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
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“In all history no class has been enfranchised without some selfish motive underlying. If to-day we could prove to Republicans or Democrats that every woman would vote for their party, we should be enfranchised.”
—Carrie Chapman Catt (1859–1947)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)