The Stasi In East Germany

The Stasi
The Stasi were the primary intelligence and security agency of East Germany also known as The German Democratic Republic (GDR) during the cold war. They had a large amount of informants, agents and military trained police. They focused on espionage and political security. In its 39 years at least 1/3 of the East German population came under Stasi surveillance, arrest, detention, or torture. The East German government, with the assistance of the Soviet intelligence community, established the Stasi on February 8, 1950 to maintain communist rule in East Germany. The soviets helped the East Germans by training the first agents, and then they let the stasi take over. The agency served the desires of the communist regime. They created
If any suspicious activity occurred or any anti government behavior occurred they would report it and the people who they caught would be under more surveillance or be arrested. The Stasi maintained their own network of prisons and detention camps where they held their prisoners; there they gained a reputation for their use of brutality, blackmail and torture to get the information and to get the prisoner to cooperate. The actual agent force was very large and comprehensive, they infiltrated schools, factories and political and social organizations to find any wrong doings, and they often created massive files on people that included pictures, information and even samples of their clothes. The agency was divided into several divisions each focusing on various security tasks. The Ministry for State Security maintained one armed force; the Feliks Dzierzynski Guard Regiment was named for the founder of the Bolshevik secret police. The force consisted of as many as 8,000 military-trained members. The FD guarded government and communist party personnel, government buildings, Soviet monuments, and military instillations. They also employed special commando and intelligence units to conduct clandestine
Schools, universities and hospitals also were under extensive surveillance. After 1950 the stasi executions were all secret. Most of them involved utilizing a guillotine and later a shot to the neck with a pistol. Before interrogating a suspect the agents had guidelines to follow on how to extract information from a suspect, they often asked about who the suspect contacted and what activities they did and they interrogated a suspect for a very long time until they confessed, they seemed to know whether or not the suspect was telling the truth and if they keep saying the same line over and over they were lying about what they know, however only about 7% of the suspects cooperated with the stasi and tactics such as blackmail were common in the interrogations. There were not many revolutions against the stasi because they would have been imprisoned and tortured for their beliefs and actions regarding illegal activity toward the government, however after the stasi lost power a protest was held in front of stasi headquarters to stop the destruction of the files that they kept on all of the people they had under surveillance. The stasi infiltrated almost every aspect