Before leaving Leipzig this morning we visited an excellent museum dealing with the Stasi, the secret police of the East German government. The museum was located in their old headquarters and preserved the look and feel of the place complete with the equipment the Stasi used to bug telephones, detain prisoners, photograph suspicious people, and disguise its agents. A few items in particular emphasized how creepy and totalitarian the organization was:
1. The sheer scale of it all. Some estimates suggest that as many as 600,000 people were recruited as “unofficial agents”, basically regular citizens who secretly spied on their neighbors and reported back to designated Stasi agents, often with little to no compensation.
2. At its height, the Stasi were reading 2000 pieces of mail a day, including all incoming mail from abroad. One old joke highlights the cynical nature of the East German people towards this practice:
An East Germany boy writes a letter to his grandmother in West Germany: “Dear Grandma, Thank you for the pistol you sent, I have buried it in the backyard.” A week later he writes another letter, “Dear Grandma, You can send the tulip bulbs now. The Stasi have dug up the backyard.”
3. Along with all of the other data, the Stasi covertly collected the body odor of individuals it deemed suspicious and possibly subversive. It stored clothes with their scent in air tight containers, and in the event that they needed to identify the author of an anonymous pamphlet, they had dogs trained to match a scent on the pamphlet to one of several suspects presented to it.
4. The Stasi also had a plan for quickly interning tens of thousands of individuals believed dangerous in the event of an uprising. Offenses that could you land you on this list included, “persistent non-voting,” and “long-time attendee of prayer meetings”.