Original subtitles

The Stasi.

For the citizens of East Germany,

few words were more guaranteed to chill the blood.

It was the official state security service.

Its purpose, to keep the ruling Socialist regime in power.

And it went to extraordinary lengths to achieve it.

Using a vast network of spies and informants,

the Stasi had virtually all of East German society under surveillance

on an unprecedented scale.

But what were its methods?

How did it listen in on those

who were thought to harbour treacherous ideas?

And how did it use psychological oppression

to quite literally drive the enemies of the state insane?

The Stasi was the Ministry for State Security,

a terrifying organisation that spied on its own population,

the people of East Germany,

for something like 40 years,

using all kinds of methods of surveillance

and using the people themselves

to spy on their neighbours and families.

Well, the Stasi were masters of disorientation.

They believed that they would weaken their enemies,

if the enemies were discombobulated,

if they didn't really know where they were or what they were doing.

The control the Stasi had over the East German people was more severe

than anywhere else in Communist Eastern Europe.

Their stranglehold was almost total.

They were the most oppressive and surveillance obsessed secret police

quite possibly in history.

Founded in 1950

and headquartered here in East Berlin,

the Stasi were one of the most

feared intelligence agencies of the Cold War.

And to ensure the people's obedience and deference to communism,

the Stasi spied on the East German population.

Anyone even remotely suspected of opposing the regime

was dealt with brutally.

But such surveillance wasn't just carried out by Stasi agents.

Key to the organisation's power was a vast network of informants.

These were ordinary citizens who,

in support, or more likely in fear, of the regime,

denounced friends, colleagues and family members to the secret police.

The Stasi is short for

"Staatssicherheit", state security.

But they weren't security.

They were a secret police.

Secret police are what dictatorships have.

They were feared, they were loathed,

and they were the most powerful in the Eastern Bloc.

Life during the Cold War in East Germany was really dark,

it was dangerous,

and it was full of paranoia.

Why? The Stasi.

You knew that if you went to a family dinner,

statistically there was someone there

listening and recording everything you said.

And as you're on the train,

as you're walking through the park,

you know there's spies everywhere

and they're going to report on you.

I mean, the whole environment is just one of,

"I'm being watched and I need to make sure

"that I appear to be as normal as possible".

In the early years,

the Stasi focused on arresting political opponents,

filling half a dozen prisons with tens of thousands of prisoners.

The organisation continually expanded both in number and power

and, with the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the population

of East Germany essentially became prisoners of the state.

Life in East Berlin at the time of the Stasi

was unbelievably repressive.

A Nazi hunter even said it was more repressive than the Gestapo.

This was on the threshold of the sort of Communist East, if you like,

and the capitalist West.

And particularly in Berlin,

you could see you have this sort of thriving capitalist,

sort of mini city-state

literally metres away from a kind of run-down, sort of grey, drab,

gloomy, repressive state.

And I think it's a measure of the insecurity of the status quo,

of the ruling authorities,

that they felt the need to subject their citizens

to such a rigorous degree of repression.

By our standards, it was grim and a bit surreal.

Um, so you were in a totalitarian state,

you had a one-party rule,

it was after the war so it was a bit shabby,

and the city was under the iron hand of the Communist Party,

and behind them, of course, the Soviet Union.

Bit of a squeeze. How does this work?

One of the most iconic images of the era was this Trabant,

an affordable vehicle

that would have been seen everywhere on the streets of Berlin.

It truly was a product of the socialist state.

It's dull, cramped and uncomfortable -

a fitting description for the lives of East Germany's citizens.

I'm on my way to the former Stasi HQ,

located on Normannenstrasse in East Berlin.

Behind these doors was the nerve centre of the entire operation

where, from 1957, everything was controlled

by its director Erich Mielke.

Felix Mueller, a guide at the former Stasi's HQ,

is an expert on the day-to-day operations of this building,

including the director's personal office.

This was his office through here, was it?

Um, that was the secretariat.

Basically, you had to go the long way to his office,

through all his secretariats,

um, so he could show, basically, who's boss.

And...

..you can still see the same furniture still here,

the same typewriters.

Nothing really changed.

And, um,

it's basically as it was left by the Stasi itself.

Wow, it's like a kind of time capsule. So this is...

Nothing has changed? Nothing has changed, no.

There aren't many rooms left that look like that.

But, um...

..it doesn't even look very interesting, I think,

because at that time every office

in East Germany basically looked like that.

So this was his secretary's office?

Yeah. This is the secretariat

and the personal secretary is in the next room.

Right, OK.

Wow, look at this. This is the kitchen?

Well, of course. Someone had to do the coffee for the boss.

Right. So, um...

..there was a kitchen in here.

Wow, so this was where, uh...

..Erich's meals were prepared?

Um, yes, sometimes. Yeah, his breakfast, uh, um...

..assuredly because we've found a little note in here that describes

how exactly his breakfast was supposed to...

Really? ..to be made.

What did the head of the Stasi have for breakfast?

Well, marmalade, bread, an egg that had to be, I think,

three and a half minutes,

and poked, so it had a big hole in it.

Right. And, um, it had to be...

And, of course, coffee.

A flask of coffee.

OK. Yeah. So is this his office?

This is not his office.

That's his personal secretary's office.

And she prepared basically everything for him.

She was also the one who had to basically

maintain the relationships to everyone,

make sure that only the important people got through to him.

So his secretary had a secretary?

Yes, exactly. Of course.

So the Stasi HQ was like a city within a city

and at the top of it was Erich Mielke,

you know, a veteran Communist who was almost, if you want,

Stalinist royalty.

You know, he lived in splendid style,

an entire floor for himself,

probably more room than the US president has in the White House.

And underneath him was this kind of mini city, you know.

There was a theatre, there was canteen facilities,

there was a supermarket and so on.

And it was a great career for people, you know,

in a very dull, grey society.

You know, want a future? Go and join the Stasi.

So...

Wow, this is it. This was where the boss had his office.

It looks quite a bit old-fashioned.

Um...

..the reason is that this office never had to change.

It was built in 1961

and from that time onwards,

um...

..nothing had to change because no-one else moved in.

Yeah?

And even behind these panels there are some...

..some things hidden.

For example, behind here, there is the personal safe of the minister.

And you... Actually, it's a big one.

He had, I think, a pistol in here, and some of his paper...

Some of the most important paper.

And you can still see that these safes were sealed

before leaving the room, so that you could see if someone,

uh, someone opened them in the absence of the minister.

So every one had a little seal.

And press it into what was basically like Play-Doh modelling clay that

was smeared over the crack between door and frame. Right.

The citizen informants, and all the other spies,

were keeping tabs on anybody

who might have anything connected with the West.

And there was a whole department

devoted to going through rubbish bins, trash cans,

looking for food wrappers from the West,

things like this. And, you know,

that gives a whole new meaning to dishing the dirt on somebody.

In the East, it really was about sort of paying people to monitor

the most trivial everyday occurrences,

people walking their dog, people going to the supermarket,

people taking their kids to school,

and entrusting this to paper and writing it down,

almost in a sort of state of frenzy

as though these were nuclear secrets,

when really they were not.

So that seems absurd and surreal.

But at the same time, if the aim was to generate a forensic overview

of people's lives then they did succeed.

So this is where the...

where the head of the Stasi would have sat here, presumably?

Yeah, exactly. This is where Erich Mielke would have sit...

..sat. Beside him, the...

..a representative of the party leadership,

and the rest of the leadership of the Stasi.

So would they have, uh, would there have been spies in here?

Would they have briefed the spies before missions, or what would...?

Not in here. But there were cases when spies who came back,

basically, from the enemy,

were received here and got some chocolates

and some medals and things like that.

Oh, spies that would have been in the West...

Yeah, yeah. ..would then have been...?

When they were caught, for example,

and were then exchanged for Western spies on the other side.

So that is what happened from time to time.

On the Bridge of Spies.

On the Bridge of Spies, for example, yeah,

at Bornholmer Strasse, or at Potsdam.

And, yeah, this is where that happened.

The thing about totalitarian Communist governments

is that it shows human nature at its very worst.

Although the whole point of Communism was always sold as,

"We're all in this together, we're all equal,"

obviously, some are more equal than others.

And when you get to the top,

especially in the Stasi, the secret police,

or you are one of their pet informants,

basically, you have a nice life,

you know, you have a nice office,

you have all sorts of minions running around after you,

you have a big car, you know.

And that's how they got some of the informants, anyway.

They promised them extras

when their lives were very drab and they had very little.

Mind you, you'd be very foolish to turn them down.

Exact numbers are hard to come by

but, between 1950 and 1989,

it's believed that the Stasi employed a total of 274,000 people.

Now, to put that into some kind of perspective,

the Soviet Union's secret police, the KGB,

employed one agent per 5,830 of its citizens.

The Nazi's Gestapo, one per 2,000 people.

But if you include informants,

the Stasi had one agent per 166 citizens.

And if you include both regular and part-time informants,

the ratio was one agent per six or seven people.

While the numbers don't tell the whole story,

the way Nazi Germany operated was very different

to Communist East Germany,

but they do show that the Stasi undertook surveillance

on an unprecedented scale.

East Germany became a country that spied on itself.

The Stasi understood one thing more than

most other secret police services,

and that was that they could use people,

they could use the ordinary people of eastern Germany.

This was an incredibly effective,

but corrosive thing to have done.

Their network of informants was colossal.

It stretched, it's been alleged,

up to possibly two million people.

And we know that a significant proportion of them were under 18.

This was children informing on their parents,

people in building blocks informing on their neighbours.

On a day-to-day basis, the Stasi leveraged

the ordinary people of East Germany and made them their spies.

This was really a way of dividing society.

You know, dividing it, keeping it weak,

making sure it couldn't unite against

this rather abrasive intelligence services.

And you even had husbands and wives

who were being spied upon by each other.

Every single apartment block would have someone connected to the Stasi.

They knew exactly what visitors had come,

which lovers had come, which prostitutes.

They really had their finger on the pulse of society

and, in quite a totalitarian way, tried to control every aspect of it

just to kind of cement this gruesome hegemony

that they'd been perpetrating for so long.

Once back at my hotel,

I found out that it was a favourite haunt for the Stasi.

It used to be called Hotel Stadt Berlin,

reserved primarily for important guests of the state,

who were all extensively bugged

by hidden cameras and microphones in these rooms.

Now, the Stasi used cameras identical to this one,

coupled with hidden microphones,

to watch and listen to what went on in rooms at this hotel.

But they went even further than this.

Guests would often receive a knock on the door

from a prostitute organised by the Stasi itself.

And if they were persuaded to partake in her services,

then these actions would also be recorded on the film rolls,

providing the Stasi with useful, incriminating blackmail material

for their archives.

Now, how this would work is that the operative would

drill through the wall, into the room next door,

feed this long lens through

and then spy on whatever was going on in the room next door.

And it wasn't just room-to-room surveillance

that would happen here in this hotel.

As you can see, there's an extraordinary vantage point

looking out across East Berlin

and they would use their cameras, both still and film cameras,

to monitor all of the activity that was going on outside.

The point was that they would have VIP guests there,

particularly from the West.

And essentially, what they did is they spied on them.

You went in and your room was basically bugged and being filmed.

And just to spice things up a bit,

particularly if they wanted to compromise you,

they'd make sure that you got into some kind of liaison

with a prostitute who'd be arranged, and that would be filmed.

So you'd then be... You know, they'd have something on you.

There were cameras installed, there were bugs,

there were even little holes drilled in the walls

so they could hear what these Western dignitaries

and visitors were saying. And it was all part

of their monumental intelligence-gathering efforts.

You can still visit it today

and imagine you're being sort of spied upon by the shadowy Stasi.

Such is the interest in the techniques of the Stasi,

there is even a spy museum in Berlin today.

I'm meeting Dr Christopher Nehring,

who has a number of objects in the collection

that reveal just what it was like to be a Stasi agent at the time.

What is this? This is obviously a briefcase here, right?

It's, er...

..one of the Stasi's... hidden devices.

You could, er...just hide everything inside the suitcase.

What it did was, to use it for secret searches of your home.

What you have built inside the suitcase

is a camera and two reduced flashlights.

It's a camera? It's a camera inside here

and it was used to take pictures of documents.

You put a document on here.

So the Stasi would take pictures.

Picture after picture of your personal documents.

And this is a handbag. I can recognise this. Can I touch this?

You can touch it.

Well, you call it a handbag or woman's purse... Yeah.

..which means that the Stasi's trick actually worked,

because what you have inside is a camera.

Wow! OK.

It's another hidden camera which will take pictures

through that little lens here.

This is the lens? This is the lens.

And you can trigger it while walking.

What were they hoping to do? What were they taking photos of?

Anything, basically, they would deem suspicious.

Right.

This, as you can see, was built for use outdoors.

Yes. But it's mainly for surveillance, following people...

Right. ..or taking pictures of larger gatherings of people.

Surveillance was so rife in East Berlin,

Stasi-managed Germany,

that it probably exceeds any other time in recorded history

for oppressive surveillance.

You were always being watched.

And more than just watched, you were being videotaped.

There was cameras in your bedroom,

cameras in the hotel.

People had special briefcases and cameras mounted on their watches.

They put them everywhere

cos they wanted to listen to everything that you had to say.

And there were so many of them, throughout the course of your day,

you were probably being videotaped a dozen different times.

Now, I know what this is. Deodorant, right?

It looks like deodorant.

It doesn't work any more, but it used to work.

And what it actually did...

..was a so-called container.

That is, you have a secret compartment here

and only a little bit of deodorant, of actual deodorant.

So, it would actually work? It would work.

For example, it was used to smuggle films

or small documents across borders. Microfilm?

Microfilms, secret messages.

And if the border police would try whether it works,

it would actually work. I mean, you can...

If you smell it, it still smells like deodorant.

It's not bad, it's not bad.

We mustn't forget that the Stasi were a Cold War intelligence agency

as well as being a secret police service.

And in that, they did the same as almost all the others.

They had Q-branch-type objects for spying.

You can see the briefcase that dismantles into a photocopier,

the bra that has a secreted camera in it,

the deodorant bottle that untwists and is there for passing messages.

They had developed all of these capabilities for their internal

and also external espionage activities, which were significant.

And this... Well, another briefcase.

I'm getting used to these now. What is it, a camera in this, or a...?

Can I open it? Check it out, yeah.

Oh, wow! Wow!

OK. Well, that's a little bit more serious.

This is pretty serious.

That's a machinegun? It's a machinegun.

This is a Czech machinegun the Stasi used.

Not so much for intelligence work.

This is reported to have been used by bodyguards

or the security people at embassies.

Right, OK. So this is obviously a little bit more...

This is all surveillance,

but this is something on a very different level.

This is really, really serious.

So it was pretty hard to get your hand on stuff like that.

And the bodyguard...

I'll show you. ..would carry the briefcase around.

Yeah. And in case of an attack, hold it up like this,

press it against the body, which would trigger the machinegun inside.

Oh, so, this is a... The whole thing is a gun?

The whole thing is a gun. Would shoot from out here.

You're kidding me! Oh, I thought this was a case to hide the gun.

No. This is a concealed weapon.

So, where does it fire...? So, you push it here?

Here. And that would fire? This would fire.

Oh, my word, that is extraordinary! I've never seen anything like it!

That is amazing!

It's incredible that the Stasi went to such extraordinary lengths

to spy on their own people.

You'd be in a park

and there'd be a camera in the tree next you

or it might be in a walking stick that some old person

walking past you nonchalantly,

was actually filming you with the walking stick.

I mean, it's absolutely bizarre.

And, of course, the items that you see in the Stasi museum

point to a paranoia that we simply can't get our heads around.

But what happened to people who crossed swords with the regime?

The answer was that many were sent to the Hohenschoenhausen,

a Stasi prison that was a central detention centre

for nearly 40 years.

Now, the prison was located in an exclusion zone

which meant that it didn't appear on any maps,

and this gave the Stasi free rein to treat the prisoners

in some pretty horrific ways.

The prison has over 200 cells and interrogation rooms.

Peter Keup was an East Berlin resident who tried to escape

the regime and spent years as a Stasi prisoner.

Well...

So, this is the car I was, you know, transported with.

Probably my worst experience in the whole time when I was in prison.

Because they picked me up from the train,

they asked me 40 hours in a row if I wanted to escape.

40 hours, I said no.

And then, you know, it was just too much for me.

I collapsed and I said, "Yes, I want to escape,"

because it didn't add up to say no any longer.

And then they, you know, they gave me handcuffs,

then they forced me to get in a car like this.

So there was a ramp, so to say, where I had to get up,

and then, you know, I had to get around the corner.

You see, a little cell, like there.

You see, there was just as much space as a human being need.

So the van would come in here.

Can you sort of walk me through what would happen?

You would walk through here, is that how it would work? Yeah.

I mean, first of all, the van, you didn't know where the van goes to.

The van came through this door.

Then this door would have been closed.

Shut, yeah. And then this van stopped, and after so many hours,

you realise that something's going on.

Then they open up the door.

Then they open up the first cell door,

then they screamed "Raus!" which is the German word for "get out".

Raus, which sounds even more... And then you had to get out.

And now imagine, four hours in complete darkness.

And then it was completely white painted,

with packages of neon lights

that means you couldn't see anything.

So you're blinded as you came out of the van. Yeah.

So you'd be picked up by the Stasi on the streets,

you'd be bundled into a windowless van,

you'd be driven around for hours, in complete darkness.

People outside would think it was a grocery van.

You'd then be taken to the Stasi prison.

The moment the doors are flung open there'd be bright lights

shining on you. The whole thing was theatre

to completely disorientate you, to break you down,

and, more importantly, to get an early confession out of you.

So, those bars were closed until you had to get through.

And it must have been terrifying for anyone being brought in here...

Yeah. ..for the first time. I mean, always the comment...

I mean, in front of this closed bar they told you, "Face the wall."

You always had to face the wall first.

Then they opened up a bar, then you were allowed to get through.

And so, the whole procedure was so unreal, so bizarre.

And also dehumanising, I guess...

Yeah. ..which was quite an important part of what they were doing.

Yes, because the fact was they informed you that you were not

allowed to look into their faces.

You always had to look down.

Oh, you're not allowed to look at the guards' faces?

Yes, yes, yes. You were not allowed to turn around, for instance.

So they ordered, you know, you have to look down

and you're not allowed to look into their faces.

So is this the kind of cell that you were held in? Yeah.

That's the kind. So, yeah, first of all, you know, these glass bricks.

It is like a wall.

I mean, you have daylight but, as you see, you can't look through.

So you are in a, you know, in a cell completely isolated

from the rest of the world.

How does it feel, for you, being in this cell now?

I remember how it felt, you know, when the door...

..when they closed the door, and they locked it up.

And then you are in this chamber, you know.

And the first time when I came into this cell, I realise the toilet...

And the toilet actually showed me that I have to stay for longer.

It is strange. It was like an enemy, this thing

because I thought, "That makes it possible that I spend here,

"you know, plenty of time."

Because everything is here - a water place, a toilet.

No need to open up the door.

Imprisonment with the Stasi

was a psychologically searing imprisonment.

The Stasi worked on people's identity.

They worked on their mental state.

They put people into states of isolation and cut them off

totally from everything they knew.

That was the horror of being captured by the Stasi.

It was complete detachment from the world.

There was the basic things like sleep deprivation,

but also interrogating people over long periods of time.

And also little things

like, you know,

you would find yourself lying in your cell at night,

you were forced to look up at the ceiling.

And the light would come on every ten minutes,

so you were sleep deprived,

and then you were taken to a room where the only person

that you're allowed to talk to for months was your interrogator.

And that's basically how they deconstructed people

and destroyed them from the inside,

so that they'd then denounce, of course,

alleged traitors in the DDR.

So, have you ever come face-to-face

with any of your captors since your release? Yes.

So, first I avoided any contact.

Of course, I lived in West Germany

and there was no reason to get back to East Germany.

I even had problems to get back to this place.

Then in 2013, I found out that my brother was with the Stasi.

So he was a Stasi spy.

I applied for his Stasi file.

And there I had to find out that my brother, you know,

worked close with them.

He signed up a contract to spy on my parents, to spy on me.

You're joking? Yeah. So your own brother was spying on your family?

I don't know if he did.

It was his order.

I cross fingers that he was maybe under pressure,

so they took pressure on him until he signed up,

and he never spied on us.

But I can't be really sure.

They would tell you things that would make you begin to doubt

what you had previously believed.

They'd tell you things about your family,

about what people were reputed to have said about you.

Much of it false, but the idea was just to make you crack.

And then you would sign whatever declaration,

or say whatever it was that they wanted you to say.

And you can still see, very visibly, the cells where so many people

buckled and gave into these sinister interrogators.

The Stasi were not just respected, because they had to be,

they were feared. I mean, you knew that if you were perceived

as being somehow as a dissident, in one way or another,

that you could be put in prison

just because of something you said after you had a couple of beers.

These people were watching your every move, and you knew

that no-one could be trusted.

Not your boss at work,

not your father, not your lover.

It was that prevalent.

The Stasi's horrific treatment of suspected enemies of the state

was not just restricted to its detention centres.

Beyond the prison walls, they carried out something

far more devious to silence their opponents

called Zersetzung, which literally translates as decomposition.

Zersetzung was a process

of psychological torture

that aimed to isolate and paralyse what were thought to be

subversive members of society.

Now, this Stasi directive rather clinically describes

what this meant.

And I quote...

"It is a systematic degradation of reputation, image and prestige.

"A systematic organisation of social and professional failures for

"demolishing the self-confidence of the individual.

"Stimulation of doubts with respect to perspective on the future,

"stimulation of mistrust or mutual suspicion among groups."

They would even poison food, destroy relationships,

or even break into people's houses and move things around

when they weren't there.

They quite literally drove enemies of the state insane.

There was something that they did called gas lighting,

which was actually terrifying.

You would go home one day, no sign of a break in.

Neighbours hadn't heard anything.

You'd be going about your business and think, "Wait a minute,

"there's something slightly different about my flat.

"Surely I didn't buy that brand of coffee?"

And then your alarm clock goes off at a different time.

And gradually they up the oddness.

Basically, you think you're becoming unhinged.

Say you had one fish in your goldfish bowl.

You'd go in one day, and there's two fish.

Well, that's impossible. So you really must be going mad.

You know this kind of thing.

They tried to kind of break men and women,

make them feel like they were going mad,

like they had nothing to live for.

And this was something that could be denied,

because it was actually very subtle in some instances,

but also something that would

get rid of the will to live from these people.

These people would be crushed and they wouldn't really want

to get up in the morning let alone engage in subterfuge

or treasonous activities.

So they were crafty, very subtle, but arch-psychological manipulators.

The psychological oppression the Stasi imposed

divided the East Berlin citizens.

Those who thought of escaping to the West questioned themselves,

and those around them.

If they did overcome their psychological border

and try to escape, then they were met with a physical one.

In a divided Germany, the border between the two opposing regimes

was of paramount importance.

The inner German border, as it was called, was over 850 miles long

and, by 1982, it had 19 checkpoints along its length.

Although it was never entirely sealed,

movement was severely restricted, especially for East Germans.

This is Checkpoint Charlie,

arguably the most famous crossing point between East and West Germany.

From 1961 to 1990, it was the main entry point into East Germany

for journalists, diplomats and non-Germans.

In October 1961 it became a flash point of the Cold War.

Soviet and American tanks faced each other in a stand-off

across this checkpoint, in an event that nearly sparked World War III.

Berlin was unique during the Cold War,

for that juxtaposition of East and West, and all eyes were on it.

Much of what happened there does read like

Cold War spy movies because that's the way it was.

I had the opportunity to cross into East Berlin a number of times

when it was still East Berlin.

Going across Checkpoint Charlie and seeing these places,

and they are exactly as you see them in the films now.

This was where the Cold War was the most concentrated.

You go to Checkpoint Charlie today and you expect there to be some

bit of atmosphere that from the...

No, not at all. McDonald's is on this side,

Kentucky Fried Chicken on this side.

It's like a huge tourist site.

It has none of the essence of importance

of a historical site that epitomised the Cold War.

This was once

a kind of perilous, mortal crossing

and it can seem a little bit distasteful

that the whole thing is almost like, parasitically,

you've got all these fast food joints,

whereas this is actually quite a grave and sobering site,

or it should be.

I know a lot of people are very unhappy that it's now

been completely commercialised, but I suppose, in a sense,

that's the new Germany, you know. I suppose,

we could almost celebrate the fact that Checkpoint Charlie now,

it's impossible to imagine the horror that went there,

that people died trying to get across the wall.

Burying underneath it, rushing to get through it,

ramming a tank into it, ramming a car into it.

All the things they did to try and get out.

You can't imagine it now.

Well, maybe in some ways it's a good thing

that we can't imagine that that ever happened there.

And let's hope it doesn't happen again.

On the 9th of November 1989,

a poorly managed press conference

led to one of the biggest blunders in history -

the accidental announcement

that people could cross freely between the East and the West,

for the first time in nearly 30 years.

And this was the beginning of the end for the Berlin Wall,

and the German Democratic Republic

was about to crumble in a similar way.

It's difficult now to piece together exactly why the Stasi allowed

the Berlin Wall to fall.

It may be an extension of their general idea,

which was not to bang enormous numbers of people up in jail

throughout their 40 years, instead, they broke them down mentally.

They didn't want the outside world to know about their, if you like,

civil rights abuses or human rights abuses.

They didn't want to risk starting a war by machine-gunning

their own citizens. There was also just the sheer number of people.

This wasn't just one or two people.

This was waves and waves of people gushing through, like,

with their husbands and their wives and their young children.

It would have been a public relations disaster

if they'd just turned the whole thing into a bloodbath.

I mean, what was so extraordinary in 1989 was

we knew the Soviet Union was changing but East Germany,

you know, that was THE most Stalinist police state, you know,

behind the Iron Curtain.

And yet, the Stasi itself seemed to know the game was up,

you know, that it was over.

And so when people climbed onto the Berlin Wall and disrespected it

and started going into the West,

incredibly, the Stasi just gave up the game.

The Stasi knew it was living on borrowed time

and the last few weeks of 1989 saw black smoke rising

from the courtyards of Stasi offices.

They were burning the files.

On the 13th of January the Stasi was formally dissolved

and it ramped up efforts to destroy the records they held.

When the poorly made East German shredders broke down,

they desperately tore the files up by hand,

all in an attempt to cover up their crimes.

But a couple of days later word got out that this was going on

and a large crowd of protesters grew here,

outside the Stasi's headquarters.

Desperate to ensure the evidence of the Stasi's crime was not erased,

they overcame the police and gained entry to the building.

Once inside, the angry mob sacked the building,

and were able to save the majority of files from destruction.

A staggering 160 kilometres of Stasi files were recovered

across East Germany.

They reveal just how in control of East Germany the Stasi really were

and also how they had acted well beyond the rule of law

and in complete disregard of human dignity and civil rights.

The Stasi were unique in many ways

and one of the extraordinary things is, because East Germany

wasn't conquered militarily

but it collapsed under its own internal struggles,

the entire Stasi infrastructure was left in place

and the people of East Germany protected it

because they wanted access to the files

and they have had access to the files subsequently.

The new unified Germany passed an Act of Parliament

to allow and enable that access, so what's been left to us by the Stasi

is an extraordinary record of their thoroughness,

and it's preserved almost in its entirety.

They kept the most meticulous records of things

that were, seemingly, utterly trivial.

Well, like, you know, when someone would take their dog for a walk,

what they'd been getting up to when they go out at night.

And this really became manifest when the Berlin Wall fell in '89

and the Stasi seemingly just walked away from their offices

and the forces of the West moved in.

And they were astonished to find not just a few filing cabinets

or a few index cards, but hundreds of kilometres

of these meticulous records.

Decades before the NSA, Facebook, Google or Yahoo

trawled our every move with cookies on the internet

and noted our likes and dislikes,

the Stasi were doing the same thing in East Germany.

We find 160 kilometres worth of files

with the same kind of information that is being recorded on us today

by Facebook, for instance.

You know, just mundane things.

"I went to the grocery store today.

"I bought three cartons of milk.

"Last week I only bought one.

"And then I went home and I took a nap."

Things that just seem ridiculous.

Why would anyone care?

But they were recording everything.

It was really quite obsessive.

The vast amount of secret data left behind by the Stasi

is a fascinating yet disturbing insight

into life behind the Berlin Wall.

It truly exposes the scale and effectiveness of their operation.

The way the Stasi operated

was a system that required people to believe in it.

People had to be afraid for that fear to work.

What happened in 1989 was that people stopped being afraid.

And when that many people, en masse, are disobedient and rebellious,

a system like the Stasi's no longer functions

and it disintegrated quickly.

You know, I look back on the Stasi period today

and I think, "Wow."

I mean, the ingenuity,

the length that they went without any real technology, right,

to record and monitor all of the movements of their people,

it's really quite impressive.

But on the other hand, it's really very revolting.

And now we realise it seems to have served as a precursor

for the surveillance we're all under today.

Has anything really changed?

I'm not so sure.

For 40 years, the German Democratic Republic

had used the Stasi to perpetuate a reign of terror over its population.

Its colossal web of spies and informants built up

a collection of files on approximately 6 million

German citizens, more than a third of the population.

It is often said that Nazi Germany left behind mountains of corpses.

Here in East Germany, it was mountains of files.

And both left scars on Germany that can be felt to this day.

I'll see you next time.

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