It brings the Cold War Era in Eastern Germany into a sharper focus.
Posted on 05/27/2009 12:23:28 PM PDT by george76
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 1968 student protest movement and the emergence of the far-left Baader-Meinhof terrorist group.
Now Germany is asking itself what would have happened if people had known that Karl-Heinz Kurras, the policeman who fired the fatal shot and became the epitome of what students saw as an authoritarian West German establishment, was a communist and a Stasi informant? Would 1968 have happened? Would the country have been terrorized by left-wing urban guerrillas for over a decade?
The issue has also raised questions about whether the gigantic archive of Stasi files is being combed thoroughly enough to reveal the Stasi's involvement in West German institutions during the Cold War. How many other significant secrets lie buried in the over 100 kilometres of files and film and in the rubbish bags of shredded documents?
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
Maybe now would be a good time to check the old records of the Ohio National Guard.
There are names of many former West German politicians and military people who betrayed their country in those files.
I have heard it said the the West German government was infested with these traitors during the Cold War. Not surprising they don’t want to examine those files too carefully or if they do, supress the sensitive information.
Probably more than West German names in there ...
No doubt a few from this side of the pond.
Maybe a couple of Billies ...
Didn’t Willi Brandt resign when his cabinet was discovered to be riddled with East German spies? I don’t see why this would come as a shock to any Germans. Maybe they’re just trying to protect the communists.
I had the same thought about an Ohio State University shooting parallel while reading the article. It’ll be interesting to see if eventually we find out more about FSU/East Block involvement with 1980s era nuclear weapons protest.
Slightly off topic, prior to fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Russel, the American historian, found evidence in East German writings that Moscow was helping to ochestrate the Sacco-Vanzetti demonstrations in the United States. (Moscow considered the Sacco-Vanzetti campaign a major success in tarnishing the image of the U.S. abroad, especially in Italy.)
Now we have an acolyte of the KGB as president, tarnish the U.S. image abroad for free.
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