The Ministry of State Security (MFS) of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), established in 1950, saw itself as “the shield and sword of the party”. In practice, this meant espionage, repression, and disruption. Its main target was its own population. The Stasi, as the MFS was commonly known, was the most important early warning system and repressive apparatus of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED).
New platform: ‘Bring the lime and bricks!’
Nevertheless, the Stasi could not prevent the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. And with that, he also met his end. Nine days after the unexpected opening of the border, the GDR’s secret police were renamed the Office for National Security (AFNS). New name, old system – that’s how the overwhelming majority of 17 million East Germans saw it.
The Stasi was the main topic of discussion at the Central Round Table meeting in Berlin on 15 January 1990. At these meetings, representatives of the old regime, led by head of government Hans Modrow, met with civil rights activists to discuss the future of the ailing GDR. That day, the New Forum political movement called for a rally in front of the Stasi headquarters. “Bring lime and bricks!” Read a booklet. The Secret Service was to be symbolically dismantled and vast territory was to be taken over “with imagination and without violence”.
‘The state has not yet given up power’
Thousands of people answered the call, including Arno Polzin from East Berlin. The thesis was something the then-27-year-old equipment maker would never forget: “The fact that we were allowed on the site unchallenged.” No resistance, no control – or was it a trap? When he entered the space, which had been sealed for decades, he saw uniformed riot police on the top floor of a building.
Polzin told DW in an interview that they were clearly not there to scare or drive away the encroachers. Instead, they were watching with “interest and curiosity” what was happening below. In Polzin’s eyes, this was a highly symbolic moment: “Well, now there doesn’t seem to be any immediate danger here.”
GDR riot police seen storming Stasi strongholds
With the attack on the Stasi headquarters, the last and most important bastion of the GDR secret service fell. However, it all started about 300 kilometers southwest of Berlin. On 4 December 1989, the artist Gabriele Stötzer and a group of women organized an occupation of the local Stasi building in Erfurt. Although the borders between East and West Germany were already open, he was not confident of peace. “The state has not yet given up power,” Gabriel Stotzer said in an interview with DW.
The police, army and Stasi were still armed. “There was a darkness over the GDR that still persists.” Despite the feeling of uncertainty, the women mustered all their courage and demanded entry to the Stasi – and the door did indeed open. So he put forward his request to the stunned Stasi people: “You created files on us, it’s our property. Now we want to reclaim them. We want to see if you’re going to destroy them.”
The recording of our lives ‘a great treasure’
Gabrielle Stotzer says she wasn’t scared at that time. His goal was so clear that there was always something left to do. The women proceeded as per plan. Strange as it may sound, he informed the mayor in advance about his upcoming action. And the public prosecutor was asked to seal the Stasi rooms to protect the files. “We knew this was also a great treasure, our treasure.”
“Our lives were recorded there,” says Stotzer, speaking of secret police methods as a means of total control “to practically snatch our lives from us, to make us criminals.” She explains that in the eyes of the Stasi, she was an enemy of the state from an early age. His crime: protesting with other civil rights activists against singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann being stripped of his GDR citizenship in 1976. For this Stotzer was sentenced to one year in Hohenneck women’s prison.
‘They went in, demanded the Stasi files, and no shots were fired’
Despite this humiliating punishment, he refused to flee to the West and earned a living as a freelance artist in the GDR. The Stasi continued surveillance of him. The way he and other like-minded people later managed to peacefully disband the Secret Service in 1989 is something Gabriel Stotzer describes today as “ingenious” and “brilliant.” The incredible news from Erfurt spread throughout the GDR: “They went in, demanded the Stasi files, and no shots were fired.” The Stasi was surrendering everywhere – in Halle, Leipzig and Gotha.
Only in Berlin it took longer. Markus Meckel, Foreign Minister of the GDR for a short time in 1990 after the first free elections, has a reasonable explanation for this: the GDR was a centralized state. “It was the center of power, including the repressive apparatus.” And the Stasi could only be removed “if the government itself became unstable and saw no other way out.” That moment came on January 15, 1990.
Stasi marks the beginning of a ‘great achievement’
Three days after the attack on the Stasi headquarters, the last communist head of the GDR government, Hans Modrow, left the resistance. He ordered the disbandment of the secret service. Meckel said in an interview with DW that the subsequent opening of the Stasi records was a “great achievement” of the GDR People’s Chamber. an achievement “which had to be fought for despite resistance from the West German government.”
Helmut Kohl, who was the Chancellor of West Germany at the time, wanted to keep the explosive material under lock and key. To prevent this from happening, Arno Polzin and several others captured the Stasi stronghold for a second time in September 1990 – and succeeded. The most important goal of the GDR civil rights activists had been achieved: “My file is mine.” To achieve this, the Stasi legacy stored in dark shelves had to see the light of day. However, according to Polzin, there was still another fear. West German secret services may have gained access to the files “before the citizens of the GDR had a chance to know what was happening.”
Access to secret files ‘was a really important task’
Without the commitment of civil rights activists in multiple locations at different times, the dismantling of the Stasi and the opening of the files would have been almost unimaginable. They were determined to keep it that way. In 2021, the independent Stasi Records Agency was absorbed into the Federal Archives of Germany and access to the files remains open today.
Markus Meckel, who served as the last GDR Foreign Minister, thinks this was a good solution. And he emphasizes how it set an example for other countries in the former Eastern Bloc who followed Germany’s example. For him, the attack on the Stasi headquarters on 15 January 1990 has a special historical significance: “It was a very important act that should be remembered.”
This article was originally published on January 15, 2020 and updated for the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Stasi.