Bringing down the Stasi

Barbara Timm helped archive secret records

By Tanner Kent

MANKATO — A hair salon, upscale supermarket, travel office, sports complex and sauna.

Sounds like a trendy suburban shopping mall or exclusive country club — not the headquarters for one of history’s most organized and repressive secret police organizations.

Shortly after the reunification of East and West Germany in the fall of 1989, community groups and citizen activists organized a demonstration in front of East Germany’s Ministry for State Security, a political agency charged with spying on its own citizens.

Barbara Timm was among those who gathered before the Ministry’s massive Berlin compound, which consumed four square city blocks. And Tuesday night in the basement of the Minnesota State University Memorial Library, she shared her experiences.

In January of 1990, Timm and approximately 100,000 other citizens stormed the Ministry’s gates, reclaiming millions of archives and documents the Ministry had collected against its citizens in an effort to quash public opposition to East Germany’s communist government and terrorize known dissidents.

Most documents were burned or shredded either by machine or by hand when the Ministry learned of the impending demonstration. But Timm was among those who, over the course of 17 years, painstakingly archived more than 360 miles’ worth of previously classified documents.

“People could see the smoke pouring out of the chimneys where documents were being burned,” Timm said. “On Jan. 15, 1990, we were finally able to do something about it.”

At its zenith, the Ministry — which had many outlying offices in addition to its main compound — employed more than 90,000 people and controlled more than 100,000 buildings. The Ministry also employed between 170,000 and 300,000 citizens as informants — or nearly one out of every 50 East Germans. The Stasi, as the Ministry was commonly referred to, is considered to be one of the deepest police infiltrations in history with records on more than 6 million people.

The Ministry is also known for its particularly invasive intelligence tactics. The Stasi collected sweat samples during interrogations with cotton sheets and would steal underwear for body odor samples. Some interrogation subjects were blasted with radioactive material and tracked with Geiger counters. Mail was closely inspected. Torture was common. And it was all kept secret.

“The Stasi never would have made its files public voluntarily,” Timm said.

Today, people are allowed to view their own files and make copies. Files often contain public records, identification and passport applications, phone number listings and employment history and could include copies of “suspicious” mail correspondence, taped phone conversations and other investigative documents.

Timm shared a file in which a document somewhat comically portrayed an East German citizen as an alcoholic who often needed help finding his room after drinking binges. Also in the document were references to his divorce, his institutionalized daughter and veiled allegations of homosexuality.

“More or less, everybody was watched,” Timm said.

The Ministry’s former administrative building now houses a Stasi Museum that Timm co-founded. There, visitors can view the Stasi’s many surveillance gadgets, original offices of former Ministry officers and a complete history of the Stasi and its dissolution.

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