East German Lawmakers’ Secret Police Ties Revealed : Scandal: 15 members are asked to quit. The construction minister announces his resignation.

Amid scenes of high drama, tears, shouts and a sit-in by an opposition party, the East German Parliament on Friday voted to reveal the names of members found to have had contact with the infamous secret police, known as the Stasi.

After initially voting to make the names public, the deputies pulled back in the course of a prolonged, emotional debate and instead decided to circulate the names only among themselves.

After investigating 56 deputies whose names appeared in internal Stasi files, a special parliamentary committee recommended that 15 of them resign. Prime Minister Lothar de Maiziere said the committee informed him that three of the 15 are members of his Cabinet.

Minutes after the initial vote to make the names public, Construction Minister Axel Viehweger approached the podium and in a voice choked with emotion, announced his resignation.

“I ask the chamber to allow me to resign immediately,” he said. “I admit that I had contact with the Stasi. . . . But I can tell you honestly, my family and I can take no more.”

Still unclear was the extent of the minister’s contacts with the dreaded Stasi, East Germany’s former Ministry for State Security, which for 40 years kept dissent in check and hard-line Communists in power. Viehweger said that his resignation and admission of “contacts” should not be interpreted as an admission of guilt.

Earlier, members of Alliance 90, made up of those who helped lead last fall’s revolution that toppled the Communists from power, staged a sit-in near the podium to protest attempts to overturn the decision to make the names public.

The single largest party, the Christian Democrats, eventually proposed a compromise to make the names known to the members of Parliament but to exclude the public. Several deputies predicted late Friday that the names would quickly leak into the public domain.

Friday’s revelations came just five days before East Germany disappears as an independent state and is absorbed into a West German-dominated united Germany.

They are merely the latest in a series of scandals that have linked leading East German politicians, elected to office last March in the country’s first and only free elections, with the security police.

The dimensions of the scandals have shocked and unsettled the East German population and left few of the country’s 16 million citizens above suspicion. They threaten to haunt united Germany for years to come.

Merging the two nations will bring together spies with those they spied on. Thousands of informants will eventually be unmasked before the friends and neighbors they betrayed.

The misdeeds of foreign agents and small-time snitches are chronicled in 6 million Stasi files that have become the subject of an escalating battle between West German prosecutors and East German activists fighting over control, access and the extent to which their contents should be revealed.

Some officials from both Germanys have become fearful of publicly naming perpetrators, warning of reprisals against Stasi stooges and mass spy defections that could upset relations with Moscow. East German Interior Minister Peter-Michael Diestel predicted in a recent interview that public disclosure of Stasi collaborators would trigger social turmoil that police could not contain.

“It would not only unleash a hurricane but a civil war, including beheadings and other forms of lynch-mob justice,” Diestel told the Hamburg-based Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

Stasi activities touched millions of lives, ranging from harassment of dissidents to harboring terrorists to stalking citizens whose crime was having a relative or friend abroad. Many who suffered the agency’s repression are finding it difficult to forgive and forget.

A broad amnesty for reformed agents and anonymous informants had been rumored in the offing as part of the celebration of unification on Wednesday. But West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s government said last week that the pardons have been postponed pending closer inspection of each Stasi employee’s role.

The delay has heightened a sense of panic among potential suspects and East German investigators who want to retain control over the sensitive probe into who spied on whom.

Two dozen civil rights workers have been on a hunger strike since Sept. 12 to demand that the files be retained by East German committees, with access ensured to the 2.4 million individuals on whom the Stasi kept dossiers.

The hunger strikers are from the New Forum movement that led last fall’s peaceful revolt against hard-line communism and set the unification juggernaut in motion.

They occupied the former Stasi headquarters to protest West German plans to transfer secret police records to the Federal Intelligence Service for review. They are also guarding against what they claim was an effort sanctioned by Diestel to destroy incriminating evidence against prominent East Germans with compromising pasts.

Kohl’s government agreed to let the files stay in the East, at least for now. But their fate remains uncertain after the East merges with the West and a single justice system attempts to rid the nation of the Stasi legacy.

Names are hurled out daily by the activists, who claim spies and agents still serve in the East Berlin government and could be taken into Bonn’s combined leadership after the Germanys unite. Of the 400 members of East Germany’s Parliament elected in March, 144 will enter the West German Bundestag after reunification, positioning themselves well for the all-German elections on Dec. 2.

“The Stasis are still sitting in this Parliament!” New Forum legislator Christine Grabe told the East German Volkskammer when it met earlier this month to approve the documents defining unification.

Even East German Defense Minister Rainer Eppelmann, a pacifist clergyman, was accused of being an informant. He has since been exonerated by the head of a parliamentary commission investigating the mounting claims.

Cabinet members from both German states have argued for an amnesty on grounds that heightened distrust and uncertainty are unhealthy at the start of the new German nation. They fear a dangerous and divisive witch hunt.

Dozens of arrest warrants for East German spies have been issued in recent weeks, netting a former NATO official, a Hamburg politician and others suspected of having served as Stasi moles.

“Now there is the danger that agents will offer their services and knowledge to other states,” West German Justice Minister Hans Engelhard said, warning of the potential for mass defections.

“I assume on the morning of Oct. 3 that bells will toll” for those suspected of spying, Justice Ministry spokesman Juergen Schmid said after the amnesty plan was withdrawn.

Two prime targets are believed to be former East German spymaster Markus Wolf and Hans-Joachim Tiedge, a West German government official who fled east five years ago after working as a double agent for 19 years.

Both have been offered asylum in the Soviet Union, according to the Bild newspaper, a mass-circulation tabloid that has proven reliable on intelligence matters in the past. Tiedge is reported to already have taken refuge at a Black Sea resort, while Wolf is said to be still in East Germany campaigning in the West German press for the chance of a fresh start.

Kohl’s chief intelligence aide, Lutz Stavenhagen, estimated that as many as 8,000 agents might be discovered once the Stasi records are examined.

But Federal Prosecutor Alexander von Stahl said his office is investigating fewer than 200 espionage cases and that predictions of thousands of arrests are “without foundation.”

West German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said that an amnesty is still expected before the national elections in December. He said he hopes investigators will hold up on spy arrests pending clarification of the amnesty’s scope. But Stahl’s office said police have to act on the issued warrants, rather than wait for official policy to change.