[video]How Swiss socialists followed their dreams in the GDR

[[R_H]]

Link to video

"The Stasi was present in some way, in our circles it wasn't seen as a threat. Maybe some people felt that speaking their minds could have a negative effect on their careers, but it wasn't a matter of fearing for their lives."

"It would be nice to see a new kind of socialism, but with more democracy."

"If the two pensioners were thirty years younger, they would move to Venezuela and support Chavez and his dream of socialism."

Comments?

I find their comments about the Stasi quite interesting, let alone the fact that they are supportive of Chavez. I'm surprised they didn't get their Swiss citizenship revoked (they left in 1968).

[K. A. Pital]

Why should it be surprising?

Why should their Swiss citizenship be revoked?

[[R_H]]

Why should it be surprising?

Because of all the stuff that has come to light about the Stasi since the fall of the GDR.

Why should their Swiss citizenship be revoked?

Because they voluntarily left the country during the Cold War to go live in the Warsaw Pact.

[K. A. Pital]

Because of all the stuff that has come to light about the Stasi since the fall of the GDR.

The Stasi was probably more intrusive than the KGB, but only in some aspects. I doubt it intruded on the daily life more so than the state security did here, and it wasn't a lot here. Of course, projecting USSR realities on the GDR might be wrong.

Because they voluntarily left the country during the Cold War to go live in the Warsaw Pact.

That is not any grounds to revoke citizenship though, if double citizenship is permitted.

[Samuel]

The Stasi was probably more intrusive than the KGB, but only in some aspects. I doubt it intruded on the daily life more so than the state security did here, and it wasn't a lot here. Of course, projecting USSR realities on the GDR might be wrong.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/563751/Stasi

By 1989 the Stasi relied on 500,000 to 2,000,000 collaborators as well as 100,000 regular employees, and it maintained files on approximately 6,000,000 East German citizens—more than one-third of the population.

[Thanas]

Because of all the stuff that has come to light about the Stasi since the fall of the GDR.

The Stasi was probably more intrusive than the KGB, but only in some aspects. I doubt it intruded on the daily life more so than the state security did here, and it wasn't a lot here. Of course, projecting USSR realities on the GDR might be wrong.

The Stasi had, with a population of 16 million, a total of 91.000 official and ~140.000 unofficial officers.

[K. A. Pital]

Wow, that's a lot. Damn. That's like the uber-state security. How much real power did the Stasi have though, wrt say detention and trials?

[Shroom Man 777]

Isn't it common-knowledge that the Stasi employed a not-insigificant portion of their own citizenry to spy on one another? I find it surprising that Stas doesn't know that.

[K. A. Pital]

No, I knew that they had lots and lots of informators. I'm impressed with the formal size of the organization... I mean, damn, that's about TWICE percentage the entire government of the USSR constituted vis it's population, just for one security agency.

That's not just the fact that they had a large portion of citizens spying (I mean, a lot of people here easily come into contact with the FSB; in fact, nigh anyone can do it without any problems), but the size of the official structure.

[Thanas]

^And that is even disregarding the armed forces the Stasi had under its disposal AFAIK. If you want those, add another 2-4 divisions to the list, depending on timeframe.

Also, the Stasi was famous for being able to fix trials and shooting people who wanted to escape. So yeah, they were a massive agency and one of the reasons contemporary germans had such an antipathy of the communist bloc.

They intruded massively on daily life. A common saying was that on every train, there is at least one stasi officer listening.

[Straha]

Also, the Stassi went out of its way to intrude into everything it could, and not always sanely.

They went as far as they could with informants with 1 in 11 Germans being IMs (Inoffizielle Mitarbeiters, I think. Their term for informant). They were also very psychologically intrusive, while a lot of East Germans I know were non-judgmental about the DDR everyone had at least one horror story about the Stassi (East German horror stories tend to involve either the Stassi or a Trabant, and sometimes both.) Anecdotal, I know, but when my mother saw the Movie the Lives of Others she came out of the theater sobbing uncontrollably. She'd been a student in Berlin in the seventies and used to visit friends in East Berlin and all she could say for a few minutes was "That's what they went through."

As for the sanity bit. There was an entire unit which searched packages coming from the West, purloined the luxury goods and gave it to the communist party leadership. They had another unit which would kill animals and refridgerate them so that when Honecker went hunting he'd seem to be far more succesful than he had been. The boss was also quite literally insane. When the wall was about to come down and the DDR was frantically trying to moderate itself they arrested the man in charge of the organization, a terrifying octogenarian whose name escapes me, and put him in a large cell. Once therein he started screaming at the guards that he was a very important person and needed to make phone calls at his desk. To shut him up they slid a desk into the room with two phones on it, which he snatched up right away and started barking orders into for hours like he was back in his office. Except the phones weren't plugged in, and the only people listening were the horrified prison guards. (Lest anyone question this, my source for that is a academic book in English called The Stassi and a article in Der Spiegel.)

[K. A. Pital]

Yup, I'd imagine for an agency that massive. For comparison, the Soviet KGB at peak only constituted around 400,000 men per 289 million, or 0,1%, including the border guards which actually constituted a large part of that number (only around 10% or 40,000 were actually employed in the state security and counterintelligence business, the rest were either foreign intelligence or mostly border guards). The Stasi by comparison would be over 6 times as massive officially if we count the border guards. If we discount them, the Stasi would be not only like 60 times more massive relatively, but also more massive than the KGB's cointel department in absolute numbers. That's what amazed me. I knew it was massive, but never actually cared to compare.

EDIT: Wow, that's... illuminating. I think Stasi was pretty powerful then. Kinda like the ISI, it probably was not exactly under full control of the civil government even...

[Thanas]

^ A friend of mine used to call it the gestapo on crack.

It was however under the control of the civil government - for example, when it was told to not crack down on the movement in 1989 it followed the order, even though it was clear that these protests would most likely mean the end of the state. They were also very loyal to the KGB and moscow in general.

I have often heard it described as the perfect soviet agency - loyal, monstrous, efficient and very, very good at what it did, though quality varied. In the end, its size was also its undoing - it just got too big and information was accumulated, but could not be processed anymore. In general though, they did a pretty good job, even though they did it for the most repulsive regimes in europe.

[Straha]

While they were certainly loyal to the Government it should be noted that the Stasi had a presence not only in the DDR's politburo but in every government ministry. The government simply couldn't ignore them. Also, Erich Mielke (the man who headed the Stasi from 1957 to 1989) predated everyone who served in the DDR's government in the later years and had massive files on everyone. If there were skeletons in your closet he knew everything about them and so did the people in the Party who Mielke got along with. This meant that if your disliked the Stasi or disagreed with it you weren't going to rise up the greasy pole and get a position where you might actually be a threat to it.

I should also add that everyone knew that he had immense influence as well, and it was blatant and universal. IIRC, he even blatantly and openly rigged the DDR Football league so that his favorite team won the championship five years in a row. Everyone knew he was doing it, but nobody anywhere would stop him.

I should add that I think it's a real shame that there are so few books on the Stasi and the DDR in English, especially when there's so much material to work with. If I could read German better than I can and was able to get a grant there are half a dozen papers/studies I'd love to do on them. (To pick one at random, the East Germans allowed the Mormon Church to build a Temple in Freiberg, hoping to show that they were accepting of all people and were indeed Socialism with a human face. The idea that they'd build the Temple, something which only Mormons are allowed entry into, and not have a compelling reason to allow its building and then not bug every room of the place they could is absurd. I'd love to just crawl through the archives and see exactly what they had on the building and what they did to the people who went there and the people who ran it.)

[K. A. Pital]

That Mormon temple shit is pure hypocrisy. The USSR at least didn't even bother with creating shrines for religion to get PR points. But then, the USSR at all rarely bothered with the world "opinion" of it since it was a superpower and had a whole host of nations that would support it in any decision.

Just how important was the perception of the West in DDR?

[Straha]

Very. Nobody was really happy with a Germany split in two, and the idea of a united Germany was important for a lot of people. The DDR's leadership thought the best way to accomplish that was by pitching their message at West Germans and convincing them that life really was much better in the East. There were slogans like "Real Working Socialism" and "Socialism with a Human Face", there was public tolerance of religion and priests (like Angela Merkel's father, for one), and a lot more. Also, remember getting into and out of East Germany wasn't that hard. You could visit and tour East Berlin for a day while staying in West Germany, and getting around East Germany wasn't hard if you tried. Unlike Russia they were right smackdab on the border with Capitalism and even had a capitalist enclave right next to their capital. So geography and History made it very important.


As for the hypocrisy, that's what makes it so interesting for me. This isn't just a church or a synagogue, this is a place only for the use of believers in the middle of a communist country. What was going through their mind when they approved it? What was going through the minds of the East Germans who went there? And what was the opinion of the Stasi in all this? There's potential for a great story to be told there and it's a shame no one has done it yet.

[Thanas]

Getting out was easy...if you were west german. The commies, of course, were more than happy to serve you hot lead otherwise.

[Straha]

Getting out was easy...if you were west german. The commies, of course, were more than happy to serve you hot lead otherwise.

You're right, I should have made it clearer I was talking about the West above.

[Serafina]

If you visit Berlin and want to learn something about the Stasi, i highly recommend visiting the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial.

The Stasi used it to imprison political prisoners. They amazingly kept it secret, despite its location in Berlin.
It is highly infamous for its "skilled application of psychological torture".

It has very, very good guided tours. They are given by former prisoners of the prisoner, who give an very good picture of the conditions inside.

Really, if you visit Berlin and have some spare time, take the tour. Unfortunately, the only english tour avaiable is on Saturdays, but it is free (IIRC).