"Shield and sword of the party" - this was the self-image of the Ministry for State Security of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) since its foundation in 1950. In practice, this meant: spying, oppression, sowing suspicion. Its main target group was its own population. The Stasi, as the population called the ministry (STAatsSIcherheitsdienst - State Security Service), was the most important early warning system and apparatus of oppression in the hands of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED).
"Bring lime and bricks with you!"
The Stasi could not prevent the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. And with it, its own downfall. Nine days after the surprise opening of the border, the GDR's secret police was renamed the National Security Service (AfNS). New name - old system: that's how the vast majority of the 17 million East Germans saw it at the time.
The Stasi was the main topic of discussion at the Central Round Table meeting held in Berlin on January 15, 1990. Representatives of the old regime from the time of Prime Minister Hans Modrow discussed the future of the dilapidated GDR with civic activists. That day, a group of civic activists gathered in the New Forum called for protests in front of the Stasi headquarters. “Bring lime and bricks!” read one leaflet. They wanted to symbolically wall off the secret service. It was supposed to be an assault on the headquarters “with imagination and without violence.”
No resistance, no controls...
Thousands of citizens responded, including Arno Polzin from East Berlin. One detail the then 27-year-old will never forget: “That you could enter that complex with impunity.” There was no resistance, no controls. Quite the opposite. When Polzin entered the Stasi headquarters, which had been hermetically sealed for decades, he saw a uniformed policeman on the top floor of one of the buildings.
He was clearly not there to scare or chase people away, Polcin recalls for DW. The police officers, he says, watched what was happening down there "with interest and curiosity." For Polcin, it was a symbolic image. With the fall of the Stasi, the most important bastion of the GDR's secret service fell. And with it, the regime.
"The state has not resigned yet"
And it all started about 300 kilometers southwest of Berlin. In Erfurt, artist Gabrile Štecer and a group of women organized an occupation of the local Stasi building on December 4, 1989. The borders between East and West were open at that time, but they doubted peace. "At that time, the state had not yet resigned," Gabrile Štecer tells DW.
The police, the army and the Stasi, she says, were still armed. “The darkness that had descended on the GDR was still there.” Despite this, the women mustered all their courage and asked to enter the Stasi building. And the door did open. They explained to the astonished officers what they wanted: “You made our files, and they are our property. We want to save them now. We want to see if you will destroy them.”
Announced actions
"We weren't afraid," says Gabrijele Štecer. Their goal, she points out, was clear. And there was always something that needed to be done. The actions of these women were planned. And as crazy as it sounds, they informed the mayor about the action beforehand, and they sent a request to the state prosecutor to seal the Stasi premises so that the files could be saved. "We knew that this was also a great treasure. Our treasure."
Their lives were recorded in these files – that was their argument. And with these files the Stasi tried to rule over them and criminalize them, as Gabriele Štecer says. According to the Stasi, this then-young woman had been an enemy of the state long before that. Her crime was that in 1976 she protested together with other civic activists against the revocation of the citizenship of the musician Wolf Biermann. For this, Gabriele Štecer was sentenced to one year in prison in the Hoenek women's prison.
Despite her sentence, she refused to move to West Germany and fought for her existence in the GDR as a freelance artist. The Stasi continued to monitor her. The way she and her like-minded people brought down the secret service in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall is still considered by Gabriele Stetzer to be "brilliant" and "magnificent". The news from Erfurt, which seemed incredible, spread throughout the GDR at the time - that citizens had entered Stasi buildings and were not being shot at.
In Berlin, however, the process took a little longer. Markus Mekel, who briefly served as the GDR's foreign minister after the first free elections in 1990, has a plausible explanation for this. The GDR was a centralized state, he reminds us, and Berlin was the "seat of power," and thus the seat of the "repressive apparatus." And the Stasi could only be removed by weakening the government itself, Mekel argues. That moment came on January 15, 1990.
Capitulation of Hans Modrov
Three days after the attack on the Stasi headquarters, the last communist head of government in the GDR, Hans Modrow, relented and ordered the secret service to be disbanded. "A great merit" of the GDR National Assembly, or parliament, was that the Stasi files were subsequently opened, Mekel told DW. And this, he says, was decided despite opposition from West Germany.
West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl wanted to keep the archive under lock and key. To prevent this, Arno Polzin and his followers launched a second raid on the Stasi complex in Berlin in September 1990 - successfully. The civic activists' most important goal had been achieved: "My file belongs to me." At that point, Polzin feared that the West German secret services might gain access to the files "before the civic activists of the GDR even had a chance to find out what was going on there."
Great contribution of civic activists
Without the involvement of civic activists, the dissolution of the Stasi and the opening of the files would have been almost impossible. As decided in 2019, the Stasi files will take their place in the Federal Archives in the medium term. Citizens will also be able to access these documents in the future.
The last GDR Foreign Minister, Markus Meckel, considers this a good solution and points out that the case can serve as a model for other countries of the former Eastern Bloc – which followed the German example. The raid on the Stasi headquarters on January 15, 1990, has a special, historical significance for him: "It was a great deed, which is important and must be written down and remembered."
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