Ex-Spy Agency’s Files Threatened by Budget Ax

These are tough times here, with a strapped government looking everywhere for fat to cut. Just how lean things have gotten can be seen in a recent proposal out of the Federal Budget Office to close some of the archives housing the files of the former East German secret police.

These vast, once-top-secret collections came into the public domain in late 1989, when anti-Communist demonstrators stormed the various district headquarters of the hated Ministry of State Security, known as the Stasi. The first Stasi building to fall was the one in Leipzig.

Thanks to the decorum with which East Germany went on to dismantle its Communist regime, most of the files were preserved intact. About 80% of the papers have since been sorted, taped back together where necessary, cataloged and archived. The rest are still being processed.

This means that, today, the secrets of the Eastern Bloc’s most extensive, obsessive spying network are largely available to interested researchers, in the same 13 cities where the anti-Communist protesters first grabbed them.

Over the past seven years, thousands have come to inspect the files: academics writing books; schoolchildren studying totalitarianism; prosecutors looking for smoking guns; personnel offices ensuring that they are not hiring spies; and East Germans convicted of dubious “crimes” by Communist judges, now hoping to get their sentences annulled.

Most of all come plain, everyday former East German citizens, curious to learn the truth about their own pasts.

“People will look into their files and find out how their lives were manipulated,” says Regina Schild, director of the archive here. “Often they didn’t even know” how much of their personal lives was secretly controlled by the state.

Schild says she receives about 1,000 applications for access every month. So it is a sign either of how bad Germany’s budget problems are, or of the lengths to which bean-counters will go, that the budget office recently proposed eliminating Schild’s facility along with seven other Stasi branches and consolidating the files into five central archives.

According to the budget office, the $129 million that Germany spends each year maintaining the 13 regional Stasi archives simply is not justified by the number of people using them. Budget-cutters say that by closing all but five they could free up about 215,000 square feet of office space, eliminate about 400 jobs and save the federal government $8 million a year.

But they underestimated the passions such a proposal could stir in Leipzig--a city where citizens consider the well-cared-for Stasi archive a proud symbol of their contribution to East Germany’s peaceful revolution. Protests have poured forth.

“This idea would mean that applicants would have to travel greater distances to see the files,” Schild says. “They would have higher costs.”

Schild does not believe that the government has sufficient space elsewhere to absorb all the letters, transcripts, microfilms and other materials now on file in the huge old Stasi building.

Germany’s Stasi archivists have staved off cost-cutters for the coming budget period. But how long can they prevail? Amid the pain of Germany’s high unemployment, there is a growing tendency in the former East to blur the memory of communism--to praise the regime’s ability to provide a job for everyone, and to forget the spying.

Schild insists that, far from reducing the public interest in the Stasi files, this nostalgic tendency makes the archival presence all the more necessary.

“These files have to stay here, to show that the German Democratic Republic was no democratic state,” she says. “The ordinary East German citizen was delivered to the Stasi, without any power to protect himself, and this archive gives the proof.”