History
During the regime's final days, Stasi officials shredded documents with paper shredders and by hand. As people heard of this, they quickly formed citizen's committees (Bürgerkomittee) 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.
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 the shredded documents as well; since then the archivists commissioned to the projects had reassembled 400 bags; they are now developing a system for computer-assisted data recovery to reassemble the remaining 15,000 bags — estimated at 33 million pages.
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. Since the year 2003 the data of the so-called Rosenholz files is a part of the Stasi Records of the BStU.
At its zenith, the Stasi had records on some 6 million people. It also had an archive of sweat and body odor samples.
Read more about this topic: Federal Commissioner For The Stasi Archives
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