Stasi

The Ministry for State Security (German: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS) or State Security Service (Staatssicherheitsdienst, SSD), commonly known as the Stasi, was the official state security service of the Communist German Democratic Republic. It has been described as one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies ever to have existed.

History

Vladimir Putin's Stasi "Ausweis" (identification card). He was assigned as a KGB agent in Dresden, as a mid-level liaison to the East German intelligence agency in 1985. He held a job as a translator as a "cover" for his KGB work.

Founded on 8 February 1950 after WWII, one of its main tasks was spying on the population, mainly through a vast network of citizens turned informants, and fighting any opposition by overt and covert measures, including hidden psychological destruction of dissidents. It arrested 250,000 people as political prisoners during its existence. The Stasi also maintained contacts, and occasionally cooperated, with Western terrorists, such as the Red Army Faction. During the Cold War,

"many West German neo-Nazi and anti-Jewish incidents were actually staged by agents of the former East Berlin Communist regime, as the records of former East German government agencies reveal. For decades, the long-hidden files show East Berlin agencies organized "right wing extremist" and anti-Jewish actions in the West German federal republic. Even more remarkable, the two German Communist officials most responsible for these anti-Jewish actions were themselves Jewish: Markus Wolf, son of Jewish-Communist writer Friedrich Wolf, was for 33 years chief of East Germany's Ministry for State Security, the secret police agency known as the "Stasi." He worked closely with Albert Norden, the chief of East Germany's propaganda machine and a member of the East Berlin Communist party Politbüro. Norden was born in Upper Silesia, the son of a rabbi. [...] Jewish cemetery desecration incidents – highlighted in newspapers and magazines around the world – served to discredit the West German Federal Republic, and to bolster the "progressive" and "anti-fascist" image of the East Berlin regime. Stasi agents continued their work into the 1970s and 1980s, Bonn government officials confirmed in 1991, infiltrating West German "neo-Nazi" groups and staging "right wing attacks.""

See also

• NSA
• Red Army Faction
• Serge and Beate Klarsfeld

External links

• Mark Weber: East Berlin Officials Staged 'Neo-Nazism' in West Germany, 1995