shadows on 26/5/2007 at 00:36
Quote Posted by BBC News
In a tiny government office in Zirndorf, Georg Schleyer takes handfuls of ripped up bits of paper out of a sack and arranges them on his desk.
As more and more scraps emerge from the bag, the jumble of fragments grows bigger and more intriguing. I can make out the code names of secret agents, there are torn-up photos and twisted lengths of microfilm.
These are the files of the Stasi - the former East Germany's Ministry of State Security. They are secrets the Stasi had tried to destroy, but which are now being pieced back together.
It is all very low-tech. To help him, Georg has a magnifying glass, some sticky tape and an iron to smooth out the creases.
But with the help of these items, over the last 12 years Georg has uncovered East German informers. He has learnt a lot about the Stasi's use of drugs in sport and discovered that the Stasi tried to cover up a train crash in which 75 children were killed.
Stasi panic "Sometimes I get so excited with my work, I miss my lunch break," Georg says.
"Once I even forgot to go home. What I'm doing is important. I'm helping to bring the history of East Germany back to life. So that former citizens of the GDR will have the chance to find out who spied on them, and why."
No secret police force in history has ever spied on its own people on a scale like the Stasi.
Some calculations have concluded that in East Germany there was one informer to every seven citizens. Back-to-back, the files would have stretched more than 100 miles (161km).
So when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, panic-stricken Stasi officers had mountains of classified files to destroy. Unluckily for then, the shredding machines could not cope with the sheer volume of paper and broke down. So the Stasi resorted to ripping files up by hand.
But the secrets did not die. More than 600 million scraps were recovered, put in sacks and stored. Georg and his team of puzzlers have pieced some back together. But it would take them more than 400 years to finish the job by hand.
Now, though, computers may speed up the solution.
Dark secrets At the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin, scientist Jan Schneider shows me how the new software works. As he feeds Stasi scraps into a scanner, the pieces appear on a giant monitor ready to be sorted and matched.
"It's like a grand jigsaw puzzle," Jan explains.
"Just like in a jigsaw, where you sort the pieces into sky, trees and so on, so here too in the computer you sort the snippets - according to their background colour, the colour of the writing, whether they're typewritten or handwritten. After that the search space is small enough to puzzle."
Then Jan presses a button and, almost magically, the different fragments dance around the screen before joining together into a single document.
There are more than 16,000 sacks of Stasi scraps to get through.
Experts believe that hidden inside are some of the Stasi's darkest secrets - untold stories of spies and informers, of undercover operations in the West and repression at home. It is thought that computers could process the entire contents within five years.
Read the rest here: (
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6692895.stm)
Who needs computers? Just get the combined might of jigsaw puzzle solvers all over the world to put things together! :cheeky:
One thing i just don't understand. The Stasi wanted to quickly destroy all their documents and they resorted to shredding and then ripping the documents up. Wouldn't it have quickly to burn them? :erg:
R Soul on 26/5/2007 at 00:48
All that paper might have set the building on fire.
I'm sure there's a reason. Although they were panicking, they had the presence of mind to try to destroy incriminating evidence, so I'm sure someone would have had the idea to use fire. Maybe they did, but there was a "Good idea, boss" mentality (not too hard to believe with a secret police force), and the boss said "No fire, it might burn the building down".
Pyrian on 26/5/2007 at 00:56
Ideally you shred first then burn, and/or use a furnace that can maintain oxygen flow and temperature at high volume. Just tossing a lot of books in a firepit and throwing down a match may do a lot of cosmetic damage without actually incinerating most of the text.
Kolya on 26/5/2007 at 01:28
Actually most of the files haven't been shredded or burned. This wasn't an agent movie.
The implications of a state that (tries to) control it's citizens like that really show on a much more personal level if you lived there. A good friend of my family learned after the collapse of Eastern Germany, that the man she had spent the last years with, and with whom she has a daughter, had been a hired spy from the start, set on her case.
When my mother applied for a departure request in the "GDR" home office, we never spoke to anyone about it, because it was dangerous to do so. My teacher came up to me only a few weeks later and asked me why we wanted to leave this great country. I was 11 years old then and answered truthfully that we wanted to go somewhere where there would be real elections and where people could say what they think. And she did her best to convince me that my mother had some wrong ideas. Well, turns out this wasn't the case. My teacher still tells children what's right and wrong btw.
I'm quite sure her work for the Stasi hasn't been overlooked or something. But you can't just exchange a whole country's population.
TheOutrider on 26/5/2007 at 02:00
The shredding/tearing was actually called "Vorvernichtung" (pre-destruction), so it's probably safe to assume that the files would have been burned. I presume the western German security forces were fast enough to prevent much of that.
I also find the "five years" mention rather amusing - manual reconstruction started in Zirndorf in 1995. This new computer-supported project has been instituted for a two-year runtime for now, for processing 400 of the 16,000 sacks of scraps. In the twelve years of manual reconstruction so far, around 300 sacks were finished. The "five years" number is probably coming from an estimate made by Fraunhofer and Lufthansa, who designed this automated reconstruction system, and assumes funding of €1,000,000 per year. I'm not holding my breath for them to finish any time soon, really.
Fun fact: Zirndorf is right next to my hometown :D
demagogue on 26/5/2007 at 02:11
Wow ... this is something that's really hard to understand in the US, the extent of what happened. We have more than our share of swarmy secrets, but 1 in every 7 a state informant is nuts.
I have a friend now living in New Jersey that tells a story of how he and a friend escaped Communist Hungary to E. Germany by hiking in backwoods and train jumping (once getting caught by security forces and getting tied up and getting the shit beat out of them and returned, only to run away again). And then from the DDR they worked for a little while and finally stowed away with on a freight ship to Canada, sneaking on deck to steal and eat ketchup packets and drinking icicles that formed on the sides, and then they hiked across the border in the US ... in 1988. Since his English is marginal, he wants me to help him write it into a book.
Pyrian on 26/5/2007 at 06:30
Quote Posted by demagogue
Wow ... this is something that's really hard to understand in the US, the extent of what happened. We have more than our share of swarmy secrets, but 1 in every 7 a state informant is nuts.
Yeah. Here we just do ridiculous amounts of unconstitutional wiretapping which no computer algorithm can yet sort through and nobody's really got time to listen to.
shadows on 27/5/2007 at 08:47
Quote Posted by Kolya
A good friend of my family learned after the collapse of Eastern Germany, that the man she had spent the last years with, and with whom she has a daughter, had been a hired spy from the start, set on her case.
Wow, and I thought that only happened in films. It must have been terrible for her to find out the truth.
It's a real eye opener isn't it? a entire society under surveillance, put one foot wrong and you could be under suspicion or worse.
Kolya on 27/5/2007 at 09:49
They were divorced already when she found out, but yeah.
The eye opener wasn't so much that you had been under surveillance, because everyone knew that really. But you know what people said?
"If you've done nothing wrong, why do you worry so much?"The eye opener was, when this big pile of lies collapsed and we learned, that our small group of friends actually had been right all the time, and all the others had been wrong; and this state, which had seemed insuperable, had to change, not us.
I learned from this to really value democracy and human rights. And that your own freedom is always measured by the freedom you grant to people who think different from yourself.
That's paraphrasing a saying, you often heard around the time the DDR came to an end, by famous communist (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Luxemburg) Rosa Luxemburg. :thumb:
TheOutrider on 27/5/2007 at 11:57
Quote Posted by Kolya
The eye opener wasn't so much that you had been under surveillance, because everyone knew that really. But you know what people said?
"If you've done nothing wrong, why do you worry so much?"I also find it quite eerie how every new massive automated surveillance measure being instituted
nowadays ends up using
that very phrase to argue against the critics. Hooray for automated surveillance, which saves the need for expensive and potentially unreliable spies!
[edit] I'm not trying to imply that modern surveillance = STASI ZOMG, but that does honestly worry me a bit. Automated general surveillance of anyone and everyone is just so easy and comfortable, which is... disturbing. Says the man who moved to the "CCTV LOL" UK because he was sick of Germany becoming ever more fucked up. [/edit]
