On the night of November 9, 1989, as East Berliners headed en masse to cross the incipient breaches in the Wall for the first time, a frenetic activity began at the headquarters of the Stasi, the feared political police of the GDR. destruction of documents. Tens of thousands of folders were shredded for several days, until citizens alerted by the huge bonfires in the courtyard peacefully took over the building and remained camped there until the transfer of powers. Despite the loss of documentation on the systematic system of communist surveillance and oppression, 110 kilometers of documents remained as testimony to their crimes, if we put them one after the other, guarded today in the former central command of the Stasi, in Berlin. Lichtenberg neighborhood. Related News 50 years later standard Yes A former Stasi police officer is convicted of “mercilessly executing” a Polish man Rosalía Sánchez | Berlin correspondent Czesław Kukuczka had threatened Colonel Maksymilian Karnowski at his East Berlin embassy with detonating a fake bomb if he was not given safe passage to the West. They remain in their original location because the transfer is impossible: there are no buildings prepared to support such an amount of weight except for this one, which was built specifically for it. That is why, for the last 35 years, researchers continue to flock to this same point. It has taken more than three decades to begin to organize and study the content of that mass of documents and, one of the most surprising conclusions they have reached historians is that the Stasi recruited as many members of Nazi intelligence as possible to form its own cadres. The institution that legitimized its cruelty in the anti-fascist struggle was made up of a good proportion of former Nazis.« The Stasi stored about eleven kilometers of archives from the Third Reich, but no prosecutor, no scientist, no one else knew that these documents existed, of course. “So those files were not used for prosecution, but for the selection of personnel and the hiring of unofficial agents,” explains historian Henry Leide, who has spent decades tracing the often well-paid careers of at least 35 featured Nazis who, after the Second World War, found their place in the Stasi.Against Western elites« The Stasi discovered that it had a file on SS-Obersturmführer Heinz Barth, the platoon leader who participated in the Oradour-sur-massacre Glane, in July 1944. The names of two witnesses from the same platoon appeared in the file and he sought them out, but not to judge them, but to recruit them. And that same procedure was later widely used,” he clarifies. Department IX/11 of the MfS, located in a villa in Hohenschönhausen, housed the ‘Nazi Archive’, top secret from the outside world. It was used to launch campaigns against Western elites and to frustrate criminal proceedings in the GDR, converted into recruitment processes. A crowd next to the Berlin Wall, November 11, 1989 AP The Stasi files testify that the entire state structure of The GDR was infected with Nazis. In the 1950s, 27% of SED comrades had previously been members of a branch of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). Even former Nazi concentration camp guards lived unmolested in communist Germany, such as SS men Paul Riedel, August Bielesch, and Oskar Siebeneicher, who were active in the selection and custody of thousands of Jews at Auschwitz. After the war, Riedel worked as a miner in Saxony, Bielesch as a truck driver in Western Pomerania, and Siebeneicher as a jewelry manufacturer in Thuringia. But where there was an interesting file, which outlined skills that were not so easy to find, the Stasi began recruiting. Josef Settnik, a Gestapo agent stationed in Auschwitz, was recruited, for example, in 1964 as a church spy. Willy Läritz, a member of the Gestapo in Leipzig, earned a reputation as a “tough” interrogator in GDR police circles. He was recruited by the Stasi in 1961 “to support our fight for peace and socialism”, according to the corresponding entry in his file. If the former Nazis demonstrated that they had “adapted”, they could also count on positions of responsibility. “The Stasi deliberately and systematically recruited Nazi criminals regardless of what they had done before, sometimes those who orchestrated massacres,” concludes Leide. A big lieIn his book ‘The Breath of the Wolf’, one of the few archive investigations of the Stasi carried out in Spanish, Amir Valle recounts the case of SS officer Hans Sommer, who played a decisive role in the attack on seven synagogues in Paris in October 1941. In 1945 He fled to Spain and was arrested, taken to the Miranda de Ebro camp. Due to the intervention of the former consul in Marseille, whom he knew from when he acted in that city under the guise of German consul Herbert Senner, he was released and worked for the French intelligence services. Unmasked, he was deported to Germany, imprisoned in Dachau and recruited by Reihard Gehlen until the Stasi set its sights on him and he began working for communist Germany from 1954, under the nickname Rumland. «Thanks to his information, Minister Erich Mielke managed to establish a very successful strategy to contain the German, French, Italian and American secret services in the GDR. And although the Stasi file on Sommer is impressive, more than 22,000 pages, some of that information is still classified,” warns Amir Valle. On the guided tours, part of the events that commemorate the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Wall of Berlin, young people listen to talks about the GDR and discover this sinister relationship. “They said they were fighting against fascism, but they did exactly the same thing,” Anika is surprised, on an excursion with her school in Stuttgart. The older attendees, however, only nod silently. «We didn’t know it, but we could sense it. What my parents said about the Nazi years was too similar,” says Reinhard, a retiree who lived in the GDR; “It was a lie so big that it could not be hidden.”
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