The Stasi and the Berlin Wall | DW Documentary
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Published 2021-08-11
The film tells the story of this existentially symbiotic relationship from the perspective of the Stasi under its notorious leader Erich Mielke. It’s the first time this most sensitive chapter of East Germany's history has been told in such an exemplary and coherent way: including the deaths that took place at the Wall, and the cover-up and concealment of many of those murders.
We learn about the arrests and imprisonment of tens of thousands of refugees, as well as the Stasi’s elaborate construction of tunnels and underground listening stations to track down tunnel diggers. From the billion-dollar business of selling GDR prisoners to West Germany, to the "filtering" of Western traffic at border crossings to recruit unofficial collaborators, Mielke's specialists were everywhere.
We see how Mielke's power grew, as the Wall and the border system were perfected, and how the walling-in of the population created more and more work for the Stasi. The Wall became the Stasi’s main field of activity, and its daily bread.
The fall of the Wall brought an abrupt end to both East Germany and its security apparatus. An irony of history is that, on November 9, 1989, it was a Stasi man who opened the first barrier on Bornholmer Strasse and thus initiated the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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All Comments (21)
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I visited Berlin in 1994 and our tour guide told us this joke - "many ex Stasi agents are now taxi drivers. This is good, because all you have to do is to tell them your name and they already know where you live"
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This is chilling. Not one word of remorse or regret from the ex-Stasi officers for the horrors they inflicted on people. News flash....when people are fleeing your country in droves, something's seriously wrong.
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An old friend of ours was a Stasi border soldier when he was young. He told us when he saw someone attempting escape, he and some of his fellow soldiers would look the other way on purpose. The night when the wall came down, he burned his East German uniform and helped cut and clear barbed wire
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The Stasi's behavior provides a solid example of what happens when you proceed logically and rationally from an insane premise
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'The Lives of Others' is a great depiction of life in East Germany and how the Stasi went about their business.
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If you need to build a wall to keep your citizens from fleeing, then maybe you need to rethink your form of government.
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What I find fascinating is that this happened just a few years after WWII. All of the adults could remember the nazi era. And certainly everyone was told how bad that era was. But they couldn't comprehend that they were doing the same thing for a different master.
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As a college student, I crossed into East Berlin in August of 1971. It was mandatory to exchange 5 West German marks into East German currency. After spending the day in East Berlin ..visiting museums..seeing sites...I had dinner in a restaurant and when I crossed back into West Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie...I still had 2 East German marks left !
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The Stasi HQ in Berlin has become a museum and can be visited, it still looks as when they left it, back in 1990. You see some of the offices in this video.
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I,m 75 years old, I still remember this like it were yesterday,Vopos shooting escaping teenage kids! I never expected to see it's demise!!
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At his sentencing, Mielke started to cry. In pronouncing sentence, Judge Theodor Seidel, told Mielke that he "will go down in history as one of the most fearsome dictators and police ministers of the 20th century."
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I'm a former Cold Warrior in the US, so believe me when I tell you that I never, ever thought I would go through the Brandenburg Gate. But I did in the mid 1990s and it was wonderful.
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Those old Stasi dudes really drank the koolaid. Years later - they still view their perverse mission in a positive manner.
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My friend's uncle died at the wall trying to escape. What was it all for. A few politicians' egos and self-importance.
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I visited Berlin with my parents, in the 1960s. The Berlin Wall, which we only saw from the west side, was terrifying.
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The best escape, I liked, were the 2 Czech guys in the 70s who used wooden chairs and climbed up the high tension power lines, hanging the chairs with rubber belts, and then pulled themselves across to Austria. Now that took balls !
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DDR citizen: Dude, I think the Stasi is listening to us A voice from the attic: No we aren't >:(
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I always call the people checking my receipt at Costco the Stazi. After watching this documentary, I can confirm that I am an idiot.
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I's horrifying what Soviet union had done, nearly 40 years of unending horrors in Germany. I've visited the Stasi prison in Berlin in December and went to see the underground tunnels. Our tour guide was a former Stasi prisoner. What amazed me was the advanced level of technology used in security and torment. If only that engineering acumen had been used for peaceful and constructive purposes.... So glad that the Wall had fallen and the reign of terror had ended.
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As a military brat who lived in West Germany, many of us took trips to the border of West Germany and East Germany. We saw the the walls, the machine gun towers, the areas where land mines were. The only thing that we could see from West Germany was how "black and white" it looked. There were colors, flowers and birds singing on the West German side, but dark, depressive sense you felt. We'd wonder how East German kids were being treated. Years later I returned, this time as a service member. I was there when the Berlin Wall opened and never closed again. There were so many people crying that you definitely felt it yourself, seeing so many families being reunited after years, decades of separation. Unfortunately the South Korean people will never see there kin on the North Korean side. One side has freedom whereas the other has been under 3 different Dictatorships of the same family. The only way for the Koreans to be reunited is for Communist China to end, just as the Soviet Union did to allow Germany to be reunited.
