Before the reunification of East and West Germany, in the years between 1950 and 1990, about one-third of the East German population were routinely monitored, arrested, detained and tortured by the East German secret police [Stasi] in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR).
The Stasi was responsible for domestic and foreign surveillance and espionage, working through more than 200,000 informers. Children were pitted against parents, family members against each other and friends against friends. During the process of German reunification, the Stasi was disbanded.
In 1991, the German government passed the Stasi Records Law, which enabled East and West Germans as well as foreigners who had been subjected to Stasi surveillance to view the files left behind by Stasi personnel. They could also verify the names of agents and informers who had spied on them.
The sensational findings – the so-called “Shoot to Kill” documents from the Stasi archives, were obtained by the Federal Commission for the Records of the State Security Services of the former GDR on October 1, 1973, when the documentation process was already ten years old (see the Birthler Office2).
Former veteran Stasi cadres, during heated discussions, denied the existence of the “Shoot to Kill” documents, as did Egon Krenz, the final head of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, post-communism attorneys and Lothar Bisky, leader of the PDS/Let Party (also formerly known as the Party of Democratic Socialism), which was a leftist-oriented party.
They claimed that from 1961 to the fall of the Berlin Wall no “Shoot to Kill” GDR mandate for border patrol guards existed at the border that divided the two Germanys.
