On reading my Stasi files

National Interest, The, Winter, 1994 by Frederic L. Pryor

AFTER THE FALL of the Berlin Wall and the political reunification of Germany, the new all-German government made the extraordinary decision to open most of the files of the East German secret police, nicknamed the Stasi. Some of the files had been removed by the Stasi before the communist government fell; some disappeared during the confusion occurring at the time of the reunification; and some of the files were deliberately destroyed or withheld by the new government. But in my case, five thousand pages of file materials were intact and the gaps were relatively minor. For the most part, therefore, I was able to find out what actually happened in the half year that I sat in the Stasi Investigation Prison Hohenschonhausen on suspicion of espionage.

From 1959 through 1961 I lived in West Berlin, writing my doctoral dissertation for Yale University on the foreign trade system of the Soviet bloc, using East Germany as a case study. In the course of my research, I conducted about thirty-five interviews in East Berlin, primarily about planning and decision-making in foreign trade. I also asked questions about the price-setting process for trade with other communist nations and, to place my research in perspective, about the East German economy in general. I consulted various libraries in East Berlin and read materials unavailable in the West.

On the night of August 25, 1961--almost two weeks after work began on the Berlin Wall--I went over to East Berlin to hear a speech by Walter Ulbricht, the head of the Communist Party, to learn how he justified this action. Afterwards, I tried to visit the home of a woman who was an engineer and economist who had been helping me to compare textile firms in East and West Germany. This was one of several small research projects I began after completing the dissertation and before I was to report for a job in Pakistan in November. The East-West political situation had become tense, so I wanted to cancel our joint project and say goodbye to her. Unfortunately, the Stasi had staked out her apartment because--unknown to me--she had fled to the West a few days before. Originally, the police thought I was coming to pick up her personal effects; they arrested me on suspicion of assisting her escape.

Although the Stasi had little in their files about me, within days they had a relatively good idea of my activities and, at that point, I was charged with espionage. The order for my incarceration was issued two weeks after I was initially arrested--and about a week later than the East German law required such orders to be made. Such legal niceties, however, made little difference to the Stasi.

The Stasi was responsible both for espionage externally and for counterintelligence work internally. Other organizations carried out regular police and security work. It was a formidable bureaucracy that even had its own language; to allow me to understand what I read in my Stasi file, the specialist who handled my case gave me a list of over twenty pages of abbreviations used in the reports. By the end of the 1980s the Stasi had about 100,000 full time workers; and, in addition, roughly another 250,000 "informal co-workers," who submitted reports on various people or topics of interest to them. This means there was one full-time or informal co-worker of the Stasi for every thirty-eight adults in East Germany. According to one specialist, if laid end to end, the Stasi's files would stretch ninety-four miles.

In relative size, the former East Germany--officially, the German Democratic Republic--appears to have had the largest secret police organization yet known in history. By way of contrast, the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, had only about 55,000 full-time workers for a population three times larger than that of the GDR. As for the Soviet Union, I was once told by Colonel Orlov, who was the highest ranking Soviet secret police officer to escape to the West, that his organization had only 50,000 full-time workers at the time of the purges in 1937 and 1938. He was not, let me add, a completely reliable source of information.

TWO YEARS AGO I applied to the German government to see my file, in order to find out exactly what the Stasi thought I was doing. After a delay of a year and a half permission was finally given. The files included my dissertation, a copy of which the police found in my car, as well as a first-rate German translation made while I was incarcerated. It also had the reports from five months of daily interrogations; the interrogation reports of those whom I had interviewed or knew on a personal basis in East Berlin; reports about each of the seventy-two pieces of paper found in my car, in my wallet, or on my person; and a full transcript of the entire "private conversation" between my lawyer and me that took place in prison shortly before my release. Of greatest interest, I also found more than 350 pages of handwritten reports about me from my cell mate, written every day while I was being interrogated.