Original subtitles

The headquarters of the East German Ministry for State Security.

Two months after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The shredders were running through the night

as agents of the Stasi, the East German political police,

tried to destroy their files.

For 40 years they had spied on, manipulated,

and imprisoned their own people,

in order to keep the Socialist Unity Party

the East German communist party in power.

But the hour of reckoning had come.

On the 15th of January, 1990,

citizens of the German Democratic Republic

stormed the Stasi headquarters to keep their files from vanishing.

The citizens' raid saved from destruction

hundreds of thousands of personal files, records, photos and films.

Among the spoils were 16,000 bags

filled with 600 million pieces of paper:

hand-torn documents that the agents hadn't had time to get rid of.

The reunified Germany took up the challenge

of uncovering the whole truth about the Stasi

and the lives it had shattered.

Over the next 20 years, 550 bags would be processed,

with documents pieced together by hand

or by purpose-built virtual reconstruction software,

which was faster and more efficient.

30 years on from the fall of the Wall,

former agents have broken their silence.

Their testimonies and those of their victims,

and the revelations from the archives,

shed new light on the Stasi and the dictatorship it protected.

The labyrinthine Stasi archives tell a story that began with the Cold War.

After the Second World War, two German states were born.

In the West, the Americans, the British, and the French

sponsored the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany,

a parliamentary democracy.

In the East, in the Soviet zone of occupation,

Stalin set up the German Democratic Republic

and imposed on it the "dictatorship of the proletariat".

The German Democratic Republic, or GDR,

was modelled on its Soviet big brother.

The East German state featured a planned economy,

collectivised agriculture, and nationalised industry.

It also recruited youngsters from the age of six

into the Party's youth organisations:

the Free German Youth and the Pioneers.

Karl Alich was seven years old when the GDR was created.

West Berlin lay deep inside the new Communist state,

and up to 1961 East Germans were allowed to visit the city.

This openness triggered a rivalry between the two systems.

The GDR had little to counter the seductive offerings of the West.

The daily life of its citizens,

dominated by ration cards, parades, and propaganda,

was nowhere near enough to ensure majority support.

The German Communists knew that in order to stay in power,

they needed control and repression.

For that there was the Stasi,

founded in 1950 as Staatssicherheit, or State Security.

Based in the Lichtenberg district of Berlin,

where it occupied a number of huge buildings,

it was modelled on the original Soviet secret police, the Cheka.

I t was the "sword and shield" of the Party.

(Automatic weapons fire)

The Stasi really took off in 1957

with the appointment of Erich Mielke.

A Communist activist from an early age,

Mielke was involved in the murder of two policemen in 1931.

To escape justice he fled Berlin for Moscow,

where he was trained in Party schools in the pure Stalinist mould.

Erich Mielke was a psychopath.

Erich Mielke was a small pugilistic man,

obsessed with guns, paranoid.

Cynical and dogmatic, Erich Mielke was the ideal man

to make the Stasi a tool of repression and control.

He was obsessed with fighting what he called

Politisch-ideologische Diversion,

political-ideological diversion,

or PID, in the jargon of the Stasi.

(Pop music)

Rock 'n' roll, jeans, long hair...

in Mielke's eyes, any deviation from the socialist norm was suspect,

including possession of a Bible.

And prevention was better than cure.

From his office on the second floor of Stasi headquarters,

Mielke set up one of the most comprehensive secret services

in the world.

With 91,000 staff, or one agent for every 180 citizens,

the Stasi far out-did the KGB.

Fifteen regional branches, each equipped with its own prison,

spread across East Germany.

The Stasi even had its own army:

the Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment, 11,000 strong.

Its members, dubbed the "Knights of the Revolution",

were recruited from families close to the regime.

Well paid and enjoying many privileges

in a country subject to all kinds of privations,

Stasi officers were part of the elite.

The regime reserved apartments and special shops

for the high-ranking officers.

It was a community set apart from the common man.

Everything was done in secret.

In Potsdam, near Berlin,

the Stasi even had its own university.

Its existence was revealed when the archives were opened.

Paranoid, the Stasi also sent its recruits beyond the borders,

and naturally to its rival, West Germany,

where its agents carried out sabotage

and disinformation operations.

The information collected was shared with the KGB.

Its agents learned how to search apartments

with the help of training films like this one.

To keep its citizens under control,

the Stasi recruited a vast network of amateur spies

from the general population.

They were called 'inoffizielle Mitarbeiter', or IM -

"unofficial collaborators".

The recruitment process took nine months on average.

IMs were volunteers friends, co-workers,

and even family members of the suspect.

All made written commitments to the Stasi,

operated under codenames, and submitted regular reports.

The Stasi was in the churches, the Stasi was in the kindergartens,

the Stasi was in the schools.

The Stasi was in the apartment block.

The Stasi was in the artists' collective.

The Stasi was in the newspapers. The Stasi was everywhere.

There was no separation, in fact,

not only between the state or the Party and the Stasi,

but life and the Stasi.

In the archives, IM files are recognisable by their orange covers.

The reconstruction of the archives

revealed the existence of recruits with disturbing profiles.

Behind the codenames 'Sternberg' and 'Erwin Mohr'

were former members of the SS.

One of them was Josef Settnik, a former guard in Auschwitz.

This discovery undermined the myth of an anti-fascist East Germany,

which had often accused West Germany

of leniency towards former Nazis.

Ignoring its own professed principles,

the Stasi tightened its grip on the population.

For all its efforts, the regime was unable

to prevent its population from leaving for the West.

By 1961, three million citizens of the GDR had already gone.

As a result, the Party made a radical decision.

13th of August, 1961.

A wall of East German police stands at the Brandenburg Gate.

All communication between the Eastern sector and those of the West

has been cut as though by a knife.

On August the 13th, the GDR sealed off East Berlin

and began to build a wall through the city,

calling it an 'antifaschistischer Schutzwall',

or "anti-fascist protection barrier".

The Stasi backed up the police and the army.

Preventing executives and ordinary citizens from fleeing the GDR

would remain its priority until the end.

Moving to the West had become a crime.

Manfred was 18 when he decided to flee to the West.

His file, found in the archives,

details his downward spiral in over 2000 pages.

The denunciation by an unofficial collaborator...

his attempt to flee by car...

and finally his arrest on the highway.

While in custody in a Stasi prison, Manfred learned for the first time

about the methods of the secret police.

Manfred spent two months in Stasi jails

before appearing in court.

Accused of attempted flight and terrorism,

he was sentenced to four years in prison after a public trial

intended to deter anyone else from fleeing.

At the age of 18,

Manfred was subjected to forced labour in harsh conditions

in several different prisons.

In the 50s and 60s, violence, kidnappings, and political murders

were committed to keep 16 million citizens on a leash.

But that wasn't the worst.

Virtual reconstruction has uncovered the details

of a top-secret contingency plan: Directive 1/67.

It was a plan to round up

some 80,0000 people considered dangerous by the regime

in just 24 hours.

These files recorded the smallest detail,

down to whether you had a doorbell.

Updated every year, Directive 1/67 was the Stasi's ultimate weapon.

In the event of a crisis,

it had to protect the Party from its own people.

Rewarded for his services,

the head of the Stasi rose through the ranks

to become a member of the Politburo,

the country's highest political authority.

In 1971, the new leader of the Socialist Unity Party

was Erich Honecker.

The atmosphere was one of detente, as East and West grew closer.

In the Stasi, there was panic.

The GDR played the detente card

in a bid to prop up its faltering economy.

Desperate for hard currency, Erich Honecker sought loans

from Helmut Schmidt, his West German counterpart.

In return, the regime had to permit

more exchanges between the two Germanys

and allow West German journalists access to the GDR.

To hide its obvious human rights violations,

the Stasi had to adjust its methods.

It was in this context that Tatjana Sterneberg,

a young employee at a Berlin hotel,

fell in love with Antonio, an Italian living in West Berlin.

The couple decided to get married,

but Antonio did not want to live in the East.

So Tatjana made an official request to leave the GDR.

But she was turned down.

The case of the hotel employee suspected of attempting to flee

became what the Stasi called an 'operativer Vorgang'

a monitoring operation.

Her file, retrieved from the archives,

reveals every stage of the relentless surveillance.

Photos were taken using concealed devices.

Mail was opened using purpose-built machines.

An entire Stasi department was responsible for developing technology

to fight "the enemies of the people".

There was also the IM network.

In her file, Tatjana discovered

she had been monitored by 12 people in her circle,

particularly by one of her colleagues at the hotel.

The Stasi was spying on everyone.

It was collecting everyone's biographies.

It was, it was stealing your life story

and then it was changing your life story.

So it was extremely sinister.

The plan drawn up by a colleague was used by the Stasi

to proceed with Tatjana's arrest.

Sentenced to three years in prison for planning to flee,

she was released in 1976 and managed to move to the West.

There, she reunited with Antonio and married him in Naples.

But the marriage did not last. The Stasi had shattered their lives.

In the mid-70s, the mood of detente

saw the first dissident movements emerge in the GDR.

Notably in the university city of Jena,

where Siegfried Reiprich was studying history.

Despite his long hair and passion for rock music,

he was a pure product of the regime.

A Pioneer from the age of six,

Siegfried became the leader

of the socialist student section called Agit-Prop,

for "agitation and propaganda".

But in the GDR, it took one mis-step to arouse suspicion.

Wolf Biermann was an East German singer popular in the West.

His popularity protected him,

but in the eyes of the regime he was a dangerous enemy.

During his interrogation,

the Stasi invited Siegfried to become an unofficial collaborator.

But when he refused, the punishment was swift.

At the age of 21, Siegfried was expelled from university.

Like Siegfried, many were socially downgraded and sidelined

for opposing the Party line.

The former Pioneer and socialist militant

became a target for surveillance by the secret police.

His Stasi file, 3000 pages long,

reveals the importance he held for them.

His mail was systematically opened.

Unofficial collaborators reported his every move to their liaison officers.

But the Stasi didn't just gather information

about Siegfried and his wife.

It used particularly underhand methods

to put pressure on the couple.

The couple were victims of what the Stasi called 'Zersetzung',

or psychological breakdown.

An insidious method of torture

raised to a science by the secret police.

The techniques of psychological breakdown

were taught at the Stasi university.

The discipline even had its own chair.

The reconstruction of the archives

has uncovered doctoral theses on the subject.

Agents used them to devise methods of destabilisation.

But indirect means did not replace strong-arm tactics.

In Jena, Stasi agents went over to the offensive

and arrested many dissidents.

To his surprise, Siegfried was spared.

The Stasi had other plans for him:

he was to be the linchpin in a plot to shatter the unity of his group.

The effect of it is really to break the fundamental human bonds

that keep a society going.

So the Stasi was a system that ran on fear and betrayal

to run a nation and to ruin its own people.

In 1981, Siegfried and his wife

were stripped of their East German citizenship and deported to the West,

a method frequently used by the regime

to get rid of rebellious elements.

In exile, Siegfried tried to reconnect with his friends,

but rumours spread by the Stasi had poisoned their relationships.

Siegfried found himself isolated.

It would take ten years to find his file in the archives

and clear his name of any suspicion.

Psychological breakdown, surveillance, arrests.

In the 1980s, the system of repression was at its peak.

The Stasi's obsession with control

meant that the archives grew exponentially.

One-sixth of the ministry's officers were busy managing 41 million files.

They collected on their own people more information in written records

than in the rest of German history since the Middle Ages.

This was an obsession.

It was perfectionising, as they say in German, 'perfektionieren'.

It was obsessive and meticulous.

The Stasi was also expanding its network of IMs,

the unofficial collaborators.

With 189,000 people,

it had become twice as large as the number of agents.

It included minors, such as Angela Marquardt.

As the daughter of parents who were both IMs themselves,

she was easy prey.

At age 15, encouraged by her parents,

Angela signed the declaration of commitment to the Stasi.

Her codename... Katrin Brandt.

The Stasi tested the young Angela

because it was preparing the next generation.

When she grew up, she was supposed to infiltrate churches,

a plan she discovered thanks to the opening of the archives.

The archives revealed that some 1300 minors

were recruited in the schoolyards.

The youngest of them was 12 years old.

But just as Angela was signing her commitment to the Stasi,

a political earthquake struck.

On the 11th of March, 1985, in Moscow,

Mikhail Gorbachev was appointed General Secretary

of the Communist Party.

Aware of the enormous difficulties facing the Communist world,

Gorbachev launched a program of reform.

In the Eastern bloc, this triggered a genuine Gorbimania

that left no one unaffected, not even Stasi agents.

(Rock music)

Encouraged by this wind of freedom blowing from Moscow,

popular opposition began to emerge in East Germany.

Starting in 1989, peaceful demonstrations were organised

throughout the country.

The Stasi was there to film and arrest people.

But its intimidation tactics were less and less effective.

It was in this poisonous atmosphere that the GDR

celebrated its 40th anniversary

on the 7th of October, 1989,

in the presence of Mikhail Gorbachev.

The official footage showed everyone smiling.

Yet away from the festivities, in front of the Stasi cameras,

the ranks of the demonstrators were growing.

Spoiling the GDR's anniversary was the ultimate affront.

The next day, at the Ministry for State Security,

the situation was critical.

For Mielke, it was time to bring out his secret weapon:

Directive 1/67, in place since the 1960s.

The head of the Stasi even had Honecker's support.

But, faced with these fathers and mothers

strolling with their children,

Directive 1/67 deflated like a balloon.

Peacefully defeated by its people, the Party renounced violence.

Now powerless,

the Stasi settled for filming the banners denouncing it.

Realising that the tide had turned, some departments

were already destroying their most compromising archives.

That evening,

the anti-fascist rampart so strictly guarded by the Stasi

gave way.

Better yet, it was a Stasi officer who, faced with the crowd,

had no choice but to open the first checkpoint at Bornholmer Strasse.

(Ominous music)

(He chuckles)

While reunification was still at the planning stage,

it quickly became clear that without a communist party to protect,

the East German secret police had no reason to exist.

On the 30th of June, 1990,

the Stasi was simply dissolved,

after 40 years of obsessively loyal service.

Ironically, the omnipresent and omnipotent Stasi

had a contingency plan for everything...

except for its own downfall and that of the regime it protected.

Captions (c) SBS Australia 2024