Analysis: Berlin recovers Stasi secrets

BERLIN, May 10 (UPI) -- Germany has launched a massive computer-aided project to reconstruct files torn to pieces by former East Germany's Stasi secret police, raising hopes that more communist wrongdoings can be brought to the surface.

In the final days of the communist German Democratic Republic, when the Ministry for State Security, better known as the Stasi, still had control of its own buildings, the secret police began destroying as many files as they could. Stasi officers burned, shredded and manually tore up documents that may have revealed state secrets or incriminated them and their superiors.

While the burned files are lost forever, West German police were able to secure more than 16,000 sacks of hand-torn paper, the largest scraps being roughly postcard size.

After Germany's reunification, Berlin vowed to reassemble the scraps as part of a greater effort to prosecute former Stasi wrongdoings and come to terms with the country's communist past.

Some 10 workers since 1995 have been manually gluing together the scraps in an office near Nuremberg, said Ilona Schaekel, spokeswoman of the BSTU, a federal agency created in the early 1990s to collect the Stasi files and organize their release to the public.

"Of the more than 16,000 sacks, 320 have been reconstructed since 1995," she told United Press International Thursday in a telephone interview. "At that rate it would take us hundreds of years until we're finished."

The new pilot project, spearheaded by a team of scientists from the Berlin-based Fraunhofer Institute for Production Machinery and Building Technology, hopes to digitalize and thus significantly speed up that process.

The German government has allocated some $8.5 million in federal funds over the next two years for the highly ambitious project that aims to see if it's feasible to digitally reassemble the roughly 600 million scraps to an estimated 45 million pages.

The sheer amount of potentially recoverable Stasi secrets excites even the cool-headed Fraunhofer scientists.

"To have that many potentially recoverable files from a former dictatorship is unique in the world," Bertram Nickolay, head of the Stasi files reassembling program at the Fraunhofer, told UPI. "This unique challenge requires a unique solution."

The Fraunhofer Institute is the only group in the world that has championed the digital jigsaw process. According to its method, a conveyor belt feeds the scraps into digital scanners that scan images of both sides of the paper. The Fraunhofer software then identifies the paper (lined or white-background) and its typefaces, any rubber stamps and the outlines of the tears. Then, like a jigsaw puzzle solver, it digitally puts together the scraps when it discovers matching edges. Over the next two years the institute aims to reassemble the contents of roughly 400 sacks.

Schaekel, of the government agency, said Berlin hopes to uncover more Stasi wrongdoings, as the manually assembled scraps had already unearthed famous Stasi informants' files previously thought to be lost. Officials believe the manually torn files contain "relevant information" on other informants, but also on victims and other intelligence measures.

The Stasi, the GDR's domestic and foreign spy service, had an overwhelming influence on the daily life of East German citizens.

During the mid-1980s, a civilian network of informants known as the Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs, Unofficial Collaborators), who spied on politically subversive citizens and activists, began to grow within both parts of Germany, East and West. By the time East Germany collapsed in 1989, it was estimated that the Stasi employed 91,000 full-time workers and 300,000 informants. That means one in 50 East Germans collaborated with the Stasi -- among the highest penetrations of any civilian society by an intelligence organization.

Regime opponents were often put in torture prisons and then released when they were mentally broken, or simply locked away for years on dubious charges.

While many former Stasi members were identified after German reunification, some have managed to pass by prosecutors and even enter public office or high positions in the industry.

"Even if some of the criminal cases are by now time-barred, this project still is very important for Germany to come to terms with its Stasi past," Schaekel told UPI.