Microdot: "Stasiland"

[00:00:09] Speaker A: Welcome to Spy Fi, guys, where we cover spy facts, spy fiction, and everything in between. I'm Christian. [00:00:14] Speaker B: And I'm Zach. [00:00:15] Speaker A: And today we have another microdot. What do we have, Zach? [00:00:19] Speaker B: Yes, that's right. So, continuing off from the lives of others, which we covered recently, I wanted to share some more information from the book stasi Land Stories from behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder. Okay, if you haven't listened to the beginning of it, which is under our spy Fact versus Fiction after the Lives of Others, I recommend you check it out, because we're going to pick right back up with Miriam, who, you may remember. She was an East Berlin resident who attempted to escape over the Berlin Wall, was intercepted by a dog that failed to do his job. [00:00:51] Speaker A: That's right. [00:00:52] Speaker B: But didn't quite make it. So a few years later, in 1979, miriam's sister and her husband tried to escape to West Germany by hiding in a car, kind of like we have seen at the Spine Museum, concealed inside of it. But the Stasi followed their every move. The couple received prison terms, and Charlie, her husband, was placed on a type of probation after that. So what had happened was they had put in applications to leave the GDR or the German Democratic Republic, which may sound silly, considering people literally risk their lives to go over the wall. But Anna says applications were sometimes granted because, unlike any other Eastern European country, the GDR could get rid of now contents troublemakers people who just caused too many problems just by ditching them in West Germany, where they were automatically granted citizenship. [00:01:44] Speaker A: There you go. [00:01:45] Speaker B: But the problem is, they didn't just happen all the time. The Stasi put applicants under extreme scrutiny, and it is legal to put an application to leave. But if they chose to, they could call it it's a headstrift, a smear, or a shock from a script, a libel, and therefore a criminal offense, and you could go to prison. Okay, so, Walt, Charlie was in prison. Miriam was called because she was told, quote, well, you need to report to the District Attorney's office and collect your husband's things, because he is dead. The person told her that was gone before Miriam could even say anything. Now, in order to get justice for Charlie, which, to be honest, I'm kind of surprised she even attempted that. She went to see Charlie's lawyer, her ex, who was the Lipsig representative of Dr. Wolfgang Vogel in Berlin. Do you remember Dr. Wolfgang Vogel? [00:02:33] Speaker A: The name refresh my memory. [00:02:36] Speaker B: Yeah. He was involved in the bridge of. [00:02:39] Speaker A: Ah, there it is. Okay. [00:02:41] Speaker B: He was the guy who drove too fast and scared. [00:02:44] Speaker A: That's right. [00:02:45] Speaker B: Yep, yep. So one way of getting onto Vogel's list to escape was to become a client of one of his representatives. But by the time Miriam went to see that representative called X, he had already been working Trelly's case for eight weeks and she wanted to know what X had found. And X said, I could see that there were head injuries. See his neck? They'd forgotten to cover it up. There were no Strangulation marks, nothing. X said, you'd think they would make sure to cover his neck if they want to stick with the story that he hanged himself. So they tried to claim that it was a suicide, but she didn't believe it. She went down to the offices, an official took her ID paper and then she was told to come back to Collector Travel Authority. You were on a train tonight, he said. So she didn't escape. She was deported. Exactly for what? The reasons we said before. She said the deportation came eleven years too late and six months too early because otherwise she could have maybe found out more about what happened to her husband. So we talked a little bit about in the movie that once the Berlin Wall fell and Berlin and Germany reintegrated the two sides would have to learn to live with each other. So they did interview some former Stasi people and one guy said, quote, you must understand that it's very hard for some of us now to get jobs in this new Germany. We are discriminated against and ripped off blind from 1 minute to another in this capitalist mess. But we learn fast. So I must ask you, how much are you prepared to pay for my so I guess it depends on how much sympathy you have for former Stasi people that they didn't understand the new world they were into. After the Wall fell, the German media called East Germany, quote, the most perfected surveillance state of all time. So this is more of the statistics that the movie talked about in the beginning. So it says at the end they had 97,000 employees, which was more than enough to oversee a country of 17 million people. So I guess I was wrong when I said, like, one in three people. Yeah, because they had 173 informers among the population. So I was wrong when I said it was like one in three people was an informer. This isn't even close to that many. [00:04:53] Speaker A: 173,000? [00:04:56] Speaker B: Yes. [00:04:56] Speaker A: Okay. [00:04:57] Speaker B: Out of 17 million. Right. In contrast, in Hitler's Third Reich there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens. And in Stalin's USSR, there was one KGB agent for every about 6000 people. But in GDR, there was one Stasi informant for every 63 people. It was much more higher. And if part time informers are included, some estimates had the ratio as high as one for every 6.5 citizens. Documents found out to the Wall fell reveal meticulous plans current throughout the 1980s for the surveillance, arrest and incarceration of 85,939 East Germans listed by Nam. But in addition to that, it is widely suspected that after the Wall fell, the former Sassy members would harass people who they fear may uncover them if that makes sense. Well, it's kind of like former Nazis where they were worried about being found out. So, for example, a former border guard who appeared on a television talk show was threatened with an acid attack and had to be placed under police protection. Home delivered harassment was popular. One man had a ticking package delivered to his doorstep. Wives had had to sign for porn not ordered by their so that's more like a low level revenge. But the strangest incident that Anna had heard of was when the man was delivered a truckload of puppies to his door and the driver demanding a signature. Okay, this is very cute, but he can't keep them. Car brake leads have been cut. Accidents and deaths reverse engineered. The child of an outspoken writer is picked up from school by a person or persons unknown taken to drink hot chocolate just for an hour or so. Detaining people clearly had its own pleasures, Anna says a habit hard to break. So that was interesting. Here's a little bit of spy gadgetry for you. Christian Vistase had used radiation to mark people and objects they wanted to track. It developed a range of radioactive tags, including radiated pins it could put onto a person or put into tires with radioactive pellets. And then it had hand pump sprays that they could approach people into crowd, spray them with radiation and then just track them home by following their radiated so now she interviews a variety of people, some from the Stasi, some like Miriam, who are victims. So one of them is named Hare. Christian. Okay, very amusing. Right, because your name is also Christian. So he worked in something called the Coding Villa where he encoded transcripts of telephone conversations intercepted from car phones and walkie talkies in the west. He said, we'd encode every last thing that was said, including Ja, guten Tag and what they had for lunch. Kind of like in the movie, right? In Berlin. They had to know everything. Mind you, we did catch a lot of Western politicians talking among themselves, too. My supervisor said, quote, anyone can have an affair, but everything must be reported. Okay, so here's a story about a guy named Cox. K-C-H. Is that coch or cock? [00:07:52] Speaker A: Not sure. [00:07:53] Speaker B: I think it might be cock. No, we'll say Koch. Okay. So Cotch, when Anna went to interview him, he had an award for cultural work by his unit. Third place. It's shown like gold, was made of plastic covered in paint. And he took it off from his hooks, showed it to her and he said, my little private revenge. That plate was all I had the courage for. So basically, he took it out of his office. Three weeks later, there was a knock at his apartment door. The head of his old Stasi section stood in the passageway. He was still being collegial. The plate is gone. What? You heard me, comrade. The plate is gone. The commandant wants the plate back. What do you know? Koch said to him. And then he's like, as soon as I'm gone, the whole place fell apart. And then his boss says, Come on, Koch, it can't have just disappeared. At the Ministry for State Security. Nothing just disappears. But Koch refused to give in. So the commandant established this is very German, by the way, which is why I share the story. The commandant established a working group on plate reprocurement. So Koch was summoned back to headquarters for an interview, gave a statement. He hid it in his kitchen. A short time later he said they brought in the big guns. The District Attorney came by asking about the plate and he wanted to sworn affidavit to the effect that Koch didn't know about it. So nothing further happened. 1989 came, the wall came down and Koch started to build up his archive. He retrieved the plate from behind and pinned up his study. And now it was a real trophy. Koch says to Anna, that plate stays there. The interviewer knew when not to push the issue. But that's not the end of the story, unfortunately, because after the wall came down more men showed up his door and said, her Koch, we've come for the plate, said one of what? He said, this is reunified Germany. And they said, pursuant to the treaty of Unification between the Federal Republic of Germany and the former German Democratic Republic, all property belonging to the latter is now vested in the former. So it's the property of Germany, not yours. So it came in the mail. Criminal proceedings were issued against him. The indictment charged him with theft of GDR property. Still, Koch did nothing. And then eventually there was a lock at his door. It was the same man again and he said, excuse us, Her Koch, I am pleased to inform you that the allegation of theft has been withdrawn. Okay, but that's not the end of the story either because the officer said new proceedings have been issued against you for perjury. So Koch said, get out of here. And the official put his foot in the door. I'm afraid it is alleged on 14 June 1985. So before the Wall came down, you sworn an affidavit that you did not know the whereabouts of the plate in question. That's offense against the law then enforced in the GDR and we still need to prosecute it. So he didn't go to prison. At the end of the day, the allegations did do a bit of damage. His wife lost his job, the rumors were pretty bad and they took on a life of their own. Cottage is a thief and a liar but he says, you know, though it was worth it, all the courage I had is in that plate, the whole shitty little scarect of it. That's all I had. And that plate stays there. So that was pretty absurd. Just a couple more things. [00:11:03] Speaker A: Sure. [00:11:04] Speaker B: A couple more statistics. 65% of church leaders were informers for the Stasi, and the rest were under surveillance. Anyhow, according to Anna, not one of the torturers at Hawkins Shanhausen has been brought to justice. So Han Shanhausen is the stasi prison that we saw. So Division X, also known as the Stasi, fed coups to Western journalists about the Nazi pass of West German politicians, and several major figures were brought down this way. Did you know about that? [00:11:31] Speaker A: No. [00:11:31] Speaker B: I think we might have talked about it before. Bridge of Spies. [00:11:34] Speaker A: Okay. [00:11:34] Speaker B: I think it's fairly common knowledge that after the war, west German politicians, all of them, like, were former Nazis. Just because you needed people to run the country, you didn't want to pull an Iraq war where you just throw everybody out. [00:11:46] Speaker A: Right. [00:11:46] Speaker B: But the Germans were able to take advantage of that. So, for example, in 1972, the social democratic head of the West German government, Willie Brandt, who I actually heard of him but didn't know much about him. He visited no confidence vote in Parliament. Division X bribed one and possibly two backbenchers for their votes in order to keep him in power. Colonel Rolf Wagenbref, the head of Division X, described the work simply as, quote, an attempt to turn the wheels of history. He said, in my section, we had all these journalists, we used them to start scandals or break open political cover ups. We funded them. We fed them scoops. So one last thing for the post war going back to Miriam and Charlie again. Miriam was asked to make a program on Ostalgi parties, parties in Germany that are kind of like speakeasies. You show an East German ID, you get in for free. Everyone calls one another comrade. And the beer is only Deutsche Mark 130, which I guess is cheap. If a Deutsche mark is equivalent to a dollar, it's pretty cheap. I'll give mirror in the last word. She says things like this feed into a crazy nostalgia for the GDR, as if it had been a harmless welfare state that looked after people's needs. Most of the people at these parties are too young to remember the GDR anyway. They are just looking for something to yearn for. [00:13:00] Speaker A: Interesting stuff. [00:13:02] Speaker B: I thought that was relevant in this day and age. [00:13:04] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:13:05] Speaker B: I don't know if we talked about this before, but I read an article once about how people have nostalgia for hard times. [00:13:12] Speaker A: Okay. [00:13:13] Speaker B: So, like, World War II obviously is one of the worst periods in human history. But you talk to people from people in the UK. Even people in Germany, you ask them later, they're like, I kind of missed the war because everyone was pulling you know, we didn't fight among each didn't we were all on the same side. That kind of reminded me of COVID Interesting. I don't miss COVID. [00:13:35] Speaker A: No. [00:13:36] Speaker B: But there was a little bit of. [00:13:39] Speaker A: Mm hmm. [00:13:40] Speaker B: Anyway, so that is Stories from Stasi Land by Anna Thunder. The book is really good, highly recommend. It's very readable and it scratched the edge of what I was looking for about life in a surveillance state. [00:13:52] Speaker A: Nice. Well, thank you for that, Zach. And thank you all for joining us. You can find us on social media at the Spy Fi Guys on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, as well as our merch [email protected]. Until next time. I'm Christian. [00:14:06] Speaker B: And I'm Zach. [00:14:07] Speaker A: And we are the spy fi guys signing off. [00:14:15] Speaker C: Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed our podcast, please be sure to rate and review us on itunes. The theme music is by Jerry Fitzgerald and Big Man Joe. Media reviewed by our podcast are the intellectual property of their respective copyright holders and no infringement is intended. [00:14:29] Speaker D: This is a personal podcast. Any views, statements or opinions expressed in this podcast are personal and belong solely to the participants. They do not represent those of people, institutions or organizations that the participants may or may not be associated with in a professional or personal capacity unless explicitly stated. Any views or opinions are not intended to malign any religion, ethnic, group, club, organization, company or individual. [00:14:54] Speaker C: You can find our podcast on social media at the Spotify Guys on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. It's.