Book Reviews | Books About MfS/Stasi

CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence

Studies in Intelligence, 2003

Books About East German MfS/Stasi

Reviewed by Hayden B. Peake, curator of the CIA's Historical Intelligence Collection

The Secret Police and the Revolution: The Fall of the German Democratic Republic

By Edward N. Peterson. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. 286 pages.

During the Cold War, defector and immigrant memoirs, Solzhenitsyn's works, and the scholarship of historians like Robert Conquest revealed to the world the malevolent practices of internal security organizations in communist states. Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany's security organ, the Ministry of State Security ( MfS, or Stasi ), had attained the reputation in the press as a brutally efficient monitor of social behavior. Details were scarce, however, especially in English.1 With the reunification of Germany in October 1990 came the opening of the Stasi files revealing intelligence reports prepared during the 45 years of the German Democratic Republic's existence. Written with the expectation that they would never be seen outside the Stasi bureaucracy, they provided scholars with a mass of primary documents no one had anticipated. University of Wisconsin history professor Edward Peterson was quick to capitalize on the windfall. He had studied Germany since 1964 and, in 1994, was one of the first American scholars to gain access to the Ministry of State Security files, commonly called the Gauck Archive.2

In his book, Prof. Peterson focuses on the domestic role of the MfS , though he briefly mentions its foreign espionage element, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA) headed by Markus Wolf. He gives a more severe picture of the HVA than Wolf does in his memoirs,3 noting that it "engaged in torture of 'enemies,' aided rightist extremists, supported efforts to sabotage nuclear plants, spread disinformation, and recorded BRD (West Germany) politicians' phone conversations."

After an introductory chapter covering the formation of the MfS in 1953 and its operations until 1979, the balance of the book addresses the Stasi's role in monitoring East German citizens from 1980 until reunification. The emphasis is on the big picture as opposed to case studies of particular operations. Using ubiquitous inoffizieller mitarbeiters (unofficial informers), the Stasi penetrated the entire society, reporting on the economy, the military, the churches, the workers, the dissidents, the corruption, and the GDR communist party itself. Ironically, Prof. Peterson discovered that the reports were accurate and the MfS was the first to realize, as early as 1986, that the days of the GDR were numbered, though its head, Erich Mielke, was not so frank in reporting this conclusion to the Politburo. In his chronological treatment, Prof. Peterson shows how the " MfS gradually moved from suppressing the opposition to joining it." Toward the end, as "the consumption-thinking citizens" gained strength, the Stasi's primary goal was to "prevent forcible entry" into its offices, and here, too, it failed. Though officials spent days destroying documents, they could not destroy all the copies.

Prof. Peterson's thoroughly documented account shows how the Stasi , formed on the Chekist model as the "sword and shield" of the Party, enjoyed great power until GDR citizens rebelled and the inherent weakness of the dictatorial system caused its demise.

The Stasi: Myth and Reality

By Mike Dennis. London, UK: Pearson Education Limited, 2003. 269 pages.

After the reunification of Germany in 1990, the surviving files of the former East German Ministry of State Security (MfS), commonly called the Stasi , consumed 185 kilometers of shelf space! They recorded the information collected by a small army of some 200,000 domestic sources called inoffizielle mitarbeiter (unofficial informers). Some were volunteers, but the majority were recruited under coercion to spy on their fellow citizens. Foreign threats were dealt with by an as yet undetermined number of officers and agents working mainly in West Germany, but in other countries as well.

Mike Dennis, professor of modern history at the University of Wolverhampton, tells the story of the MfS throughout the 45-year existence of the GDR. He considers the extent to which the Stasi's appellation--"sword and shield" of the Communist Party--was justified by examining the organization's origins, its operations, and the nature of the threats it faced. In contrast to Edward Peterson's more bureaucratic study,4 there is greater detail here about the Stasi case officers, their recruitment techniques, and the types of sources they cultivated--from ordinary citizens to scientists, educators, intellectual dissidents, and skinheads. He addresses their motives for cooperating and what happened to those who refused to play the game. The level of detail collected is astounding, as case after case makes clear.

Two of the 15 chapters are devoted to the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA), headed by Markus Wolf, and they show how this foreign intelligence arm fitted into the MfS's mission. The final two chapters deal with the collapse of communist rule, why the Stasi failed to prevent what many saw coming, and the Stasi's legacy.

Prof. Dennis provides a good mix of primary and secondary sources and sound analysis, though his finding that J. Edgar Hoover "is not too dissimilar from Mielke," the head of the MfS , suggests a weak grasp of American domestic security. Dennis concludes that the GDR collapsed not because the Stasi failed, although it played its part, but because of a national "legitimacy deficit" common to communist countries. The Stasi myth was the belief that its efficiency could overcome communist inefficiency; the reality was that it could not.

The Stasi Files: East Germany's Operations Against Britain

By Anthony Glees. London, UK: Free Press, 2003. 461 pages.

In two respects, Anthony Glees, Reader of Politics and Director of Studies at Brunel University in England, has taken a different tack is his book on the Ministry of State Security (Stasi) when compared to Edward Peterson and Mike Dennis.5 First, he considers only HVA (East German foreign intelligence) operations involving British subjects. Second, his research is based on Stasi files that are no longer available to public examination due the legal ramifications of the Helmut Kohl case.6

The book has four parts. The first describes, at excessive length, the problems associated with making sense of the files he discovered. Then he relates the background of the German Democratic Republic as a police state and its contacts with Britain until it achieved diplomatic recognition. Parts two and three tell of Stasi espionage in Britain, both the HVA and Military Intelligence, which was controlled by the Stasi . Part four describes the penetration of the British peace movement, and the recruitment and operational experiences of British penetration agents in other organizations.

Glees provides 12 pages of translated documents to which he apparently had exclusive access, except for the HVA itself. And he names a number of British HVA agents. But none of the agents identified are mentioned in the documents, which relate only to policy matters. In Appendix 5, he provides "precise details of every significant HVA operation in the UK"--but they are unintelligible in the format presented and no explanation is offered. Nevertheless, in the narrative he gives true names and discusses the cases of a number of British subjects, and, with one exception, none denied his assertions. The exception was Lord John Roper, a former Labour MP and later Director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, commonly called Chatham House. Glees claims that Lord Roper was a Stasi "agent of influence." Lord Roper rebuffed the assertion in public and The Times promptly cancelled its serialization agreement for the book. It seems that Lord Roper's contacts with the HVA had been approved by the Foreign Office, something Lord Roper told Glees when interviewed for the book. But Glees knew better.

This is not an easy book to read and understand. It is awkwardly organized and its analysis is steadfastly mediocre. There is doubt that the conclusions are supported by the evidence and no way to check. Despite the inclusion of a glossary, some HVA terms are not defined correctly; e.g. , IMs are called Informelle Mitarbeiter ; whereas Inoffizelle Mitarbeiter is correct--Mike Dennis gets it right. Furthermore, the story is not "told with comprehensive footnotes" as claimed. Many paragraphs have none where they are badly needed. That even Glees is unsure about his exegesis is suggested in the conclusions when he asks: "Were the Stasi's British sources spies?" He goes on to state that one of the tasks of the East German intelligence service was to keep the regime in power. But that was not the mission of the HVA in Britain, which was the subject of the book.

Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

By Anna Funder. London, UK: Granta Books, 2003. 288 pages.

At the Free University in West Berlin during the late 1980s, Australian Anna Funder learned that East Germany was "a kind of Utopia, where there was no unemployment, universal childcare, equal pay and no prostitution." But her inquisitive mind suggested that there must be something more to life there or they would not have built the Wall and East German citizens would not have risked all tunneling under it and climbing over it to get to the West. She wondered what life was really like in the East.

After a visit home, she returned to a reunified Germany without the Wall, got a job, and visited what was once East Berlin and its Stasi museums in Berlin and Leipzig. She began learning the stories of daily life that came to an end in November 1989. In Stasiland , her first book, she portrays life "beyond the Wall" in vivid terms through the stories she learned from former Stasi officers, Stasi victims, and those going through the Stasi files captured after the collapse of East Germany. When the end was clearly in sight, the Stasi began burning and shredding documents. The job was too big and 15,000 sacks of hand-torn documents were retrieved by the new authorities. Rather than complete the destruction, a team of 31 women--the "puzzle ladies"--began reassembling the pieces at a site in Nuremburg. At the present rate of success, it will take 375 years to finish the task! In the meantime, we have the collection of personal accounts assembled by Funder, told in a nimble but somber style that reveals a few of the tragedies that were the daily experience of East Germans for nearly 30 years.

At the Runde Ecke , the former Stasi headquarters in Leipzig, Funder found an exhibit of "smell jars" that once contained samples of human odors collected by the Stasi from citizens' clothes--often underwear--or other items that came in contact with the skin. The theory was that Stasi dogs could be trained to sniff the contents of the jars and then track a suspect. Samples from all political dissidents were collected, though the jars are now empty.

Funder heard of a woman named Miriam who had once tried to escape over the Wall and had been caught. She tracked her down and learned her story of two years in prison, brutal treatment, and the subsequent loss of her husband. Funder made other contacts by putting an ad in a Potsdam paper: "Australian seeks Stasi men, view [to] conversation, discretion guaranteed." She included her phone number and received many calls. One was from a former Stasi guard, another a teacher of " Spezialdisziplin , the science of recruiting informers. He showed her a counterintelligence study and tried to convince her that socialism would return someday. Frau Paul told the story of her baby who was in a West German hospital when the Wall went up and how she was kept from him until it came down again.

One senses that the stories are typical and not the product of Funder's imagination. There are no sources cited, though the museums that were helpful to her are still there. This is a disturbing yet valuable book about ordinary life in an extraordinary authoritarian state

Footnotes:

1. For an early treatment of the Stasi in German, see Karl Wilhelm Fricke, Die DDR-Stastssicherheit
(Cologne, FRG: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1984). A victim of the Stasi himself, Fricke was
abducted from West Berlin in 1955. An updated version of his book was published in 1991.

2. The Gauck Authority was the German federal agency charged in the early 1990s with cataloging and examining some 6 million East German intelligence files.

3. Markus Wolf, with Anne McElvoy, The Man Without A Face: The Autobiography of Communism's
Greatest Spymaster (New York, NY: Public Affairs, 1999), 367 pages.

4. Edward N. Peterson, The Secret Police and the Revolution: The Fall of the German Democratic Republic (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002).

5. Edward N. Peterson, The Secret Police and the Revolution: The Fall of the German Democratic Republic (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002) and Mike Dennis, The Stasi: Myth and Reality (London, UK: Pearson Education Limited, 2003).

6. The MfS intercepted the phone calls of West German Chancellor Kohl and those in his immediate circle, which could have proven embarrassing if made public as part of the Stasi files.