E. German Quits Post Over Secret Police Link : Politics: De Maiziere denies that he worked for the Stasi agency. Kohl says he has no reason to doubt the former leader.

Lothar de Maiziere, the man who led East Germany into unification, resigned from the German Cabinet Monday amid continued charges that he once worked for the Communist state’s secret police, known as the Stasi.

Repeating his claims of innocence at a news conference in Bonn, the 50-year-old former East German premier said he would leave Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Cabinet immediately and also give up his posts as deputy national chairman of Kohl’s Christian Democratic party and chairman of the Brandenburg state party.

He has served Kohl as a minister without portfolio since reunification on Oct. 3.

“I must recognize that in resolving the Stasi problem, the difficult situation has arisen that an accused must prove his innocence and that suspicion alone carries an enormous weight,” De Maiziere said.

He repeated his earlier claims that his only contact with the Stasi came in his role as a human rights lawyer, defending those opposed to the neo-Stalinist regime that ruled East Germany for 40 years until last year’s revolution.

In a prepared statement released by the chancellory, Kohl said he respected De Maiziere’s decision to step down and added that “I have no cause today to doubt his word.”

De Maiziere’s resignation is the latest and, in many ways, the most disturbing instance of a prominent easterner with a promising career in a democratic, united Germany finding himself undercut by accusations of Stasi links.

The pervasive nature of the East German secret police, which is believed to have employed or indirectly involved a sizable minority of the former country’s 16 million people, has left Germans and foreigners alike unsure of just who among their acquaintances, who among prominent easterners, might have worked for the Stasi.

These suspicions have merely hardened as the names of well-known eastern Germans--and occasionally those from the western part of the country--have been bandied about in the national media in a seemingly constant procession of revelations about purported contacts with the Stasi.

Somehow, however, the shy but feisty De Maiziere seemed to carry an integrity and sense of purpose that lifted him above other politicians. As certain politicians resigned after allegations of Stasi links were raised, East Germans emerging from 40 years of dictatorship were widely confident in their belief that De Maiziere was clean, honest and uncompromising.

In the course of the often tough unity negotiations, they came to respect their premier, and many believed that his presence at the table was probably their strongest single asset.

His resignation Monday was met with genuine shock and a feeling of bitter disappointment.

It was also a reminder that the Stasi legacy is likely to be a problem that social scientists and political observers believe will continue to separate Germans for years despite their unification.

While accusations that De Maiziere had once informed for the Stasi first surfaced during the East German national election campaign last March, when he was his party’s main candidate, they never gained prominence and were never confirmed.

However, two weeks ago the leading German newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, published a 6-page article accusing De Maiziere of working as an “informal employee” of the minister for state security over an 8-year period.

The article claimed he used the code name Czerny to provide the Communist regime with details on activities in the Protestant Church that protected a small, but occasionally embarrassing, anti-government peace movement.

The magazine published an internal Stasi document with the alleged Czerny code name and De Maiziere’s Berlin street address.

Earlier Monday, German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told reporters that there were “isolated hints” in the Stasi files that linked De Maiziere to the Czerny code name, but “that these hints were not clear and specific enough . . . so that one can speak of evidence.”

Speaking on a news program late Monday, Schaeuble indicated that a search of the Stasi’s main archives had failed to turn up De Maiziere’s personal file so the full truth may never be known. He noted that at times the Stasi used people as casual informants without the informant’s knowledge.

De Maiziere, who turned to law in the mid-1970s when an elbow injury ended his career as a violinist with the East Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, personally led the revival of the East German Christian Democratic Union late last year, cleansing it of its neo-Stalinist leadership and preparing it for power in a democratic state.

Last March, the chairman of the Democratic Awakening, Wolfgang Schnur, quit after the weekly magazine Stern revealed that he had informed for the Stasi since the 1960s. Social Democrat Chairman Ibrahim Boehme stepped down a few weeks later amid charges that he had maintained Stasi ties.

This week, in an ironic twist, a television current affairs program accused a leading editor of Der Spiegel, Diethelm Schroeder, of working for the Stasi for 30 years. The Hamburg-based weekly has frequently carried allegations of politician contacts with the Stasi.

German Federal Prosecutor Alexander von Stahl speculated that about 500 suspected Stasi informants are still being sought.