Uncovering the Stasi: Behind the Berlin Wall
34:08 Share

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. The Stasi. For the citizens of East Germany, few words invoked more fear throughout the population. Between 1950 and 1989, it was the official government security service. Its purpose: to keep the ruling socialist regime in power.

On an unprecedented scale, the Stasi established a vast network of spies and informants that put all of East German society under surveillance. How did it listen in on those who were thought to harbor treasonous ideas? And how did it use psychological oppression to literally drive the enemies of the state insane?

The Stasi was the Ministry for State Security, a terrifying organization that spied on its own population for something like 40 years using all kinds of methods of surveillance and using the people themselves to spy on their neighbors and families. The control the Stasi had over the East German people was more severe than anywhere else in communist Eastern Europe. Their stranglehold was almost total.

They were the most oppressive and surveillance-obsessed secret police quite possibly in history. Founded in 1950 and headquartered in East Berlin, the Stasi was one of the most feared intelligence agencies of the Cold War. And to ensure the people's obedience and deference to communism, the Stasi spied on the East German population. Anyone even remotely suspected of opposing the regime was dealt with brutally.

But surveillance wasn't just carried out by Stasi agents. Key to the organization's power was a vast network of informants. These were ordinary citizens who, in support or more likely in fear of the regime, denounced friends, colleagues, and family members to the secret police.

The Stasi is short for Staatssicherheit, state security. But they weren't security. They were a secret police. Secret police are what dictatorships have. They were feared, they were loathed, and they were the most powerful in the Eastern Bloc.

Life during the Cold War in East Germany was really dark. It was dangerous and it was full of paranoia. Why? The Stasi. You knew that if you went to a family dinner. Statistically, there was someone there listening and recording everything you said.

And as you're on the train, as you're walking through the park, you know there's spies everywhere and they're going to report on you. I mean, the whole environment is just one of, "I'm being watched and I need to make sure that I appear to be as normal as possible." In its early years, the Stasi focused on arresting political opponents, filling half a dozen prisons with tens of thousands of inmates.

As the organization expanded, in addition to the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the whole population of East Germany essentially became prisoners of the state. Life in East Berlin at the time of the Stasi was unbelievably repressive. A Nazi hunter even said it was more repressive than the Gestapo.

This was on the threshold of a sort of communist East, if you like, and the capitalist West. And particularly in Berlin, you could see you had this sort of thriving capitalist sort of mini city-state, literally metres away from a kind of rundown, a sort of grey, drab, gloomy, repressive state. And

I think it's a measure of the insecurity of the status quo, of the ruling authorities, that they felt the need to subject their citizens to such a rigorous degree of repression. By our standards, it was grim, a bit surreal. So you were in a totalitarian state. You had one party rule. It was after the war, so it was a bit shabby. And the city was under the iron hand of the Communist Party and behind them, of course, the Soviet Union.

One of the most iconic images of the era was a Trabant car, an affordable vehicle that was seen everywhere on the streets of Berlin. It was a product of the socialist state: dull, cramped and uncomfortable. A fitting description for the lives of East Germany's citizens. Investigative journalist Jamie Theakston is going to find out exactly how the infamous Stasi used to operate.

Felix Müller, a guide at the former Stasi headquarters, is an expert on the day-to-day operations of this building and is giving Jamie an insider's tour. You can still see the same furniture still here, the same typewriters, nothing really changed. And it's basically as it was left by the Stasi itself.

So the Stasi HQ was like a city within a city, and at the top of it was Erich Milke, you know, a veteran communist who was almost, if you want, Stalinist royalty. You know, he lived in splendid style, an entire floor for himself, probably more room than the US president has in the White House.

And underneath him was this kind of mini city, you know. There was a theatre, there was canteen facilities, there was a supermarket and so on. It was a great career for people, you know, in a very dull, grey society. You know, want a future? Go and join the Stasi.

The citizen informants and all the other spies were keeping tabs on anybody who might have anything connected with the West. And there was a whole department devoted to going through rubbish bins, trash cans, looking for food wrappers from the West, things like this. And, you know, that gives a whole new meaning to dishing the dirt on somebody.

In the East, it really was about paying people to monitor the most trivial everyday occurrence. People walking their dog, people going to the supermarket, people taking their kids to school, and entrusting this to paper and writing it down, almost in a state of frenzy, as though these were nuclear secrets, when really they were not. So that seems absurd and surreal. But at the same time, if the aim was to

generate a forensic overview of people's lives, then they did succeed. The thing about totalitarian communist governments is that it shows human nature at its very worst. Although the whole point of communism was always sold as "we're all in this together, we're all equal", obviously some are more equal than others. And when you get to the top, especially in the Stasi, the secret police,

or you are one of their pet informants, basically, you have a nice life, you know, you have a nice office, you have all sorts of minions running around after you, you have a big car, you know. And that's how they got some of the informants anyway. They promised them extras when their lives were very drab and they had very little. Mind you, you'd be very foolish to turn them down. Exact numbers are hard to come by.

But between 1950 and 1989, it's believed that the Stasi employed a total of 274,000 people. The Soviet Union's secret police, the KGB, employed one agent per 5,830 of its citizens. The Nazi's Gestapo, one per 2,000. But if you include informants, the Stasi had one agent per 166 citizens.

And if you include both regular and part-time informants, the ratio is actually one agent per six or seven people. The Stasi undertook surveillance on an unprecedented scale. East Germany was a country that spied on itself.

The Stasi understood one thing more than most other secret police services, and that was that they could use people. They could use the ordinary people of Eastern Germany. And this was an incredibly effective but corrosive thing to have done. Their network of informants was colossal. It stretched, it's been alleged, up to possibly two million people.

And we know that a significant proportion of them were under 18. This was children informing on their parents, people in building blocks informing on their neighbors. On a day-to-day basis, the Stasi leveraged the ordinary people of East Germany and made them their spies.

This was really a way of dividing society, you know, kind of dividing it, keeping it weak, making sure it couldn't unite against this rather abrasive intelligence services. And you even had husbands and wives who were being spied upon by each other.

Every single apartment block would have someone connected to the Stasi. They knew exactly what visitors had come, which lovers had come, which prostitutes. They really had their finger on the pulse of society and in quite a totalitarian way tried to control every aspect of it, just to kind of cement this gruesome hegemony that they'd been perpetrating for so long.

A long-held fascination into the techniques of the Stasi created the need for a spy museum in Berlin. Jamie Theigsten is meeting with Dr. Christopher Nehring of the museum, who has a number of objects in the collection that reveal just what it was like to be a Stasi agent at the time. What is this? This is obviously a briefcase here, right? It's one of the Theater Stasi's hidden devices.

just hide everything inside the suitcase. What it did was to use that for secret searches of your home. What you have built inside the suitcase is a camera and two reduced flashlights. It's a camera? And it was used to take pictures of documents. Well, you called it a handbag or a woman's purse. Yeah. Which means that the Stasi's trick actually worked because what you have inside

It's a camera. Wow, okay. It's another hidden camera which will take pictures through that little lens and you can trigger it while walking. And so what were they hoping to do? What were they taking photos of? Anything basically they would deem suspicious. It's mainly for surveillance, that is following people or taking pictures of larger gatherings of people. Surveillance was so rife in East Berlin

Stasi managed Germany that probably exceeds any other time in recorded history for oppressive surveillance. You were always being watched. And more than just watched, you were being videotaped. There was cameras in your bedroom, cameras in the hotel.

People had special briefcases and cameras mounted on their watches. They put them everywhere because they wanted to listen to everything that you had to say. And there were so many of them. Throughout the course of your day, you were probably being videotaped a dozen different times.

We mustn't forget that the Stasi were a Cold War intelligence agency as well as being a secret police service. And in that, they did the same as almost all the others. They had Q Branch type objects for spying. You can see the briefcase that dismantles into a photocopier, the bra that has a secreted camera in it, the deodorant bottle that untwists and is there for passing messages. They had developed all of these capabilities for their internal and also external espionage activities, which were significant.

It's incredible that the Stasi went to such extraordinary lengths to spy on their own people. You'd be in a park and there'd be a camera in the tree next to you. Or it might be in a walking stick that some old person walking past you nonchalantly was actually filming you with the walking stick. I mean, it's absolutely bizarre. And of course, the items that you see in the Stasi museum point to a paranoia that we simply can't get our heads around.

While some of the more valuable captured spies were exchanged at one of the border control points between East Germany and West Berlin, the Bridge of Spies, what happened to the rest of the people who stood up to the regime? The answer was that many were sent to the Hohenschönhausen, a Stasi prison that was a central detention center for nearly 40 years. The prison was located in an exclusion zone, which meant that it didn't appear on any maps.

This gave the Stasi free rein to treat the prisoners however they wanted. The prison has over 200 cells and interrogation rooms. Peter Kayup was an East Berlin resident who tried to escape the regime and spent years as a Stasi prisoner. He's giving Jamie Theakston a unique insight into his time there.

They picked me up from the train, they asked me 40 hours in a row if I wanted to escape. 40 hours I said no and then it was just too much for me. I collapsed and then I said yes, I want to escape because it didn't end up to say no any longer.

So you'd be picked up by the Stasi on the streets. You'd be bundled into a windowless van. You'd be driven around for hours in complete darkness. People outside would think it was a grocery van. You'd then be taken to the Stasi prison. The moment the doors flung open, there'd be bright lights shining on you. And the whole thing was theater to completely disorientate you, to break you down, and more importantly, to get an early confession out of you.

So once a prisoner landed in Hohenschönhausen, how were they treated and what was their ultimate fate?

Hello, I'm Violet Manners and welcome to Hidden Heritage, the podcast that brings you inside Great Britain's favourite destinations. From the same team that brought you the number one history podcast, Duchess, Hidden Heritage will uncover the fascinating stories behind the UK's brightest, shining hidden gems.

You'll hear from top experts in British heritage, including custodians, historians, artisans, experts, and even the craftsmen and restorers who've worked on some of the most celebrated historic buildings.

We will share the untold and unique stories that celebrate UK heritage, from landmarks to architecture, artefacts to myths and legends. Hidden Heritage will highlight a side of British history you have never seen before. I'm your host, Violet Manners, and founder of HeritageX, and I invite you all to join us on this exciting journey. This is Hidden Heritage. You can find Hidden Heritage wherever you listen to your podcasts.

The infamous Hohenschönhausen was a Stasi prison in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik in East Berlin that was a central detention center for nearly 40 years. Interrogation, sleep deprivation and beatings were all used extensively. So those bars were closed until you had to get through. And it must have been terrifying.

for anyone being brought in here for the first time. Yeah, I mean, always the comments. I mean, in front of this closed bar, they told you, "Face the wall." You always had to face the wall first. Then they opened up a bar, then you were allowed to get through. And so the whole procedure was so unreal, so bizarre. And also dehumanizing, I guess. Yeah. Which was quite an important part of what it was. Yeah, because...

The fact was they informed you that you were not allowed to look into their faces. You always had to look down. Oh, you're not allowed to look at the guards' faces? Yes, yes, yes. You were not allowed to turn around, for instance. So they ordered, you know, "You have to look down and you are not allowed to look into their faces." You are in a cell completely isolated from the rest of the world.

How does it feel for you being in this cell now? I remember how it felt, you know, when the door

when they closed the door and they locked it up and then you are in this chamber you know and then you know the first time when i came into the cell i realized the toilet and the toilet actually showed me that i have to stay for longer it is strange because everything is here a water place a toilet no need to open up the door imprisonment with the stasi was a psychologically searing imprisonment

The Stasi worked on people's identity. They worked on their mental state. They put people into states of isolation and cut them off totally from everything they knew. That was the horror of being captured by the Stasi. It was complete detachment from the world.

There was the basic things like sleep deprivation, but also interrogating people over long periods of time. And also it's little things like, you know, that you would be, you'd find yourself lying in your cell at night, you were forced to look up at the ceiling and the light would come on every 10 minutes. So you were sleep deprived and then you were taken to a room where the only person that you were allowed to talk to for months was your interrogator.

And that's basically how they deconstructed people and destroyed them from the inside. So they then denounced, of course, alleged traitors in the DDR. So have you ever come face to face with any of your captors since your release? Yes. So first I avoided any contact. Of course, I lived in West Germany and there was no reason to get back to East Germany. I even had problems to get back to this place.

Then in 2013, I found out that my brother was with the Stasi. So he was a Stasi spy. I applied for his Stasi file. And then I had to find out that my brother, you know, worked close with them. He signed up a contract to spy on my parents. You're joking. So your own brother? Yeah.

was spying on your family? I don't know if he did. It was his order. I crossed fingers that he was maybe under pressure. So they took pressure on him and he signed up and he never spied on us. But I can't be really sure.

They would tell you things that would make you begin to doubt what you had previously believed. They'd tell you things about your family, about what people were reputed to have said about you. Much of it false, but the idea was just to make you crack and then you would sign whatever declaration or say whatever it was that they wanted you to say. And you can still see

very visibly the cells where so many people buckled and gave in to these sinister interrogators.

The Stasi were not just respected because they had to be, they were feared. I mean, you knew that if you were perceived as being somehow a dissident in one way or another, that you could be put in prison just because of something you said after you had a couple of beers. These people were watching your every move and you knew that no one could be trusted, not your boss at work, not your father, not your lover. It was that prevalent.

The Stasi's horrific treatment of suspected enemies of the state was not just restricted to its detention centers. Beyond the prison walls, they carried out something far more devious to silence their opponents, called "Zertsetung." It was a process of psychological torture that aimed to isolate and paralyze those thought to be subversive members of society. The Stasi would poison food,

destroy relationships, and even break into people's houses and move things around when they weren't there. They quite literally drove enemies of the state insane. There was something they did called gaslighting, which was actually terrifying. You would

Go home one day, no sign of a break in, neighbours hadn't heard anything, you'd be going about your business and think, "Wait a minute, there's something slightly different about my flat. Surely I didn't buy that brand of coffee." And then your alarm clock goes off at a different time. And gradually they up the oddness

Basically, you think you're becoming unhinged. Say you had one fish in your goldfish bowl, you go in one day and there's two fish. Well, that's impossible. So you really must be going mad. You know, this kind of thing.

They tried to kind of break men and women, make them feel like they were going mad, like they had nothing to live for. And this was something that could be denied, because it was actually very subtle in some instances, but also something that would get rid of the will to live from these people. These people would be crushed and they wouldn't really want to get up in the morning, let alone engage in subterfuge or treasonous activities. So they were crafty, very subtle, but

arch-psychological manipulators. The psychological oppression by the Stasi successfully confused its citizens. Those contemplating an escape to the West questioned themselves and those around them. If they did overcome their fears and attempt to get away, they were then met with a physical one. In a divided Germany, the border between the two opposing regimes was of paramount importance.

The Inner German Border, as it was called, was over 850 miles long, and by 1982, it had 19 checkpoints along its length. Although the wall was never entirely sealed off, movement was severely restricted, especially for East Germans.

Berlin was unique during the Cold War for that juxtaposition of East and West and all eyes were on it. Much of what happened there does read like Cold War spy movies because that's the way it was. I had the opportunity to cross into East Berlin a number of times when it was still East Berlin, going across Checkpoint Charlie and seeing these places and they are exactly as you see them in the films now. This was where the Cold War was the most concentrated.

This was once a kind of perilous mortal crossing. And it can seem a little bit distasteful that the whole thing is almost like parasitically you've got all these fast food joints, whereas this is actually quite a grave and sobering sight, or it should be. I know a lot of people are very unhappy that it's now been completely commercialised, but I suppose in a sense that's the new Germany, you know.

we could almost celebrate the fact that Checkpoint Charlie, now it's impossible to imagine the horror that went there, that people died trying to get across the wall, you know, burying underneath it, rushing to get through it, ramming a tank into it, ramming a car into it, all the things they did to try and get out, that you can't imagine it now. Well, maybe in some ways it's a good thing that we can't imagine that that ever happened there. Let's hope it doesn't happen again. On November 9th, 1989,

The Stasi announced that people could cross freely between the East and the West for the first time in nearly 30 years. This was the beginning of the end for the Berlin Wall. The German Democratic Republic was about to crumble in a similar way. It's difficult now to piece together exactly why the Stasi allowed the Berlin Wall to fall.

It may be an extension of their general idea, which was not to bang enormous numbers of people up in jail throughout their 40 years. Instead, they broke them down mentally. They didn't want the outside world to know about their, if you like, civil rights abuses or human rights abuses. They didn't want to risk starting a war by machine gunning their own citizens. There was also just a sheer number of people going, this wasn't just

one or two people. This was waves and waves of people gushing through with their husbands and their wives and their young children. It would have been a public relations disaster if they'd just turned the whole thing into a bloodbath.

I mean, what was so extraordinary in 1989 was we knew the Soviet Union was changing, but East Germany, you know, that was the most Stalinist police state behind the Iron Curtain. And yet the Stasi itself seemed to know the game was up, you know, that it was over. And so when people climbed onto the Berlin Wall, you know, and disrespected it and started going into the West, incredibly, the Stasi just gave up the game.

The Stasi knew it was living on borrowed time, and during the last few weeks of 1989, black smoke could be seen rising from the courtyards of Stasi offices. They were burning the files. On January 14th, 1990, the Stasi was formally dissolved, and efforts were ramped up to destroy the records they held. But word got out that this was going on, and a large crowd of protesters grew outside the Stasi's headquarters.

Desperate to ensure the evidence of the Stasi's crimes was not erased, they overcame the police and gained entry to the building. Once inside, the angry protesters overtook the building and were able to save the majority of files from destruction. In the end, a staggering amount of Stasi files were recovered across East Germany.

They revealed just how powerful the Stasi really was, and also how they had acted well beyond the rule of law and in complete disregard of human dignity and civil rights. The Stasi were unique in many ways, and one of the extraordinary things is because East Germany wasn't conquered militarily, but it collapsed under its own internal struggles,

The entire Stasi infrastructure was left in place and the people of East Germany protected it because they wanted access to the files and they have had access to the files subsequently. The new unified Germany passed an act of parliament to allow and enable that access. So what's been left to us by the Stasi is an extraordinary record of their thoroughness and it's preserved almost in its entirety.

They kept the most meticulous records of things that were seemingly utterly trivial, like when someone would take their dog for a walk, what they'd been getting up to when they go out at night. And this really became manifest when the Berlin Wall fell in '89 and the Stasi seemingly just walked away from their offices and the forces of the West moved in. And they were astonished to find not just a few filing cabinets or a few index cards, but hundreds of kilometers of these

meticulous records. Decades before the NSA, Facebook, Google or Yahoo trolled our every move with cookies on the internet and noted our likes and dislikes, the Stasi were doing the same thing in East Germany. We find 160 kilometers worth of files.

with the same kind of information that is being recorded on us today by Facebook, for instance. You know, just mundane things. I went to the grocery store today. I bought three cartons of milk. Last week, I only bought one. And then I went home and I took a nap. Things that just seem ridiculous. Why would anyone care? But they were recording everything. It was really quite obsessive. The vast amount of secret data left behind by the Stasi

is a fascinating yet disturbing insight into life behind the Berlin Wall. It truly exposes the scale and effectiveness of their operation. The way the Stasi operated was a system that required people to believe in it. People had to be afraid for that fear to work.

What happened in 1989 was that people stopped being afraid. And when that many people en masse are disobedient and rebellious, a system like the Stasi no longer functions, and it disintegrated quickly. You know, I look back on the Stasi period today and I think

Wow, I mean the ingenuity, the length that they went without any real technology, right, to record and monitor all the movements of their people. It's really quite impressive. But on the other hand, it's really very revolting. And now we realize it seems to have served as a precursor for the surveillance we're all under today.

For 40 years, the German Democratic Republic had used the Stasi to perpetrate a reign of terror over its population. Its colossal web of spies and informants built up a collection of files on approximately 6 million German citizens, more than a third of the population. Here in East Germany, mountains of files have left scars on the country that can still be felt to this day.