The Stasi who continue to work for German state

Independent:

Berliners and the citizens of eastern Germany are struggling to digest the news that thousands of former members of the dreaded Stasi secret police were working as their local civil servants, police officers and teachers, almost 20 years after the Iron Curtain collapsed.

More than 17,000 staff currently employed by Berlin and eastern Germany's five federal states were estimated to have worked for the all-pervasive communist police organisation, according to evidence compiled by historians at Berlin's Free University.

Shocking cases came to light after the fall of the Berlin Wall, including a husband who spied on his dissident wife for years and a mother who informed the Stasi about her son after he reached puberty because she considered him a threat to the state.

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The Stasi was one of the biggest employers in the former East Germany. It had some 200,000 people working for the organisation full- and part-time and it is estimated that one in every 50 East Germans had Stasi connections. About half of the Stasi's employees were civilians who worked as informants. But the information they gleaned from spying on neighbours, friends and colleagues was used to imprison people, strip them of privileges and ruin careers.

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The Stasi were essential to the odious apparatus of communist rule in East Germany. The government obviously thought the people would rise up against them if they were not controlled through this kind of operation. It tells you something about communism, that an organization like the Stasi was needed for communism to survive.