A short educational paper I wrote for my History course a few years back about the East German Communist Secret Police, the Staatssicherheitsdienst (State Security Service) or Stasi for short.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

In 1991, the newly unified German state took the unexpected and unprecedented decision to open the secret police files to anyone who had such a file and wanted to know, under certain limitation.

Due to these actions, what we discovered was that the Stasi in East Germany was probably the closest we had come to the Totalitarian Police State evoked by George Orwell in his book, 1984. One in fifty people in Communist East Germany, one in fifty had connections to the Secret Police. The legacy of the Stasi is One-Hundred and Eleven miles in files.

The more general interest is the question that has been widely discussed by any country that has had a Secret Police, which is how reliable are these files? In the debate in United Germany, many people said, “Die Dateien liegen”, The Files Lie, you can’t rely on this, they are falsified, they are inaccurate. It has been checked and proven by many people who have read their own files that many small details are in fact, inaccurate.

But to be certain, it is firmly believed by most that even though small details are wrong, such as birth dates or places of work, the files are on the whole, quite reliable. And that when treated with the necessary and critical care, yield quite a lot. It is not true to say, “Die Dateien liegen”, they are not wholly unreliable.

Now, more important still, a large part of the file is concerned with the informers and the Stasi officers. Many people have tracked down their informers and the Stasi officers that handled their files and have written and given speeches about how it was a unique opportunity to find and talk to these people.

The information gathered has helped us as Westerners to understand how these people came to work for such an organization, how a Dictatorship wins its, to coin the phrase, “Willing Executioners”.

Every individual story is different and the truth of the story only emerges through the biography. There was for example, a German Literary Scholar who was blackmailed. There was the head of an art gallery who worked with the Stasi partly out of ambition, it helped her further her career, and partly because she very much liked traveling to the West and as you know, most ordinary East Germans could only dream of going to the West. But if you worked for the Stasi, it became a whole lot easier.

But then again, another informant was a cultured, warm hearted, elderly German Jewish lady who had collaborated with the Stasi mainly, quite simply because she was a true believer. She had become a Communist in Nazi Berlin in the 1930’s, she thought Communism was the only credible opposition to Nazism and she had remained so in spite of everything.



So there is a whole palette of motivations, but what you find and what I hope is brought home by these individual stories, is that none of these people were monsters. We, I think too often imagined in the West the people who worked for a regime like that, for the Gestapo or for the Stasi or the KGB were all monsters. No, they were actually, most of them, people like you and me, they were not evil, they were weak. They were human, all too human and the palette of motives is quite familiar to us in the West and what you see then is how a system that is in itself very evil, is built upon individual people who are not themselves evil, only weak.

In other words, it’s another chapter in the history of what Hannah Arendt called, the banality of evil.

And I hope, you see, there’s a real question what someone coming from the West should do about the past of other people who lived under dictatorships. It’s so easy for us to condemn as so many West Germans have lightly condemned these Germans. It’s so easy for us to say, how could they, how could they work for the secret police. But, we’ve never stood the test. How do we know how we would behave in such circumstances, if we were born into and grew up in a dictatorship.

Are we sure we’d be the dissident or the man of integrity? Are we sure we wouldn’t be the informer or even the secret police officer. But on the other hand, there’s an opposite mistake which you meet also in the relationship between West Germans and East Germans.

Quite a few distinguished West German Liberals say, “Good Lord, I have no idea how I would have behaved in that system, I’m sure I’d have been a Stasi informer - so let’s forgive all and forget all.”. Forgive and forget.

But the point is, we from the West have no right to forgive because these people had victims. As a Westerner, the worst thing that could happen was I am to be expelled from the country, tough, that doesn’t hurt me. But the same people who could have informed on me were also informing on say, their colleagues and employees and even their own family, and those people did get hurt.

To be exposed as an informer in contemporary Germany is a kiss of death, it has very serious consequences. You could lose your job, your friends may shun you, your children could be kicked out of school.

Only the victims have the right to forgive, only the victims. So what’s left for us in the West if not to condemn and not to forgive? What’s left for us, I think is simply to try to understand, not to excuse, but to understand how that system functions, so that hopefully we can look out for the warning signs that are developing again.