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The numbers are impressive: a total of 2.17 million citizens have submitted around 3.35 million applications since 1991 to find out what the GDR State Security once said about them.

Currently there are still between 3000 and 4500 new requests for information per month.

In the past 30 years, authorities and - much less often - private companies that wanted to check employees for possible Stasi involvement, journalists and scientists, submitted four million further applications.

Roland Jahn and Wolfgang Schäuble at the photo session on the occasion of the handover of the 15th and last activity report of the Stasi records authority

Source: Getty Images

The federal commissioner for the Stasi files, Roland Jahn, gave these total figures up to the end of 2020 when he presented the 15th and last activity report of his authority (BStU) in Berlin.

Because after exactly three decades, a fundamental change is imminent: In June the term of office of the third representative elected by the Bundestag ends, and at the same time the approximately 111 kilometers of racking material at currently 13 and in the medium term only six locations will be transferred to the responsibility of the Federal Archives.

Including, of course, around 1,300 BStU employees.

The Stasi Records Act continues to apply, so that access to the files will not change - neither for the worse nor for the better.

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Never before in world history has a society set itself the task of clearing up a previous dictatorship and its misdeeds with so much expenditure in terms of personnel and money.

This cost more than three billion euros in total, around four fifths for staff.

With “working up” a word that was previously meant quite differently was rededicated - the term “coming to terms with the past”, which was common in relation to the Nazi era, was never particularly happy.

The BStU insider and critic Christian Booß on the site of the former Stasi headquarters

Source: picture alliance / dpa

Time to take stock.

Christian Booß, historian, journalist and long-time BStU employee, is critical: "Roland Jahn has neglected important internal reform tasks in his efforts to handle his authority and his function,

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says the 68-year-old, who is today with the Citizens Committee 15. January e.

V. advocates a continuation of the processing: "In anticipation of the handover of the authority to the Federal Archives, the secret service research was actually processed."

The BStU goes back to debates in the unified year 1990 and to the temporary occupation of former Stasi buildings by GDR dissidents.

“My files are mine!” Was the slogan at the time.

But of course, handling the documents was not that easy.

The files, which were always created in a manner that violates human rights, could not be “handed out” to those affected because several, sometimes many, people were named in almost all of the documents.

In addition, German society as a whole should learn how the secret service had "secured" the SED.

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Despite the almost always non-violent assault on Stasi offices in December 1989, files and electronic data carriers of the Stasi were destroyed on a large scale in the spring of 1990 - often with the consent of control institutions such as the central round table or the citizens' committee.

The inexperienced civil rights activists had been persuaded to do so with flimsy justifications.

For example, with the assertion that every state engages in foreign espionage and that every state must be allowed to protect its own spies.

Even when these exterminations were stopped, there remained uneasiness about the enormous mountains of material.

They were a scientifically immensely valuable, but at the same time politically difficult legacy.

Fears soon circulated that disclosure of the files could lead to vigilante justice if people spied on tried to confront their traitors.

In reality, no such attack has ever been recorded.

The entrance to the Stasi records archive in Berlin-Lichtenberg

Source: picture alliance / Bildagentur-o

In any case, the only freely elected GDR People's Chamber laid the foundation for an authority, which was then designed by the Bundestag in the Stasi Records Act (StUG) after October 3, 1990.

In formal legal terms, it was and is a data protection law, i.e. a file closure law with the option to open it: exactly the opposite of a normal archive law.

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For this reason, all files researched in the BStU's holdings on a requested topic (mostly on a person) are first looked through by BStU employees before they - almost always fragmentarily and even on the released pages often with blackened names and similar personal information - the Applicant to be submitted.

Even stricter rules sometimes apply to copies made from the material.

In the 1990s, the term of office of the first Federal Commissioner for the Stasi files (and later Federal President) Joachim Gauck, the regulations were handled a little more loosely.

But when left-wing media were supposed to gain access to Stasi documents on Helmut Kohl in 2000, the former Chancellor complained against it.

With the illegally obtained information, journalists wanted to harm Kohl personally in the CDU donation affair at the time.

After several instances, this intention, which clearly contradicted the intention of the StUG, led to a strict interpretation of data protection enforced by the courts.

A typical example of a "fear-blackened" and thus de facto worthless copy from the Stasi records archive

Source: BStU

From then on, "fear blackening" became the norm in the BStU, even with files from the 1950s and 1960s, which under normal archive law would have long been accessible without being blacked out.

Once, in all seriousness, an employee made the word “God” unrecognizable - because his personal rights could be violated by appearing in a Stasi spy report from 1981.

The entire term of office of the second Federal Commissioner, Marianne Birthler, was characterized by this significantly more difficult access to the files.

In addition, there were failures such as the alleged “discovery” of the shooting order at the inner-German border in 2007.

Even in the term of office of the third and last Federal Commissioner Roland Jahn since 2011, the BStU was not really able to overcome the bureaucratic and data protection barriers, even if a lot got better.

Of around 16,000 sacks with "pre-destroyed" Stasi files, not even a thousand have yet been reconstructed

Source: picture alliance / dpa

The handling of the “pre-destroyed” Stasi files contained in around 16,000 bags is still open.

Millions were available for their virtual reconstruction by means of scanners, but the project silted up in bureaucracy and excessive expectations, as Christian Booß also criticizes: “The computer-aided composition of the torn files, after all an order of the Bundestag, is in fact dead. Nothing has been done for five years more electronically puzzled. ”At the current speed, putting the snippets together would probably be a task for several centuries.

After 30 years of dealing with the Stasi, the balance sheet is divided.

Never has more effort been put into dealing with a collapsed dictatorship in society - that's on the plus side.

But German weaknesses such as the tendency towards bureaucratization, resentment such as against Kohl and a narrow interpretation of the rules instead of pragmatism slowed this commitment in many cases.

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