, to quote Lou Reed.
ReplyDeleteAnd along those lines, here is an interesting read.....
ReplyDeletehttps://amgreatness.com/2021/06/27/how-i-got-classified-as-an-anti-government-domestic-extremist/
Jeff, one way to get classified as an anti-gov't extremist is to read that article.
ReplyDeleteJust like the way to get the gov't to read your emails is to use encryption.