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As ubiquitous as this was, the ratios swelled when informers were factored in: counting part-time informers, the Stasi had one agent per 6.5 people. This comparison led Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal to call the Stasi even more oppressive than the Gestapo. [36] Stasi agents infiltrated and undermined West Germany's government and spy agencies.
The Geheime Staatspolizei (German pronunciation: [ɡəˈhaɪmə ˈʃtaːtspoliˌtsaɪ] ⓘ; transl. "Secret State Police"), abbreviated Gestapo (German: [ɡəˈstaːpo] ⓘ), [3] was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
In a 1991 interview, Jewish Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal said, "The Stasi was much, much worse than the Gestapo, if you consider only the oppression of its own people. The Gestapo had 40,000 officials watching a country of 80 million, while the Stasi employed 102,000 to control only 17 million." [94]
It had secret police, commonly referred to as the Stasi, which made use of an extensive network of civilian informers. [30] From the 1970's, the main form of political, cultural and religious repression practiced by the Stasi, was a form of 'silent repression' [31] called Zersetzung ("Decomposition").
The Stasi kept files on about 5.6 million people. [9] The Stasi had 90,000 full-time employees who were assisted by 170,000 full-time unofficial collaborators (Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter); together these made up 1 in 63 (nearly 2%) of the entire East German population. Together with these, a much larger number of occasional informers brought up ...
A former member of communist East Germany's secret police has been charged with murder over the killing of a Polish national at a border crossing in divided Berlin in 1974, prosecutors said Thursday.
Directive No. 1/76 on the Development and Revision of Operational Procedures, which outlined the use of Zersetzung in the Ministry for State Security. The Ministry for State Security (German: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS), commonly known as the Stasi, was the main security service of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany or GDR), and defined Zersetzung in its 1985 dictionary ...
The Stasi report shows that the search was conducted in 2021, meaning German authorities also considered the possibility that Gansau could have been Stasi. Federal prosecutors confirmed that the ...