Eavesdropping, torture, murder – how Stasi kept East Germany under control

East Germany was a nation saturated in spies – they were in every office, factory, school and university, and even families spied on themselves.

Wolfgang Schwanitz worked his way up to be head of East Germany’s Office for National Security, the feared secret police known as Stasi. (Getty Images.)

OBITUARY

Wolfgang Schwanitz
Stasi leader. Born Berlin, June 26, 1930; died Berlin, February 1, aged 91.

Long before any wall went up around Berlin, East Germans were trapped. By the time of Germany’s surrender in May 1945, it had ceased to exist as a state. Almost nine million Germans had been killed. The country had brought on itself an unprecedented military, industrial and social calamity.

Up to a quarter of all housing had been destroyed. Allied bombing had smashed the country’s industries. Transport systems lay in ruins. There was no government, and Germans, particularly in cities, starved.

Thousands wandered homeless down debris-strewn alleyways created as teams of Trummerfrauen – rubble women – using shovels and buckets pushed bricks, timber and masonry to the side of once famous streets salvaging what they could.

That year’s Potsdam Conference divided the spoils of war between Britain, the US, France and the Soviet Union.

East Germany’s cards were marked. The western half would enjoy democracy, free speech, and the market economy, and would witness an economic miracle, quickly rebuilding itself into an industrial powerhouse; the east would be absorbed into Stalin’s communist utopia with no political freedoms, a centralised command economy, inhuman social restrictions and a perverse, self-mocking name – German Democratic Republic. Not too many fled West Germany to head east.

East Germany was ruled by homegrown communist thugs and criminals whose enthusiasm for Marxist-Leninist doctrines often outshone their Moscow bosses. It was they, not Moscow, who built the Berlin Wall. Indeed, they needed reluctant Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev’s permission.

Protecting East Germany’s 18 million people from the ideological subversion posed by next door’s democracy was a full-time job, and more than 90,000 were employed to do it – along with another 175,000 enthusiastic collaborators, of whom there was never a shortage. It is estimated that one in every 63 East Germans may have co-operated with the feared Stasi.

The last man to oversee this Orwellian militia was the unpleasant Wolfgang Schwanitz.

And, as recent events confirm, just as older Russians pine for the days of their stolen empire, plenty of former East Germans regret ever hearing of Mikhail Gorbachev with his glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring).

Schwanitz came late to the role. Gorbachev’s reforms had ensured the fall of the Soviet Union, although it was always likely to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. But that didn’t stop Schwanitz’s eagerness to save fellow East Germans from the democracy to come – and protect the legacy and his beloved Stasi.

An ardent communist from youth, Schwanitz took a traditional path to the leadership of the Ministry of State Security. By 20 he was a member of the officially sanctioned Free German Youth movement. From there he joined the ruling Socialist Unity Party and graduated with a doctorate from one of its colleges. Only Stasi recruits took it as other than a qualification to terrorise the neighbours. He climbed its military-like structure and in 1989 became just the fourth man to lead East Germany’s secret police agency.

The Stasi’s well-earned reputation for spying – at one stage 2000 full-time officers tapped an estimated 100,000 telephone lines – arbitrary arrests, torture and murder would pose a problem for the soon-to-be-united Germany.

The Stasi was often compared to the feared Nazi Gestapo, only it was a much bigger organisation monitoring a country with not a quarter of the population.

East Germany was a society saturated with spies. Every block of apartments had a nominated spy. Every school, university, hospital, factory and government department had spies. Family members spied on each other. And the Stasi perfected the techniques of compromising vulnerable people in the West so they too would collect information for East Germany. The Stasi was also responsible for training foreign insurgents including ANC guerrilla fighters, Palestinian terrorists and even West Germany’s Baader-Meinhof Gang.

When Schwanitz realised the East German state was collapsing, the Stasi lifer oversaw the attempted destruction of its millions of files – records of fellow Germans mostly unaware they had even come to the attention of the secret police.

But in a demonstration of people power, newly liberated East Germans raided Stasi headquarters across the country to preserve what they could. And what they found shocked them: 40 million index cards, 100km of paper files and almost two million photographs, videos and taped conversations. The united Germany passed legislation protecting the files and giving citizens access to them – almost three million have checked theirs out. Eventually, 249 officers were convicted of various offences and East Germany’s last leader, Egon Krenz, jailed for three years.

But not Schwanitz. He even co-wrote a book defending the Stasi’s role. “There is no reason to regret,” he would say.