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"What remains is the disgust": Stasi files that changed life

2021-06-21T00:25:44.878Z


The Stasi files now belong to the Federal Archives. What they can reveal about spying, what it feels like when the documents reveal former friends as traitors: eight people and their files.


Enlarge image

A look at the archives of the Stasi records authority in Berlin

Photo:

Bonn sequence / imago images

It's just a sober, bureaucratic act that can provoke very ambivalent emotions: relief and certainty.

Or anger and bitterness.

With the integration of the

Stasi files into the Federal Archives from June 17, 2021,

some things have changed formally, but little in terms of human nature.

The fearful uncertainty about accessing the files remains: Could old friendships break due to new certainties?

Or can inspection of files also mend relationships that were burdened by possibly unfounded suspicions?

It takes courage to pull out your Stasi files.

Here you can read about eight people who dared to take this step and who SPIEGEL reported on in recent years.

He always wanted to travel far.

That alone made Gernot Friedrich suspicious in the GDR, especially because he persistently tried various transit visa tricks.

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He was completely targeted by the Stasi because, on his travels through Poland and the Soviet Union, he smuggled a commodity that was ostracized under communism: Bibles, which he obtained from the Protestant Gustav Adolf factory in Leipzig.

The pastor smuggled 150 copies in an adventurous way into the Eastern Bloc, for example to a German-born community on the Volga.

Friedrich was stunned that his file fills several folders because of this.

"Oh no, all the mail to my mom," he told SPIEGEL in 2012, pointing to dozens of copied postcards.

»Here, a detailed floor plan of my apartment in Jena.

And this one here, IM ›Romain‹, was a pastor friend whom the Stasi had forced to hear me out. "

The Stasi saw the rather apolitical travel fanatic as the head of a conspiratorial network, because they suspected that the Gustav Adolf work was "an extensive system for collecting news and information" in the West.

The informers characterized Friedrich as an "extremely skilful speaker" who instigated "agitation" and "antipathy against the Russians" with irony;

he is "very adaptable" and steals trust.

"When I read that," said Friedrich, "it sounds as if you wrote about a completely different person."

He only found out how close he was to the abyss through his files.

The Stasi subjected him to "certain tests," trying to slip a hymn book into which a microfilm with military information was incorporated.

She even considered exposing him to "wrong medical treatment."

A car driver almost ran him over in Jena in a clear situation.

An attack?

There are no records for this.

Friedrich is nevertheless convinced of it.

Because he had confronted the IM "Romain" who had been scheduled for him after the fall of the Wall - and he had hinted that there had been such plans.

Perhaps Hans Weber (all names of the family changed) shouldn't have read his family's Stasi files in July 1997.

Because there was also the autopsy report of his mother Anna.

The details of her suicide opened wounds from a traumatic childhood experience.

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On the night of September 4, 1965, ten days after Hans Weber's father, a BND spy, was arrested by the Stasi, his mother locked herself in the living room.

Then she hanged herself from the transom of the window.

Hans Weber, five years old, and his two years older brother slept next door.

"The interrogations killed them," said Hans Weber in an interview with SPIEGEL in 2012.

His file seems to confirm that.

There are records of humiliating interrogations in it.

Anna Weber said to a neighbor before the suicide that she "no longer has a goal or a task, she has finished everything."

The two children spent days looking for their suddenly missing mother.

They weren't told anything even when child care sent them to their grandfather, where they grew up.

Officially, the mother was in the hospital.

Over time, the memories faded.

Until his father's death in 1997, which became the impetus to inspect the Stasi files.

Hans Weber regretted that later, he said.

Especially because of the photos of his mother from the autopsy report: a lifeless woman lying strangely twisted on the floor.

He has always been fascinated by things that suddenly disappeared.

Then Robert Conrad felt the urge to capture her on camera.

In the GDR, however, that was not opportune if you saw yourself as a chronicler.

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Conrad secretly photographed the half-timbered houses threatened by demolition in his hometown Greifswald and elsewhere, which the historically forgotten state wanted to replace with prefabricated buildings.

He lived in demolished houses in protest.

He saw himself as a documentary of the destructiveness and showed his photos in church circles.

He even climbed into the ruins of the "Führerbunker" in Berlin, disguised as a construction worker.

All of this earned him interrogations and house searches.

And yet Conrad was surprised when he leafed through his Stasi files in 1993.

The Stasi had given him the name "The Collector" - at least that was appropriate.

"While reading I was alternately hot and cold as I realized more and more what undeserved happiness had spared me from East German prisons," he told SPIEGEL.

It was different for some of his friends.

He had "known nothing about the danger in all these years and therefore lived fairly impartially."

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He could see from the files that his supposedly "hostile-negative basic position" was enough to keep him under observation for eight years.

Spy should provoke him to commit criminal acts and statements.

He was denied studies, even if there is no documentary evidence for it.

"What remains is the disgust that arises involuntarily when you read the endless pages of overarching spy reports," says Conrad.

"The action plans are shockingly often stupid and often just fanatical."

One became conspicuous in the SED state just listening to supposedly inflammatory music.

Raik Adam from Halle had long hair and loved heavy metal.

The small subculture scene was spied on, and Adam assumed a "solidified hostile-negative attitude".

In 1986 he was allowed to leave the country.

Three years later he retaliated with symbolic attacks on the Berlin Wall from the west.

On the 28th anniversary of the construction of the wall, he and friends from the former Halle metal scene threw Molotov cocktails onto the wall and a watchtower, the crew of which they warned beforehand.

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Adam knows how naive and reckless these and other actions were.

However, a look at the Stasi files gave him the opportunity to later process this story as a graphic novel based on the documents and his own memories.

"We knew that we were also being monitored in the West," he told SPIEGEL.

»Friends in Halle were regularly questioned about us by the Stasi.

Lieutenant Colonel Peter Romanowski from the Stasi in Halle wrote pages and pages of reports. «The Stasi suspected that the Halle residents were planning something on the wall, but could not prove anything.

»The biggest surprise was that someone who had also left Halle and who had lived in my direct neighborhood spit out the entire circle of acquaintances from ex-Halle residents in West Berlin.

She bought her departure with the obligation to work for the Stasi in the West, as she had done in Halle. "

IM "Vera Stein" diligently collected information about Adam: phone number, travel destinations, monthly income.

»We confronted IM› Vera Stein ‹after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But to this day she vehemently denies being that person.

Actually unbelievable. "

In 1999, the photographer, who had initially received an award for his photos in the GDR, sat agitated in front of his files in the Rostock branch of the BStU.

“I read mesmerized for hours,” Siegfried Wittenburg recalled in SPIEGEL in 2016.

“Sometimes my hair stood on end, sometimes I had to laugh out loud.

The first report was from my parents' neighbor.

She intercepted the letters that I wrote from the NVA basic military service to my colleagues in my brigade, where she worked as a secretary. "

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The head of the cultural center in Rostock, where he had led a photo group, triggered a case against Wittenburg.

Out of solidarity, Wittenburg had boycotted an arbitrarily censored exhibition.

This was followed by an "Operative Personal Control" (OPK), code name "Lens".

So it should be checked for anti-state activities.

In the file, Wittenburg found evidence of how his apartment had been searched: It noted what kind of books were on the shelf and how much money was in the cupboard.

“I have to laugh about the fact that the snoopers couldn't make samples of the types on my typewriter to identify documents.

Because the neighbor came home unexpectedly - who, as far as I know, was a Stasi officer himself. "

Wittenburg also requested that the real names of the informers assigned to him be disclosed.

They were friends and bosses.

One was the partner of his wife's best friend.

However, its information also led to the OPK »lens« being discontinued.

Twelve years after seeing the files, Wittenburg approached this man.

He told him that he had acted in accordance with the system out of fear for his daughter.

In parting, Wittenburg said: “Thank you.

We can look each other in the eye again.

But we cannot become friends again. "

It was hardly surprising that Western correspondents in the GDR were monitored.

The intensity and effort, which could be proven by the inspection of the files, nevertheless surprised: The Stasi had spied on SPIEGEL with an army of agents in the 1980s.

The "operational process" under the cover name "tarantula" was intended to "seize the enemy, expose them, unsettle them, interrupt their channels of information."

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The focus was on Ulrich Schwarz, SPIEGEL correspondent in East Berlin.

Everything interested in him.

And because Schwarz often dragged a strange-looking object with him into his residential office, distrust grew: there was a detailed discussion of this »copper-colored anodized object«, the »approx.

50-60 cm long «, fables.

It seemed suspicious that Schwarz carried the thing "constantly wrapped in newspapers".

Schwarz was a tough nut to crack for the Stasi: As a Catholic and a studied theologian, he had a "good marriage" according to informers and was considered insensitive to erotic advances.

He also tried to protect his informants from being stalked and called important contacts from phone booths.

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The Stasi therefore tightened the agents' ring.

Office rooms were bugged, incoming phone calls were bugged, long-distance calls were recorded.

Two IMs disguised as cleaning men even rummaged through the paper garbage in the SPIEGEL office.

For critical reports, Schwarz earned psychological terror from nightly calls: "Farewell, Farewell, Farewell".

And anyone who contacted the SPIEGEL office was in danger of being "dealt with operationally."

That could also lead to prison sentences.

Despite their obsession with collecting, the informers did not reveal the secret of Ulrich Schwarz's enigmatic object.

It was a cow's foot - a crowbar.

Schwarz carried it with him because his office was on the 16th floor and the elevator often got stuck.

With the cow's foot he was able to free himself without waiting hours for the emergency service.

Harald Hauswald was considered suspicious of the GDR because he masterfully and subtly photographed contradictions and disappointed promises of the GDR.

The fact that he also worked for some West German magazines such as “Stern”, “Geo” and “Merian” made him look even more dangerous.

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Official and unofficial employees, who were even supposed to spy on him in his darkroom, described his photos as "dreary" and full of "skepticism about life in the GDR".

In 1985 there was an internal Stasi arrest warrant against Hauswald, among other things for alleged "subversive agitation" and "agent activity".

His contacts with Western journalists saved him from arrest, as an internal note shows: "Not advisable at the moment for political reasons."

Hauswald's favorite sentence in his Stasi files only linguistically shows the dehumanization of the hunt: "The Hauswald object got out of control." This was noted by frustrated pursuers who lost sight of the photographer when he went wrong on a one-way street with a bicycle.

Bad luck for the informers - they were sitting in the car.

In 1979 the GDR families Strelzyk and Wetzel made history when they managed to escape to the West by balloon.

But it was only through his files that Peter Strelzyk realized that the Stasi then put a former friend on him.

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His name was Jürgen Dier, alias IM »Diener«.

He had served in prison in the GDR as an alleged escape helper, but was allowed to leave the country after his release in 1982.

Unsuspectingly, Peter Strelzyk hired him in his electronics shop in Bad Kissingen.

The informant not only provided the Stasi with intimate details from the Strelzyks' private lives.

He soon took over the electrical shop, which went bankrupt after a few years.

Was that the revenge of the Stasi?

Peter Strelzyk (who died in 2017) was suspicious of this when he leafed through his files.

That could not be proven.

But there were other nasty surprises for him: His sister and brother had also spied on him.

Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2021-06-21

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