Germans Will Be Allowed to See East’s Spy Agency Files : Unification: Lawmakers vote to open up 6 million cases from the hated Stasi to individuals for inspection. Access by police and the media is limited.

Parliament decided on Thursday to open 6 million secret police files to individuals victimized by Communist East Germany’s ruthless network of informers, giving those persecuted by the Stasi an emotionally explosive opportunity to find out who betrayed them.

It also will offer those accused of Stasi collaboration a chance to clear their names, which commentators say may help dispel a witch-hunt atmosphere that has poisoned the country since the Berlin Wall fell two years ago.

But the new law, passed after five hours of debate in the Bundestag, also drew sharp protest because it narrowly limits access by police, intelligence services and the media to the 125 miles of documents.

Journalists and civil rights activists complained that the law, which takes effect Jan. 1, is tantamount to censorship and would allow public figures to block publication of embarrassing information gleaned from their Stasi files.

The motion, which carried the support of all mainstream parties, was passed overwhelmingly. East German legislators dominated the debate, often telling of their own harrowing experiences with the Stasi.

“Recently, when I was cleaning out, a piece of paper fell into my hands that was written by my then 7-year-old son in 1987,” said Gerd Poppe, who represents the alternative Alliance 90 party and who, as an East German dissident, was often arrested for short periods. “Written down were two apparently unrelated sentences: ‘Today was the first day it snowed. The Stasi was there and took Daddy with them.’ ”

The notorious Stasi archives represent 40 years of espionage, blackmail and psychological terror by the East German regime against its own people. Victims could face jail or even torture by the Stasi, based on accusations by shadowy informers Germans were never allowed to confront or challenge--until now. An estimated 85,000 people were employed full time by the Stasi; another 110,000 worked part time. There have been estimates that up to 1 million people were informers.

The Stasi also ran what is credited with being the most cunning foreign espionage network of the Cold War era, planting or recruiting tens of thousands of spies, mostly in West Germany. The former Stasi spymaster, Markus Wolf, surrendered last month and is free while investigators decide whether to prosecute him.

Besides reports by agents and informers, the files now safeguarded by a government-appointed committee contain data from the countless bugs that the Communist authorities planted in telephones, offices, homes and even church confessionals.

But whether the decision to cautiously unseal the files will begin a healing process for united Germany or merely tear open even deeper wounds remains to be seen.

The debate over the Stasi files--which undoubtedly also contain disinformation--has been the most divisive issue that Germans have had to face since East Germany was absorbed by West Germany a year ago.

“Friendships will be shattered when applicants discover that they were betrayed to the Stasi by those closest to them--in the worst cases, it could even have been their spouses,” warned the Berlin daily newspaper Tageszeitung.

Rainer Eppelmann, an Evangelical minister and easterner who represents Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union in the Bundestag, said the law “will only help us work through the sorrowful East German-German history, if everyone self-critically analyzes whether insight into their files will really be helpful to them.”

An unknown number of files reportedly were burned or hauled away by Soviet trucks during the chaotic months between the Nov. 9, 1989, fall of the Berlin Wall and East Germany’s first--and last--democratic elections the following March. Mobs of angry citizens stormed Stasi headquarters in several cities during the bloodless East German revolution to safeguard the files, which they wanted to expose informants.

Allegations of Stasi collaboration have destroyed careers and reputations in united Germany, including that of Lothar de Maiziere, a human rights lawyer who was elected prime minister of East Germany after the revolution and guided his nation to unification with West Germany. The highest-ranking easterner in the Bonn government, he recently resigned as Kohl’s minister without portfolio and deputy party leader amid allegations he cooperated with the Stasi under a code name. De Maiziere denied any wrongdoing.

The new law, which still must be approved by the Bundesrat, or upper house, stipulates that “persons concerned are to be given information about documents held on them. The names of officials of the state security service, who gathered or evaluated information about them . . . and the names of people who denounced them in writing, are to be made known at their request.”

Each request is to be weighed by a government-appointed committee headed by Lutheran minister Joachim Gauck, who has acted as guardian of the documents since German unification Oct. 3, 1990. He has said he expects up to 50,000 requests a month--besides the 70,000 already received--and must quadruple his staff of 600 to deal with the demand. One-third of the files kept were on West Germans, who also have access under the new law.

The committee may refuse a media request to see public figures’ files, on grounds that would invade their privacy--a provision that the country’s journalists’ union denounced; publishing Stasi documents without committee consent could cost offenders up to three years in prison. (Law enforcement officials and intelligence agencies may use the files under certain conditions, such as if they deal directly with espionage or terrorism.)

Alliance 90 and the Communist Party opposed the new law, arguing that it gave the state too much power to censor and control information, particularly about public officials.