The Stasi and the Berlin Wall | DW Documentary

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"

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

The Stasi's behavior provides a solid example of what happens when you proceed logically and rationally from an insane premise

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 !

'The Lives of Others' is a great depiction of life in East Germany and how the Stasi went about their business.

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.

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."

I wonder if those ex-Stasi guys saw the irony in that they were able to speak freely and recount their nefarious deeds without fear of retribution, something they spent their careers denying their countrymen.

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.

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!!

I visited Berlin with my parents, in the 1960s. The Berlin Wall, which we only saw from the west side, was terrifying.

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.

DDR citizen: Dude, I think the Stasi is listening to us

A voice from the attic: No we aren't >:(

Those old Stasi dudes really drank the koolaid. Years later - they still view their perverse mission in a positive manner.

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.

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 !

My friend's uncle died at the wall trying to escape. What was it all for. A few politicians' egos and self-importance.

If you need to build a wall to keep your citizens from fleeing, then maybe you need to rethink your form of government.

I visited East Germany and both east and west Berlin in December 1978 for a week when I was twenty years old American traveler. I walked through the checkpoint Charlies freely until the East German security border guard with a submachine gun at the gate asked me for my passport and questioned me for visiting East Berlin. I was nervous and discomforted while I traveled in East Berlin. I was heavily surveillance in East Germany and a few guards and police asked me for my passport and questioned me again. I visited a cigarette-smoking pub for a drink - the Pepsi, and almost all East German patrons in the bar quickly stared at me, but they quickly ignored me when two undercovered police came into the pub. Several of them drank vodka and beer, and smoked cigarettes, and quietly talked to each other. They avoided contacting me. I walked and explored the city of East Berlin in the greying sky and it looked depressing until the end of the day. I walked back to West Berlin via Checkpoint Charlie and I felt relieved and I said "freedom." West Berlin was the oasis of freedom and capitalism. I took a train to West Germany from West Berlin via East Germany. East German guard on the train checked my passport twice. Security dogs walked through beneath the train and the corridor of the train on the East Germany border before proceeded to West Germany. After arrival in West Germany, the West German border guard smiled at me after he checked through my passport and he spoke English "Welcome!" There was a huge contrast between depressed joyless dark East Germany and vividly joy brighten West Germany on Christmas week. I never forget this unique era of Stasi rule in East Germany.

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.