Questions Raised Over Merkel's Communist Past

Americans frustrated by German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s reluctance to meet demands for stronger sanctions against Russia have now begun to ask if there is a good reason the German leader has been targeted by US spies.

Questions are being raised about Merkel’s early life in totalitarian East Germany, the extent of her ties to its communist regime and her history as "an ardent Russophile" in Soviet-dominated East Germany.

Last year, in information leaked to the German news magazine Der Spiegel by former US National Security Authority contractor Edward Snowden, Merkel learned that the US intelligence service had been tapping her personal mobile phone since 2002.

The tap was part of a mass surveillance of European leaders by joint US and British intelligence.

In a furious confrontation with President Barack Obama Merkel compared the snooping practices of the U.S. with those of the Stasi, the secret police of the communist dictatorship in East Germany.

Subsequently the Obama administration refused to give Berlin a "no spying pact," but agreed to stop spying on Merkel personally.

Some Americans are now asking: was there a good reason the US needed to keep an eye on Merkel's private conversations? As Reuters blogger Jack Shafer wrote when the story broke last year: "Just as Germany has yet to expunge its Nazi past, its eastern, totalitarian provinces have not come close to expunging their Communist past."

"The longitudinal interest by the US in all things Merkel may be informed by her past. She was a citizen of East Germany before reunification, and her personal history has long been controversial."

The NSA, Glenn Greenwald, and Angela Merkel - April 18, 2014
Germany’s so-called “unique relationship with Russia” means that the country gets 36 percent of its natural gas imports and 39 percent of its oil imports from Russia.
The increasing dependence on Russia is related to Merkel’s decision, after the accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, to phase out Germany’s nuclear energy program. Pressure to cancel Germany’s nuclear program had come from the German Green Party.
A prominent member of the German Green Party, Hans-Christian Ströebele, met with Edward Snowden in Moscow and gave him a “whistleblower” award. He previously served as a lawyer for the Soviet- and East German-backed terrorist group, the Baader Meinhof Gang (also known as the Red Army Faction), and was sentenced to 10 months imprisonment in 1982 for setting up a communications network between the terrorist prisoners and activists outside the jails.
Merkel, who grew up in the formerly communist East Germany and spent 35 years of her life under the dictatorship, is the subject of a book by Günther Lachmann and Ralf Georg Reuth titled, The First Life of Angela M., which suggests that she had deeper ties to the communist regime than previously known or acknowledged. She has admitted joining the Free German Youth, the communist youth organization, and a photo has surfaced showing her in a communist uniform. But the book argues that she hid her role in the youth group as secretary for agitation and propaganda, instead depicting herself as someone engaged in “cultural” affairs.
One of Merkel’s defenders said she “couldn’t remember whether she was involved in agitation and propaganda.”
Russian ruler Vladimir Putin, of course, was a KGB spy in East Germany, and speaks German.

Russia counts on EU ‘friends’ to avert further sanctions - June 26, 2014 - Europe-wide, many far-right parties are speaking in favour of Putin's policy in the Ukraine. In Germany, this is the case of the far-right and fascist National Democratic Party (NPD). The party's newly elected MEP, Udo Voigt, criticises the EU and the US: "Both stir up resentment in Ukraine against Russia. After the Cold War, NATO has gradually expanded to the east. The US tried to move closer and closer to the Russian border, presenting a threatening stranglehold." "Russia's patience" in the face of NATO “provocations” is “astonishing“, Voigt said.

Not that I'm an expert on the matter (far from it) but this,IMO,is a very complicated subject.The east German government had a level of control over its citizens that the Nazis wouldn't have dared dream of.I won't go into detail but anyone who's truly interested should read a book called “Stasi”.I can't recall the author's name.Reading it will cause Freepers (and other real Americans) to understand that in comparison to the Stasi...and the East German state apparatus...Osama Obama and his IRS spies are amateurs.

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