Free Republic

They are "traitors to the Fatherland." That was former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's angry response to the recent, sensational revelations concerning West German citizens who spied during the Cold War for the Stasi, the dreaded East German secret police. Kohl was West Germany's conservative leader during the crucial 1980s, who, along with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, helped win the Cold War for the West. The exposure of these leftist turncoats has come about thanks to the United States, Kohl's anti-Communist ally. After the Berlin Wall fell, many Stasi archives were destroyed, but a complete copy of the files of...

<p>Cold War historians and spy novelists have long conjectured about hit squads working for communist East Germany. But a recent arrest is the strongest official acknowledgment yet that state-sponsored assassins were on the loose before the fall of the Berlin Wall.</p>

The Swedish television journalist Cats Falk and a friend were murdered in 1984 on the orders of the East German security service Stasi, the newspaper BERLINER ZEITUNG reports today. According to the newspaper, Cats Falk, who worked for Rapport [Swedish television news programme], was murdered because she had found out too much about the smuggling of high-technology equipment, weapons and ammunition to the Communist regime in East Germany through her investigations. According to the newspaper the women were poisoned and put in a car which was rolled over the quayside into the Hammarby Canal in Stockholm.

Last May, Katarina Witt lost a court battle to keep her Stasi file a secret. Witt, the figure skater who won Olympic gold for East Germany in the 1980s, co-operated with her country's dreaded secret police, the heirs to the Nazi Gestapo. Few Communist countries had a secret police as brutal as the Stasi. They were the ones who killed more than 1,000 of their own countrymen who tried to cross the Berlin Wall to freedom in the West; they were the ones who kept a bizarre warehouse of jars filled with the body odor of political dissidents -- so...

Kohl loses battle to keep Stasi files secret By Kate Connolly in Berlin (Filed: 18/09/2003) The former German chancellor Helmut Kohl yesterday lost a legal attempt to prevent the publication of thousands of pages of potentially explosive records compiled about him by the East German secret police, the Stasi. A court in Berlin decided that, as a public figure, Mr Kohl's files should be made accessible to researchers. The ruling, which overturns an earlier decision, is in line with a new law passed by parliament last year. Lawyers for Mr Kohl, who did not appear in court, said they would...

The Olympic skating champion Katarina Witt will bring to a climax a wave of Communist-era nostalgia sweeping Germany with a television show next week highlighting the bright side of life in a totalitarian state.A batch of films, TV shows and series is cashing in on a wave of popular sentiment for the East German Communist era, and nearly all have avoided painful subjects such as the infamous Berlin Wall.The programme's uncritical stance has angered those who suffered under Communism. Former dissidents who have studied East German Stasi secret police files say the shows are an insult to the more than...

Amid calls for his resignation, the leader of the reformed and reconstituted former East German communist party said in a broadcast interview Thursday he had "never made any secret" of his links to the Stasi secret police. "Everyone knows I was unofficially with the Stasi," said Lothar Bisky, chairman of the leftist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) which caters to a largely eastern German constituency. "I have never made any secret of my unofficial contacts to the Stasi," he said in an interview with RBB television taped Wednesday and widely broadcast on Thursday. But he insisted he was never an...

The head of Germany's reformed communist party has been unmasked as a spy for the former East German secret police by researchers studying files that have been returned to Germany by the CIA. A team of 50 analysts is going through the "Rosenholtz" (Rosewood) files - the last remaining record of East German espionage - which were taken to Washington during the final days of the GDR (German Democratic Republic) and returned earlier this month. The files, whichcontain 320,000 agent cards and 57,000 spy reports, name Lothar Bisky, the chairman of the German Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), as an...

Thousands of former East German Stasi agents who spied on the West during the Cold War face the prospect of being unmasked after a decision by the CIA to return a hitherto top-secret espionage document to the German government. The revelations concern about 50,000 former Stasi agents. Their identities are contained in a massive intelligence dossier, codenamed "Rosenholz", which the CIA smuggled out of East Germany shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Yesterday, the German government disclosed that Washington had returned all of the 380 compact discs that made up the Rosenholz file and that, 10...

New Software to Unravel Stasi Puzzle   The orderly habits of communist bureaucrats have made it easier for new technology to uncover secrets they sought to destroy.   Researchers at Berlin's prestigious Frauenhofer Institute are programming software that will piece together documents destroyed by East German secret police workers as the sun set on the communist era. Everyone knows that if you really want no-one to discover your secrets, the trick is to completely destroy all the evidence. But this concept appears to have been lost on the workers at East Germany's secret police agency, the Stasi, during the...

<p>To Harvard University, Greek billionaire Socrates Kokkalis is a generous donor, a visionary promoting democracy and free markets in Eastern and Central Europe.</p> <p>But in Greece, Kokkalis is being investigated for betraying his country to communist spies. The 64-year-old telecommunications magnate has been charged with funneling information to East Germany during the Cold War, and also faces charges of fraud, money-laundering, and embezzlement.</p>

DURING 40 years of Cold War, East Germany’s secret police opened up to 400 million items of mail using steam, chemicals, irons and ultrasonic baths. This is just one of the disclosures to emerge from a new exhibition chronicling the Stasi’s obsession with eavesdropping. A cousin in East Berlin of Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor, was one of 436 people employed to snoop on enemies real and imagined. Her remit was eavesdropping on British diplomats, military officials and businessmen. The tape machines she and her cohorts used are on display at An Open Secret: Postal and Telephone Surveillance in the...