The Stasi, or Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security), was the intelligence and secret-police agency of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) from its founding on February 8, 1950, until the agency’s dissolution in 1990. At its peak, the Stasi employed approximately 91,000 full-time officers and was supported by an estimated 189,000 unofficial collaborators — the highest surveillance ratio in any modern state. For more on the KGB article; the broader topic of Cold War surveillance is treated in the intelligence and espionage overview.
The Stasi was established as a Soviet-style security ministry in February 1950, with Erich Mielke as its first chief. Mielke, a former Comintern operative and a participant in the 1931 Berlin murder of the German police officer Paul Anlauf, ran the agency for thirty-two years, from 1957 to 1989. He was seconded by the KGB in the early years and modeled the agency on the Soviet pattern; the cooperation between the two services was unusually close — the Stasi supplied the KGB with intelligence gathered on West German soil that the KGB could not easily collect itself.
The surveillance state
The Stasi’s most distinctive feature was the scale of its surveillance of the East German population. The agency maintained files on an estimated 6 million East Germans — out of a population of about 16 million. The files were created from a combination of telephone tapping, mail opening, the monitoring of personal contacts, the recruitment of informers, use of hidden microphones in homes, offices, and even hotel rooms. The agency used a sophisticated coding system (the “Rosenholz” file system) to organize the records; the files were preserved, after 1990, by the Stasi Records Agency (the BStU) and are now accessible to individuals who wish to read their own files and to researchers with appropriate credentials.
The informer network was the Stasi’s most effective tool. The agency divided informers into categories based on the nature of their cooperation. The most common were the “IMs” (Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter), or unofficial collaborators; the most valuable were the “FIMs” (Führungsoffiziere), or officers who handled other informers. The IMs were recruited from every walk of East German life — from factories, universities, churches, sports clubs, and the cultural institutions. The agency’s preference was for informers who could access specific target groups, including dissidents, members of the Protestant church, and writers.
Operations
The Stasi’s most famous domestic operations included the surveillance and harassment of dissidents, including the writer Christa Wolf, the physicist Robert Havemann, and the singer Wolf Biermann; the suppression of the June 17, 1953, uprising, in which the agency played a central role; and the construction, with the GDR border guards, of the Berlin Wall in August 1961.
Internationally, the Stasi was the most active of the Eastern-bloc security services. The agency ran assassination operations against defectors and dissidents abroad, including the 1978 murder in Copenhagen of a Bulgarian dissident, Vladimir Kostov, and the 1979 murder in London of a Bulgarian dissident, Georgi Markov, both operations run in cooperation with the Bulgarian State Security service. The agency kidnapped West German citizens from West Berlin and other locations; the most famous case was the 1955 abduction of the lawyer Wolfgang Welsch from West Berlin. The Stasi also supported the West German Red Army Faction (RAF) and provided training facilities, safe houses, and intelligence to the Palestinian PLO and to a range of other foreign groups.
The Stasi’s relationship with the KGB was close. The Stasi contributed agents to the KGB’s operations abroad, including the case of the West German BND officer Heinz Felfe, who was turned by the KGB in 1959 and run jointly with the Stasi; the case of the BND officer Klaus Kuron, turned in 1972; and the case of the West German Chancellor’s office secretary Günter Guillaume, whose identification in 1974 led to the resignation of Willy Brandt. The Stasi also provided training in surveillance and tradecraft to other Eastern-bloc services, including the Czechoslovak StB and the Romanian Securitate.
The fall
The Stasi was dismantled in the revolutionary autumn of 1989. The agency’s last chief, Erich Mielke, was replaced by Wolfgang Schwanitz on October 18, 1989. Schwanitz attempted to reform the agency, including the creation of the “Office for National Security” as a successor, but the protests of 1989 and 1990, the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, and the March 1990 elections made any successor impossible. The agency was dissolved on October 3, 1990 — the day of German reunification. Mielke was arrested in November 1989, tried in 1992, and convicted in 1993 of the 1931 Anlauf murder; he died in 2000. The Stasi’s records were preserved by a citizen’s movement that occupied the agency’s headquarters in Berlin in January 1990; the BStU has administered them since 1991.