The Stasi and the Berlin Wall | DW Documentary

Aug 11, 2021 | For one group, at least, the erection of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961 was a stroke of luck. Over the following decades, the Wall would be the lifeblood of the East German secret police, known as the Stasi. By the time the Wall fell, in 1989, thousands of Stasi agents were employed with a single goal: to make the Wall insurmountable.

The film tells the story of this existentially symbiotic relationship from the perspective of the Stasi under its notorious leader Erich Mielke. It’s the first time this most sensitive chapter of East Germany's history has been told in such an exemplary and coherent way: including the deaths that took place at the Wall, and the cover-up and concealment of many of those murders.

We learn about the arrests and imprisonment of tens of thousands of refugees, as well as the Stasi’s elaborate construction of tunnels and underground listening stations to track down tunnel diggers. From the billion-dollar business of selling GDR prisoners to West Germany, to the "filtering" of Western traffic at border crossings to recruit unofficial collaborators, Mielke's specialists were everywhere.

We see how Mielke's power grew, as the Wall and the border system were perfected, and how the walling-in of the population created more and more work for the Stasi. The Wall became the Stasi’s main field of activity, and its daily bread.

The fall of the Wall brought an abrupt end to both East Germany and its security apparatus. An irony of history is that, on November 9, 1989, it was a Stasi man who opened the first barrier on Bornholmer Strasse and thus initiated the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Stasi Files: Inside East Germany’s Secret Police | SLICE | Full Documentary

Feb 18, 2026 | Five letters came to symbolize dictatorship, terror and mass surveillance: STASI. The Staatssicherheit, East Germany’s state security service, employed 100,000 people, relied on nearly 200,000 informants and operated across 16 regional offices with their own prisons, making it one of the largest secret police systems in the Soviet bloc. After the fall of the Berlin Wall more than 30 years ago, the Stasi disappeared, but it left behind 111 kilometres of files, 41 million record cards, 1.4 million photos and countless recordings, many saved from destruction by human rights activists.

Today, historians, journalists and victims continue to examine these archives, including 16,000 sacks filled with millions of torn documents now being reconstructed by hand and with specialized software. These records have revealed the recruitment of minors, the coercion of former Nazis, the use of psychological torture known as “Zersetzung,” and contingency plans for camps designed to detain 80,000 opponents within 24 hours. Through newly uncovered documents, expert analysis, interviews with former officers and testimonies from victims, this film explores the workings and legacy of the most effective secret service in the Communist bloc. It invites viewers to consider how confronting these archives shapes both personal memory and democratic accountability today.

Documentary: Stasi : A State Against Its People (2022)
Directed by: Barbara NECEK
Production: ET LA SUITE PRODUCTIONS

Beyond the Wall: Part 1 - The Rise of Germany's Far Right; Part 2: From Germany to Bulgaria, What Happened to Hope? | People & Power

Merkel Compared NSA to Stasi in Heated Encounter with Obama

THE GUARDIAN: German chancellor furious after revelations US intelligence agency listened in on her personal mobile phone

In an angry exchange with Barack Obama, Angela Merkel has compared the snooping practices of the US with those of the Stasi, the ubiquitous and all-powerful secret police of the communist dictatorship in East Germany, where she grew up.

The German chancellor also told the US president that America's National Security Agency cannot be trusted because of the volume of material it had allowed to leak to the whistleblower Edward Snowden, according to the New York Times.

Livid after learning from Der Spiegel magazine that the Americans were listening in to her personal mobile phone, Merkel confronted Obama with the accusation: "This is like the Stasi."

The newspaper also reported that Merkel was particularly angry that, based on the disclosures, "the NSA clearly couldn't be trusted with private information, because they let Snowden clean them out."

Snowden is to testify on the NSA scandal to a European parliament inquiry next month, to the anger of Washington which is pressuring the EU to stop the testimony. » | Ian Traynor in Brussels and Paul Lewis in Washington | Tuesday, December 17, 2013