Corruption, Reunification Calls Spur Leipzig March : East Germany: Protesters target the state security agency. More reports surface of shady dealings by party leaders.

As many as 200,000 East Germans demonstrated in Leipzig on Monday night calling for German reunification and castigating their discredited Communist leaders for widespread corruption.

Some marchers wanted to besiege the local state security office, chanting “Rotten rabble!” Organizers for the first time had to plead for nonviolence.

Reports from Leipzig, East Germany’s second-largest city, said that members of opposition groups such as New Forum and Democratic Awakening and Protestant church organizations linked arms to keep crowds from pressing up to the grim, five-story regional center of the state security agency in the southern German city.

The demonstrators shouted: “Let us in! Let us in!”

The state security agency--the hated, dreaded “Stasi”--has been a particular target for East German wrath in the tumultuous political changes sweeping the country.

One spotlighted, massive banner carried by marchers proclaimed: “Reunification.”

Another, referring to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, said: “Only Kohl Can Save Us.”

Crowds in other East German cities were prevented by fellow demonstrators from breaking into local state security offices to try to obtain incriminating documents involving corruption and abuse of power by discredited officials.

Members of the special “working committee” that was set up Sunday to supervise the government after the entire Communist leadership resigned were active throughout the country, appealing to people not to take the law into their own hands.

Spokeswoman Brigitte Zimmermann said reports from the provinces indicated that people wanted to raid state security offices in an effort to get records before they could be destroyed. She reported that the East Berlin headquarters of the state security agency were locked up to ensure that the records would remain intact.

She added that the working group went on national television to appeal for calm. The need for the appeal was a measure of the anger rising across East Germany as new charges of corruption appeared.

Police were reported to have arrested senior Communists and stopped others from destroying evidence or fleeing the country.

Police said they had sealed off the offices of four government guest houses and two state trading companies after the flight of Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski, a Communist currency exchange specialist who was said to be in West Germany.

The East German government formally asked other European, Middle Eastern and Latin American governments to help apprehend Schalck after it was disclosed that he ran a secret arms-exporting business here.

The nation’s security chief, Wolfgang Schwanitz, told the official ADN news agency that all flights to Romania have been canceled to keep Communist Party officials from fleeing to that hard-line Communist state.

Working group officials here said that disgraced party chief Erich Honecker and other ousted leaders had been asked not to leave their homes, although he said they were not actually under arrest.

Another report said that police had found 2 million West German marks in the headquarters of a trade union. It was suggested that the cash was part of an illegal fund.

In East Berlin, the New Forum opposition group, which claims 200,000 adherents, said Monday that financial and artistic resources have been moved from the country, that substantial Communist files and data were destroyed and that the people responsible were illegally fleeing East Germany.

New Forum also decided to call for new, free elections to be held in May, even though some leaders said it would be difficult to prepare for free national balloting so soon.

A leading member of New Forum, Michael Goebel, said Monday night that the group has decided to run candidates in the elections. Earlier, New Forum was undecided whether it should constitute itself as a political party or remain a loose opposition movement.