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Citizens protesting and entering the Stasi building
in Berlin; the sign accuses the Stasi and
SED of being Nazistic dictators. (From: Wikipedia) |
"As the Berlin Wall fell in 1989-1990, the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany united with great speed and utter confusion. The records of the East German State Security Service (
Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit, called the MfS or Stasi) were at first neglected by West German authorities preoccupied with the seemingly hopeless task of steering monumental changes that were beyond any governmental control. The Communist security apparatus continued to operate after the fall of the Wall, and party loyalists ran shredding machines around the clock in an effort to destroy incriminating evidence from forty years of intelligence-gathering activity. The shreds, which were saved, actually filled 15,587 mail sacks. In the power vacuum, East German dissidents and some more politically mainstream citizens invaded the Stasi headquarters in Berlin on 15 January 1990 to halt the destruction of records by Stasi functionaries. Certainly the dissidents wanted to preserve the evidence of the fallen regime's oppression for historical reasons. On a more personal level, they also wanted to know exactly who had been reporting the adverse information about them that had affected their jobs, personal freedom, and basic aspects of their lives... Archivists took on seemingly impossible tasks, such as the re-assembly of shredded documents. Some 400,000 pages have been pieced back together." (100-101) --Elena S. Danielson, "Privacy Rights and the Rights of Political Victims: Implications of the German Experience," in Menzi L. Behrnd-Klodt and Peter J. Wosh, eds.,
Privacy & Confidentiality Perspectives: Archivists & Archival Records
