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Entitled Verrat Verjaehrt Nicht, or Betrayal Never Dies, the book by Christhard Laepple is a collection of the stories of six former Stasi employees and informants, one of the first published chronicles of the agency from people on the inside. "I experienced many shocking moments," Laepple told Reuters. "Some events are incomprehensible: a brother spying on his own sister, a professor denouncing his son’s classmate." The book is the latest in a series of works that delve into the methods of the Stasi, which under the leadership of Erich Mielke, was regarded as one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies in the world. The 2006 film The Lives of Others, the tale of a Stasi officer in East Berlin who develops feelings for his victims while spying on them, was a huge hit in Germany and won an Academy Award for best foreign film. Another film about the Stasi’s persecution of a top East German cyclist was released last month. Laepple began his research for the book years ago while working on a two-part television documentary, Die Feindzentrale, or Enemy Headquarters, which was broadcast on German public television in 2006. It was the first chance for many of those interviewed in the book to speak freely about their past, he said. All six former Stasi workers use pseudonyms to hide their true identities. Some claim to have "slipped" into the Stasi by accident. Others say they joined out of a feeling of moral obligation. One young man from Weimar tells how he joined after being told that his school fees would be subsidised. "He later became addicted to the Stasi, craving information about possible dissidents the way that a drug user craves his next hit," the prologue of the book explains. Using an extensive network of informants instructed to snoop on anyone they knew, the Stasi infiltrated almost every area of life in East Germany. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Stasi had some 91,000 employees and at least as many informants. The rising new Left party, a grouping of ex-communists from East Germany and West German leftists, has been accused by the country’s mainstream parties of housing former Stasi members. Earlier this year, a German politician linked to the Left sparked outrage by arguing the Stasi should be brought back. — Reuters
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Former
members of the Stasi come clean about their work for East Germany’s
infamous secret police in a new book that offers some of the most
detailed personal accounts of its clandestine operations.