| Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives | |
|---|---|
| Agency overview | |
| Formed | 3 October 1990 |
| Jurisdiction | Government of Germany |
| Headquarters | Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 31/33 Berlin-Mitte, Germany |
| Employees | 1 687 |
| Agency executive | Roland Jahn, Federal Commissioner |
| Website | |
| http://www.bstu.bund.de | |
The Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives is an upper-level federal agency of Germany that preserves and protects the archives and investigates the past crimes of the former Stasi, the secret police and intelligence organization of the communist German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Since March 2011, Roland Jahn has been head of the agency. He succeeded Marianne Birthler as federal commissioner.
The agency is subordinate to the Representative of the Federal Government for Culture (Bernd Neumann, CDU). As of 2010, it has 1 687 employees.
The agency is a founding member organisation of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience.[1]
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The agency is formally called the Office of the Federal Commissioner Preserving the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic (German: Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, usually referred to as the Bundesbeauftragte für die Stasi-Unterlagen and abbreviated BStU).
In German, the office is informally often referred to as the Gauck office (German: Gauck-Behörde), Birthler office (German: Birthler-Behörde) or Jahn office (German: Jahn-Behörde) after the first, second and third federal commissioners respectively.
During the regime's final days, Stasi officials shredded documents with paper shredders and by hand. As people heard of this, they quickly formed committees of citizens and occupied local Stasi-Branches, the first on December 4, 1989 in the east-German town of Erfurt. In a public demonstration they finally gained access to the Stasi headquarters on January 15, 1990 and halted the destruction.
With the German Reunification on October 3, 1990 a new government agency was founded to preserve the archives of the Stasi, named Special Representative for the Stasi-Records, later the BStU.[2]
In 1992, following a declassification ruling by the German government, the Stasi records were opened to public access, leading people to look for their files. Timothy Garton Ash, an English historian, wrote The File: A Personal History after reading the file compiled about him while he completed his dissertation research in East Berlin.
In 1995, the BStU began reassembling also the shredded documents; since then the archivists commissioned to the projects had reassembled 400 bags; they are developing now a System for computer-assisted data recovery to reassemble the remaining 15,000 bags — estimated at 33 million pages.[3][4]
The CIA acquired some Stasi records concerning the espionage of the Stasi. The Federal Republic of Germany has asked for their return and received some in April 2000.[5] Since the year 2003 the data of the so called Rosenholz files is a part of the Stasi Records of the BStU.[6]
At its zenith, the Stasi had records on some 6 million people. It also had an archive of sweat and body odor samples.
Controversy erupted after an investigation, whose report had been leaked to the media, found out that the BStU at one point employed at least 79 former Stasi members and still employed 52 as of 2009. The great majority of these were hired from the "bodyguards" branch of the Stasi; some were former archivists and some were just technicians. There was suspicion that some of these former Stasi officers managed to manipulate records, so nowadays no former Stasi officers are allowed to enter the Stasi Archives by themselves. The report recommended, for several reasons besides the issue of former Stasi officers working for the BStU, to integrate the BStU into the German Federal Archives. It also reported there was a constitutionally questionable situation.[7] In summer 2008, the German Parliament decided to found an expert commission to analyze the role and future of the BStU.