For one group, at least, the erection of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961 was a stroke of luck. Over the following decades, the Wall would be the lifeblood of the East German secret police, known as the Stasi. By the time the Wall fell, in 1989, thousands of Stasi agents were employed with a single goal: to make the Wall insurmountable.
The film tells the story of this existentially symbiotic relationship from the perspective of the Stasi under its notorious leader Erich Mielke. It’s the first time this most sensitive chapter of East Germany's history has been told in such an exemplary and coherent way: including the deaths that took place at the Wall, and the cover-up and concealment of many of those murders.
We learn about the arrests and imprisonment of tens of thousands of refugees, as well as the Stasi’s elaborate construction of tunnels and underground listening stations to track down tunnel diggers. From the billion-dollar business of selling GDR prisoners to West Germany, to the "filtering" of Western traffic at border crossings to recruit unofficial collaborators, Mielke's specialists were everywhere.
We see how Mielke's power grew, as the Wall and the border system were perfected, and how the walling-in of the population created more and more work for the Stasi. The Wall became the Stasi’s main field of activity, and its daily bread.
The fall of the Wall brought an abrupt end to both East Germany and its security apparatus. An irony of history is that, on November 9, 1989, it was a Stasi man who opened the first barrier on Bornholmer Strasse and thus initiated the fall of the Berlin Wall.
I can't wait until we have a similar wall on the southern border. Eventually the guns will turn inward and none of us will be able to leave the 3rd-world hell hole that used to be a bastion of liberty...
ReplyDeleteThe guns have already turned inward.
DeleteMy Great Uncle lived in East Berlin. He specialized in smuggling people out, and TV's and radios in. He never got caught.
ReplyDeleteIs the Holocaust as history tells it? Patton suggests we were fighting the wrong enemy. I don't know, but now more than ever I have a lot of questions. We have a nation divided for face value anyway. What I once thought I knew is rapidly diminishing.
ReplyDeleteIf the Allied soldiers who fought and died in WW2 could have seen what has become of the nations they fought for, they would have crossed the front lines and fought with the Germans
Delete@snuffy April 11, 2023 at 7:44 AM
Delete"they would have crossed the front lines and fought with the Germans"
They was gut boyz. Jis tryin tuh gitinta college.
I have read half-way through this book.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.amazon.ca/Stasi-Untold-German-Secret-Police/dp/0813337445
It's both depressing and illuminating. People snitched on their neighbours and friends out of fear or because they believed it was the right thing to do because the government was always right.
Al_in_Ottawa
When the people you have sworn to protect want to leave, and you FORCE them under threat of death or imprisonment from leaving...you are evil. The great pride you see on the people who were in charge of the Berlin wall is the face of evil. The language was controlled and the facade of legitimacy was pushed. It was farce. The ONLY way to stop communism is to permanently stop communists. There is no negotiation that will achieve freedom.
ReplyDeleteI thought the democrats said walls don't work execpt for around their homes.
ReplyDeleteSTASI= FBI, NSA, TSA, IRS, and some I'm missing, but you get the drift.
ReplyDeletecheck out "The Theory and Practice of Hell" by Eugen Kogon about the German concentration camps (ie smart cities) and the system behind them. One might say its a treatise on mans inhumanity to man but there's more to it than that. or like the ol preacher said; umm umm, we do's has a time wit' it donts we?
ReplyDelete