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STASI

Court to review access to Sweden’s ‘Stasi files’

Sweden's Supreme Administrative Court (Regeringsrätten) has taken up the case of a researcher who is applying for access to classified security police (Säpo) documents relating to Stasi contacts in Sweden.

Court to review access to Sweden's 'Stasi files'
Magdeburg office of German Stasi Archives, 2007

Säpo in November refused Birgitta Almgren, a researcher at Södertörn University south of Stockholm, access to the lists of Swedish contacts for Communist East Germany’s (GDR) Stasi secret police.

The Administrative Court of Appeal (Kammarrätten) upheld Säpo’s decision when it rejected Almgren’s appeal in February.

Professor Almgren has now taken her case to Sweden’s highest administrative court arguing that as the GDR and the Stasi ceased to exist 20 years ago the documents can no longer reasonably be argued to pose a threat to international relations or Sweden’s national security.

“Access to the documents requested is essential for research into Sweden during the Cold War and, in a wider perspective, to show how dictatorships work and how an open, democratic country can be systematically infiltrated,” Almgren writes in her submission to the court.

Almgren hopes that the documents will support her hypothesis that the GDR considered Sweden to be a “focus country” in its foreign policy and functioned as a bridge between East and West in the Cold War.

She furthermore argues that her research is more of an archiving nature and she has no intention to sensationalise the issue or expose names of those contained in the lists.

This is the second time that Birgitta Almgren has pushed the case to the Supreme Adminstrative court after her leave to appeal an Administrative Court of Appeal decision from October 2007 was rejected in December 2007.

The documents that Almgren is seeking access to form part of the so-called Rosenholz files or “Stasi lists” which ended up in the hands of the CIA during the German reunification, but were finally returned to Germany and their respective countries in 2003. The files contain details of informal contacts that the GDR had in a slew of countries.

The German parts of the Rosenholz files are open for public viewing at the Stasi archive in Berlin but the Swedish files remain classified.

In an article in the Svenska Dagbladet daily on February 22nd, Säpo’s head of information Åsa Hedin claimed that there was no such “Stasi list”, arguing that the approximately 50 Swedish names that featured in the Stasi files found after the fall of the Berlin wall have been fully investigated by the security police.

“In most cases, it appeared that the criminal charges were completely baseless. The people in question had never had access to any secret information and knew no one who had access to classified material,” Hedin wrote.

Hedin argued that that espionage crimes committed by the small number of Swedes recruited as agents by the Stasi had already exceeded the statute of limitations by the time their names had been made known to Säpo.

The decision to deny access to the files was defended “partly on national security grounds, partly in the interests of our organization and partly out of consideration to the individuals,” the Säpo spokesperson explained.

The Local has made attempts to contact Birgitta Almgren on Tuesday and Wednesday but without success.

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STASI

How Germans are reconstructing Stasi files from millions of fragments

Barbara Pönisch spends most of her days at work doing puzzles -- piecing together a mountain of documents torn up by the hated East German Stasi secret police.

How Germans are reconstructing Stasi files from millions of fragments
Shredded Stasi files at the Stasi Archive in Berlin. Photo: DPA

The former bookbinder is one in a team of 10 people painstakingly reconstructing surveillance reports, private letters or policy papers that the Stasi accumulated and desperately tried to destroy as the communist regime came crashing down 30 years ago.

When the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, the secret police began shredding their files.

READ ALSO: Why Germany will never forget the Stasi era of mass surveillance

The machines broke down under the strain, so they were forced to tear up the documents by hand to then pulp or burn the scraps.

But “citizen committees” stormed the Stasi's offices — including its East Berlin headquarters — on January 15, 1990, seizing millions of files along with 16,000 bags of torn up documents to preserve them for the future.

Stasi files being electronically constructed at the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin. Photo: DPA

The East Berlin-based Ministry of State Security, known as the Stasi, had been one of the world's most effective instruments for state repression during its nearly 40 years of existence.

It employed more than 270,000 people — many of them informants seeded throughout the population — during the Cold War, making East German society the most intensely monitored in the Eastern bloc.

Three decades on, its secrets are still being revealed as Pönisch and her colleagues at the BStU federal office for Stasi records reconstruct the ripped up papers.

“I enjoy doing puzzles and the search, that's a little like detective work,” said Pönisch, herself an east German, with a smile.

More crucially, she said, “it is gratifying to be able to put together these things that were once torn up 30 years ago… because I know that this material will then be looked at by an archivist and make a contribution towards our coming to terms with the past.”

'Huge responsibility'

Thousands of spies were unmasked as the Stasi files became available to the public in the years following German reunification in 1990.

Many East Germans learned that their friends and even family members had been keeping tabs on them as “unofficial collaborators” of the Stasi.

What Pönisch describes as her “small contribution to coming to terms with the past” is therefore in fact a Herculean task with an impact on the real lives of thousands if not millions of people.

Among personal items that she had pieced together is a letter written by a mother pleading with the Stasi to free her son.

“That was from a few years back and really touched me,” she said.

Carefully aligning two scraps of papers, holding each side down with paper weights before firmly sticking them together, Pönisch underlined that the key to her job is not only patience, but more importantly, recognition of the “huge responsibility” it carries.

Technology overwhelmed

Since manual reconstruction of the ripped up papers began in 1995, some 500 bags of fragments — equivalent to more than 1.5 million pages — have been pieced together.

Bombshells turned up by the archivists as they reconstruct the documents include papers proving the state-sponsored doping of East German athletes or papers about extreme left Red Army Faction militant Silke Maier-Witt, who went underground in the GDR.

Many more may lay hidden for years, as on average, it takes each puzzler 18 months to completely reconstruct each sack of shreds, said Andreas Loder, who leads the manual reconstruction team.

Files at the Berlin Office of the Federal Commissioner for Stasi Files (BStU). Photo: DPA

With each bag containing fragments making up as many as 3,500 pages, it means there remain up to 600 million fragments to be pieced into some 55 million pages.

Hopes had been raised in 2013, when technology was deployed to help in the
process.

But the so-called e-Puzzler developed by research institute Fraunhofer IPK proved helpless in the face of hundreds of thousands of fragments. Eventually, only 23 bags or around 91,000 pages were put together.

A new machine is being designed and archivists hope it will be deployed in the coming years.

'Claim their rights'

For now, it is back to human labour.

Ute Michalsky, who oversees the reconstruction work, admits that she cannot say if there will come a day when all the fragments will be pieced together.

But she stressed the importance of pushing ahead with the work, noting that the priority will be to put together documents that carry personal significance.

READ ALSO: Stasi documents trove released online

“The bags in which documents with information about people who the Stasi kept tabs on” are first on the list, she said.

“For many affected people, such things are still very important for rehabilitation… so we're not looking particularly for controversial documents or explosive finds.

“For us it's more important to help victims of the dictatorship claim their right” to know what the secret police knew about them.

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