Free Republic

The past can never be predicted, and perhaps never more so than when it comes to the German left. Two years ago, we learned that Nobel Laureate Günter Grass -- the literary scourge of all things fascist, especially America -- had himself been a member of the Waffen SS. Now comes another zinger that casts the radical political and social upheavals of the late 1960s in new and revealing light. The historical surprise concerns a turning point whose ripple effects were felt in Europe and beyond. On June 2, 1967, a West German policeman fatally shot an unarmed, 26-year-old literature...

Is Germany doing enough to figure out how much the Stasi, East Germany's secret police, influenced West Germany? Or would it prefer to not open old wounds? The discovery that the policeman who unwittingly helped triggered the 1968 student protest movement was a Stasi spy has unleashed a heated historical debate. The revelation that the policeman who shot Berlin student Benno Ohnesorg in 1967 was a spy for the Stasi East German intelligence service has led to an intense historical debate in Germany. Ohnesorg's death radicalized many students and is seen as one of the factors that lead to the...

East German Spy Shot West Berlin Martyr The name of Benno Ohnesorg became a rallying cry for the West German left after he was shot dead by police in 1967. Newly discovered documents indicate that the cop who shot him may have been a spy for the East German secret police. It was one of the most important events leading up to the wave of radical left-wing violence which washed over West Germany in the 1970s. On the evening of June 2, 1967, the literature student Benno Ohnesorg took part in a demonstration at West Berlin's opera house. Mohammad Reza...

During the Cold War, the Stasi - East Germany's secret police - sent "Romeo" spies to the West. They seduced secretaries working in Bonn and tricked them into handing over secrets. More than 30 of the women were later prosecuted for spying. Now a former senior Stasi officer has told BBC News the women should be pardoned. One of those targeted by the Stasi more than 30 years ago is Gabriele Kliem, who still suffers the consequences. "It's like an invisible amputation of the soul," she says. "I am totally alone, I don't have any family, I don't have any...

Cologne, Germany - A senior executive at Russian gas monopoly Gazprom is under investigation in Germany over the claim that he was a German secret-police officer in the communist era, a prosecutor confirmed Tuesday. The newspaper Die Welt was set to name the man on Wednesday as Felix Strehober, chief financial officer of Gazprom Germania. It said it was possible he would be charged in Cologne with perjury after making a statutory declaration last year, 'I have never been a salaried employee of the Ministry of State Security (Stasi) or the equivalent.' Die Welt said more than 100 pages in...

Grainy pornographic films made for officers of the People's Army of former Communist East Germany have surfaced in the Stasi files in Berlin. Movies with titles like Glass Dreams, Private Werner's Big Surprise and F***ing for the Fatherland were made by a secret unit set up within a barracks of the army in Biesdorf in East Berlin. While the west fretted about the Cold War turning hot, soldiers based at Biesdorf were measured all over to see if they were well-enough endowed to play in the blue movies that mimicked those of the west in both style and substance. Officially,...

The supermarket chain Lidl has been accused of using methods reminiscent of the Stasi secret police to spy on employees in Germany. The company, which has more than 400 stores in Britain, reportedly monitored details of intimate conversations and personal relationships. Surveillance teams would arrive early on Monday mornings to install between five and 10 miniature cameras in Lidl stores, according to the German news magazine Stern. The retail chain insisted that the cameras were not to spy on staff but for "the identification of possible misconduct" adding that "details and observations do not apply to casual conversation". But in...

E. Germans drew blueprint for Cuban spying A once-jailed Cuban exile's research reveals how East Germany exported its repressive Stasi security system to Cuba, where it lives on today. MICHAEL LEVITIN BERLIN -- In the cavernous underground jail once run by East Germany's notorious Stasi security agency, Jorge Luís Vázquez leads a visitor into a dank, tiny, pitch-black cell, then slams the iron door shut. The world vanishes into darkness. Moments later, the door swings open and light returns. ''Well, how was it?'' asks Vázquez, a Cuban exile who was jailed in one of these very Stasi cells in 1987,...

BERLIN (Reuters) - Nearly two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall a German company plans to give the Trabant, a stinky two-cylinder car that became the symbol of communist East Germany, a new lease of life. The new Trabants will no longer have tiny engines, noxious fumes and plastic bodies but will retain the iconic design of the original -- like Volkswagen's new Beetle or the new Mini. The Trabant was the most common vehicle in the former East Germany and was produced without major changes for nearly 30 years. Known in the West as a "spark plug...

BERLIN — Researchers have discovered a Cold War “shoot-to-kill” order in what amounts to the clearest evidence yet that East German troops were given a licence to fire on people fleeing to the West, the Times of London reported. The written order, issued to Stasi secret service agents, states: “Don’t hesitate to use your weapon even when border breaches happen with women and children, which traitors have often exploited in the past.” It was found by a researcher in a regional archive of Stasi documents in the city of Magdeburg.

BERLIN _ The agency that manages the records of former East Germany's dreaded secret police has uncovered an order for border guards to fire on escaping citizens that is far more explicit than others on record, an official said in remarks published Saturday. Though the official East German border regulations said use of a firearm was to be considered an ''extreme measure in the use of force,'' the Oct. 1, 1973 order to border guards from the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, is much less reserved, Magdeburg's Volksstimme newspaper reported. ''Do not hesitate with the use of a firearm,...

I return from one week’s leave from my column, grateful for my old roost and in the mood to repay a favor by granting one, or attempting to do so. You must have the narrative of what happened one day last week. I was at work, with an assistant, on a long project, a book about the Goldwater campaign and the events leading up to it. At noon I had an e-mail from my oldest friend, a historian-belletrist, a knighted Englishman, whose message was that I must interrupt whatever I was wasting time on in order to catch a particular...

CHILDREN in formerly communist eastern Germany are to be given lessons next year about the dreaded Stasi secret police amid fears that their horrors have been forgotten. Feelgood films like Goodbye Lenin!, TV shows, books and a soon-to-open theme park dedicated to the lost socialist state of the German Democratic Republic have had an impact on children who were not born when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Some fear a rose-tinted view of what was a hideous tyranny has warped the entire German perspective of the state that was Moscow's most fervent eastern bloc ally in the Cold War....

German spymaster buried in Berlin Nov 26, 2006 Several hundred people gathered at a cemetery in east Berlin on Saturday to bury Markus Wolf, the legendary East German spymaster who died earlier this month at the age of 83. As head of the elite foreign intelligence division of the communist state's Stasi secret police, Wolf masterminded some of the Cold War's most audacious operations. He planted an agent close to West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, a move which led to Brandt's downfall when the spy was exposed in 1974. "Markus Wolf was a true and loyal friend of my country,"...

Markus Wolf, known as Cold War spymaster, dies at age 83 By Jeffrey Fleishman Los Angeles Times Former East Germany spy chief Markus Wolf is seen in front of Berlin's Brandenburg Gate in this 1995 photo. WARSAW, Poland — Markus Wolf, the spymaster who epitomized Cold War espionage as head of the brutal and inventive East German foreign-intelligence service, died Thursday at his Berlin home. He was 83. The cause of death was not announced. Suave and elusive, Mr. Wolf was such an enigma that Western intelligence agencies didn't know exactly what he looked like during tense decades when a...

Markus Wolf, the sinister East German spymaster who spun his web across Western Europe, has died peacefully in his sleep — taking with him some of the darkest secrets of the Cold War.A solitary red rose was deposited by a sympathiser yesterday on the doorstep of his Berlin apartment block. But few tears were being shed for the 83-year-old Stasi general who dispatched some 30,000 agents to seduce Nato secretaries, buy up politicians, vacuum up secrets and train terrorists. Normally voluble politicians contacted for comment yesterday refused to utter a word, as if Mr Wolf were a demonic presence. “Let...

Markus Wolf, the former head of communist East Germany's foreign intelligence service, has died at the age of 83, his family says. Wolf kept such a low profile that Western intelligence services did not have his picture. But as a key figure in the feared Stasi security ministry, he was a highly influential figure in the Cold War. He was interviewed by the BBC last year over his role as a journalist at the Nuremburg trials in 1945-6. He said witnessing the evidence of the Nazis' crimes "influenced my later life because anti-fascism became the raison d'etre of my life".

“There can be no peace without honestly and maturely confronting the past.” --Joachim Gauck[1] It’s the middle of May, and I’m having breakfast at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin.[2]  I’m in Germany with other journalists on a visit sponsored by Atlantik-Brücke, a Berlin-based organization that promotes German-American friendship.   This morning I’m speaking with Dr. Helmut Holl, former state secretary for Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany.  Dr. Holl and I discuss the German Democratic (sic) Republic (sic) (GDR), which subjugated eastern Germany from 1949 to 1990 after National Socialist subjugation from 1933 to 1945.   A short walk from the Adlon is...

BERLIN - The official German archives released Wednesday a communist file that describes former West German leader Willy Brandt as an intelligence source, but experts said it was clear that Brandt was unaware he was being pumped for information. Brandt was one of 45 members of the West German Bundestag parliament in the 1969-1972 period who is named in a directory of East Germany's foreign espionage network. Historians say three Bonn parliamentarians were definitely communist spies at that time. Files on 16 persons were released. Most of the rest, like Brandt, who was chancellor 1969-1974 and died in 1992, were...

In most parts of Berlin today, one has to look hard to find the double strand of bricks embedded in sidewalks, >snip< the Berlin Wall was one of the most visible, despised, politically and ideologically charged boundaries on earth. It was also the quintessence of an unnatural border, one drawn not by nature, language, ethnicity or colonial hubris, but an artificial, man-made and deliberate cleaving of a culturally and linguistically homogenous society.  >snip<  very simply, no major world city had been cleaved in half so abruptly and violently. >snip< What happened in East Germany, many Germans are  realizing, was not...