Regional Outlook : Secret Files Haunting Eastern Europe : * Reams of chilling police documents have fallen into hands of post-Communist governments. The contents are profoundly unsettling.

For most Americans, a personal look back at life is a varied but benign journey, a mixture of satisfaction and regret, tears and laughter.

Not so for the Germans.

In a nation whose confrontations with history this century have already generated immeasurable personal suffering and endless public debate, people have started another painful trek through the past. This time they are searching the most disturbing chapter of East Germany’s 40-year-long communist era--the dehumanizing and pervasive work of the infamous Ministry for State Security, known as the Stasi.

As victims gained access to their Stasi dossiers for the first time under a new law that took effect early this month, many feared that exposing the hidden horrors could cause an uncontrollable quest for revenge in the region.

“Something is about to overwhelm us with unbelievable force--a mountain of files, anAuschwitz of (our) souls,” predicted east German writer Juergen Fuchs shortly before the new law took effect.

So far, more than 300,000 Germans have applied to see their files and the initial revelations have only confirmed Fuchs’s worst fears.

What is happening in eastern Germany is part of a broader regional issue that continues to haunt the former Soviet-controlled nations of Eastern Europe. Some countries have shied away from a direct confrontation with the past.

Hungary’s democratic government, for example, considered publishing a list of secret police agents and informants, but pulled back after learning that most secret police files had been destroyed. The rest have been placed under a 30-year quarantine.

In Bulgaria, a parliamentary committee has been established to decide between those who want secret police files destroyed and those who want them turned over to the media. And in Poland, occasional voices demand action but there seems little political will to seek out secret police collaborators.

So far, only Czechoslovakia has moved as forcefully as Germany, launching what has become known as “lustrace” --literally a purifying sacrifice--that includes a sweeping five-year public employment ban or demotion for anyone found on a massive list of former Communist officials and secret police collaborators. For a modest fee a citizen can find out whether he or someone he knows is on the list.

While the sweeping nature of the regulation and questions about the list’s accuracy have unsettled many in the country, events in Czechoslovakia pale in comparison to what is under way in Germany.

Here, the sheer size of the Stasi network and the depth of the shadow it cast over individual citizens give the east German experience a dimension all its own.

Of all the internal security systems that operated in Communist eastern Europe, none managed to penetrate more deeply into the heart of people’s lives, gather more extensive information and sow deeper mistrust than the Stasi.

Former East German dissident pastor Joachim Gauck, who heads the specially created German government authority responsible for maintaining the Stasi dossiers, says conditions are still too chaotic for any serious estimate on the number of files kept by the Stasi. Instead, hemeasures the information in miles--125 to be exact.

A master file containing a single cardfor each Stasi employee, collaborator and surveillance target covered more than a mile. Cards with the name “Mueller” alone stretched over 100 yards.

After the army, the Stasi was East Germany’s largest single employer, with 90,000 full-time workers. It looted private mail, tapped up to half a million telephones simultaneously and generally gathered more information on more of the country’s citizens than any internal security operation anywhere.

“In numbers alone, what existed here was larger than what was at work during the Nazi era,” said Gauck, referring to the Nazi secret police, known as the Gestapo. “The level of cruelty was not worse, but the penetration through to the basic elements of society was better organized. There were more people and more money thrown into the surveillance apparatus.”

What made the Stasi so pervasive--and so unique--was its success in recruiting an army of part-time informants, an army estimated variously at between 100,000 and 1 million otherwise ordinary citizens--lawyers, doctors, writers, schoolchildren, friends, neighbors, even spouses--who fed the organization’s insatiable thirst for information. They provided details ranging from the location of the ironing board in a victim’s apartment, to what a dissident wore when she took out the garbage, to a person’s deepest medical or bedroom secrets.

“The efficiency of this penetration was very German--perfect, exact,” said Gauck in an interview with The Times.

The results, as Germans are now finding out, were often chilling. Some examples:

* After seeing his file, Saxony’s Interior Minister Heinz Eggert, a former dissident Protestant pastor, stunned a national television audience with details of how, when he sought medical treatment for depression in the mid-1980s, the Stasi ordered hospital doctors to drug him and tell him he would never work again.

“I feel incredible rage that the Stasi stole a part of my life from me,” said Eggert. His file also revealed that the Stasi used preteen informants to report on the actions of his two children.

* Another dissident pastor, 34-year-old Ulrich Kasparick, sought emotional help in a psychotherapy class run by the city’s University Clinic only to end up committed to a maximum security psychiatric hospital. Last week, he learned how it happened. A member of his group was a Stasi informant, whose information led to a well-targeted action plan that emotionally destroyed him.

* In perhaps the most shocking and widely reported case, former East German peace movement activist Vera Wollenberger, now a member of the German Parliament, discovered the ultimate betrayal: her most private thoughts and comments had been faithfully passed to the Stasi hierarchy by none other than her husband of 10 years.

The leading news weekly, Der Spiegel, reported how, after trying unsuccessfully to remain composed enough to read a prepared statement to a television film crew, Wollenberger simply blurted out, “How can it be that someone can be such a loving father and then write such reports? How can a human being do that? I just can’t comprehend it.”

Her questions reflect an unsettled nation.

“Certainly I should have made a definite break (with the Stasi),” her husband, Knud, told the same news weekly. “For that, I was too weak.”

* Shortly after the Wollenberger case became public, a Berlin newspaper interviewed a 28-year-old student it identified only as “Holger T.” who said he had formally lodged legal proceedings against his father for divulging details about his efforts to escape to the West. The young man claimed his father’s information led directly to a two-year imprisonment; the father charged that the escape attempt endangered his entire existence.

The Stasi’s intrusion into the private lives of individual East Germans was almost as impressive as its recruitment of supposed dissidents or their supporters.

Indeed, the list of those who betrayed friends, colleagues or relatives by passing information to the Stasi contains the names of many who were once admired as heroes for what seemed at the time to be brave and risky stands against Erich Honecker’s regime.

Men like Wolfgang Schnur, a lawyer so praised for his courageous defense of dissidents during the communist era that the political party he later founded was embraced by Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democrats, and Lothar de Maiziere, another lawyer, who became East Germany’s only freely elected prime minister and deputy chairman of the all-German Christian Democrats, are two of those forced from public life after they were linked to the Stasi.

Shocked Social Democrats last week discovered that the group that bravely defied the Communists to found an eastern wing of the party a month before the Berlin Wall fell had been betrayed by none other than the man they later elected as their leader--Ibrahim Boehme.

Although Boehme was forced from politics in mid-1990 after leaked information linked him to the Stasi, later revelations showing the detail with which he reported on his party’s activities have dismayed his former colleagues.

More than any other single individual, it is Gauck who has forced his East German brethren to face what many see as the most disturbing chapter of their collective past.

After being picked in the spring of 1990 by the newly elected East German Parliament to guard the Stasi files, the 51-year-old Protestant clergyman fought a running battle to derail Interior Minister Michael Diestel’s push for a general amnesty for those connected with the internal security network.

“We don’t have the right to search around in people’s heads for what happened and what they thought 10 years ago,” pleaded Diestel. And his thoughts were shared by many western German political leaders afraid of the potential for social unrest.

But Gauck organized enough pressure to prevent the amnesty, then blocked western German efforts to relocate the files to the Federal Archives in the western city of Koblenz. He argued that the files needed to remain in the east and be administered by easterners. Finally, he battled for months to win the right for each citizen to view his personal file.

Despite warnings that information from the Stasi dossiers would flow like poison through eastern society, Gauck has not wavered. With a conviction as hard and steady as the gaze he fixes on visitors to his large, but sparely furnished office a few hundred yards east of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, Gauck talks of a greater good.

He argues that airing the files now will keep them from becoming a mysterious social taboo that might later explode. Revelations also will dampen any sense of nostalgia for the secure, predictable “good old days” occasionally expressed by those eastern Germans disoriented by the turmoil of the region’s transition to a free-market democracy.

He concedes that the confrontation he shaped is far from perfect and appears to regret an incident involving the rector of eastern Berlin’s premier university that raised basic human rights questions.

The rector, Heinrich Fink, vehemently rejected accusations leaked to a Berlin newspaper that he had been a Stasi informant. But he was summarily dismissed from his job and then denied access to the material on which the accusations were based.

But for Gauck, it is important to continue the process. For him, it is part of the east Germans’ liberation, a much-needed and powerful lesson in self-determination. He argues that, for the first time, the Stasi issue gives the individual German the power to decide whether to forgive or not to forgive, or to bring charges against informants.

“This is all about the long-withheld opportunity of the individual citizen to shape his own life and the life of the society in which he lives,” Gauck said. “We want to put people in a situation where they, on their own initiative, become society’s independent decision-makers.”

At the same time, however, Gauck and others have warned victims to think carefully before they decide to check the Stasi material on themselves.

“In principle, all should see their files, but what we’re experiencing right now with Vera Wollenberger shows just how deep a personal crisis this can bring,” Gauck said. “People need to check their personal strength before going ahead.”

Gauck also shows little of the sympathy commonly displayed by Westerners for the plight of many informants who were blackmailed or otherwise forced into working for the Stasi.

“It has become trendy in the West to offer help to the culprit, but now is the time to help the victim,” he said.

The division between culprit and victim is often less than clear-cut, however. Consider dissident writer Rainer Schedlinski. In a long, compelling account published in a recent edition of the respected daily Frankfurter Allgemeine, Schedlinksi told how he informed on his associates for years after being threatened with a 10-year jail term for helping someone to flee the country.

“There is no excuse,” commented one of Schedlinski’s closest friends in an open letter. But others who read the article were less certain.

Whether the process set in motion in Germany will degenerate into a series of individual vendettas or will ignite a meaningful dialogue of understanding and reconciliation remains to be seen.

As the Communist state’s most secret files gradually become public knowledge, other nations in the region are carefully watching both the revelations and the reactions to them. Whatever else results, one thing is certain, noted Gauck’s deputy, Hans-Joerg Geiger:

“The psychological burdens for all those affected are going to be enormous.”

Language of Terror

From the files of former East German Stasi security police: “(It is necessary) to limit the negative influence of those people or circles, to isolate them and to force social conformity.” “The . . . struggle against political underground activity demands . . . such proven methods as harassment, repression, incriminalization . . . “ “A so-called ‘illegal reading circle’ has come into existence . . . (We will deal with it) through political-operational measures of repression/demoralization . . . “ “His actions and his statements show the basic . . . ideology of a class enemy, whose dissemination will have dangerous consequences . . . “

The Hidden Empire

East Germany’s secret police commanded a huge network. Some chilling facts:

* NAME: Ministry of State Security

* ACRONYMN: Stasi

* MISSION: “To create and maintain a system to keep total watch over everything”

* POWERS: The Chief of Security, the last of which was Erich Mielke before being ousted and arrested, had the whole of the armed forces at his disposal and had the right to give orders to public officials throughout the country

* NUMBER OF AGENTS: 90,000, plus 100,000 to a million part-time informants.** More than 3,000 operatives opened mail and eavesdroped on telephone conversations. More than 5,000 people were assigned to following people around

* BUDGET: Equivalent of $2 billion in 1989, or about 1.3% of the national budget.

* FILES: Up to six million, plus estimated 2 million files on West Germans. Covering more than a third of the 16 million population. If placed side by side, files would require a drawer 125 miles long. One persons file contained 50 volumes, each with 300 and 500 pages apiece.

* OTHER PROPERTY: 125,000 pistols and 76,000 submachine guns. More than 12,000 private cars--in a country where the average citizen must wait ten to 12 years for a car.

* STATUS: Voted out of existance on December 13, 1989.

**By comparison, former Soviet Union, had 17 times the population of East Germany but only 5.4 times as many career officers (488,000) in its Committee for State Security, or KGB, Soviet figure included border guards and foreign intelligence operatives, as well as domestic agents.

5 Other Networks

BULGARIA: Little is known about these secret police, who reported to Ministry of Interior Affairs. Parliamentary committee is reviewing whether to destroy files or release them to media.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA: State Security, or SB, reported to Ministry of Interior and had 15,000 agents. Most files were destroyed.

HUNGARY: Security Police, formerly AVO, reported to Ministry of Interior and had 15,000 agents. Most files were destroyed.

POLAND: Little is known about the Sluzba Bezieczentswa, or SB. It was accused of involvement in over 100 political murders in the 1980s.

ROMANIA: Securitate was brutal, personal army of the late great Nicolae Ceausescu, executed in 1989. Officially disbanded but may still be operating.

SOURCES: Include Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Izvestia, Argumenty i Fakty, Tass; Area Handbook series, 1971-90.