23/01: News from the Dark Days
Category: America and the World
Posted by: an okie gardener
For those of you committed to the idea of complete moral relativism, that every culture and society is equally valid, and that no one culture or person has a priviliged position from which to criticize another, please read this article on the reconstruction of the records of the Stasi, the East German secret police. Then answer this question: if no society is superior to any other society, would you be happy living in pre-fall East Germany?
Most of the records were recovered intact by German citizens after the fall of the communist regime. But, during the final chaotic months, the secret police managed to shred about 5% of the records; and when the shredder motors burned out, they ripped files up by hand. Given Teutonic order and logic, one can assume that this 5% chosen for destruction first may be especially damning. Today the hand-ripped files are being pieced together, and now computer software has been developed to aid the recovery.
But some of it wasn't. And some of it ... Poppe doesn't know. No one does. Because before it was disbanded, the Stasi shredded or ripped up about 5 percent of its files. That might not sound like much, but the agency had generated perhaps more paper than any other bureaucracy in history — possibly a billion pages of surveillance records, informant accounting, reports on espionage, analyses of foreign press, personnel records, and useless minutiae. There's a record for every time anyone drove across the border.
In the chaos of the days leading up to the actual destruction of the wall and the fall of East Germany's communist government, frantic Stasi agents sent trucks full of documents to the Papierwolfs and Reisswolfs — literally "paper-wolves" and "rip-wolves," German for shredders. As pressure mounted, agents turned to office shredders, and when the motors burned out, they started tearing pages by hand — 45 million of them, ripped into approximately 600 million scraps of paper
. . .
As the enforcement arm of the German Democratic Republic's Communist Party, the Stasi at its height in 1989 employed 91,000 people to watch a country of 16.4 million. A sprawling bureaucracy almost three times the size of Hitler's Gestapo was spying on a population a quarter that of Nazi Germany.
Part of an Evil Empire indeed.
Link from Instapundit.
Most of the records were recovered intact by German citizens after the fall of the communist regime. But, during the final chaotic months, the secret police managed to shred about 5% of the records; and when the shredder motors burned out, they ripped files up by hand. Given Teutonic order and logic, one can assume that this 5% chosen for destruction first may be especially damning. Today the hand-ripped files are being pieced together, and now computer software has been developed to aid the recovery.
But some of it wasn't. And some of it ... Poppe doesn't know. No one does. Because before it was disbanded, the Stasi shredded or ripped up about 5 percent of its files. That might not sound like much, but the agency had generated perhaps more paper than any other bureaucracy in history — possibly a billion pages of surveillance records, informant accounting, reports on espionage, analyses of foreign press, personnel records, and useless minutiae. There's a record for every time anyone drove across the border.
In the chaos of the days leading up to the actual destruction of the wall and the fall of East Germany's communist government, frantic Stasi agents sent trucks full of documents to the Papierwolfs and Reisswolfs — literally "paper-wolves" and "rip-wolves," German for shredders. As pressure mounted, agents turned to office shredders, and when the motors burned out, they started tearing pages by hand — 45 million of them, ripped into approximately 600 million scraps of paper
. . .
As the enforcement arm of the German Democratic Republic's Communist Party, the Stasi at its height in 1989 employed 91,000 people to watch a country of 16.4 million. A sprawling bureaucracy almost three times the size of Hitler's Gestapo was spying on a population a quarter that of Nazi Germany.
Part of an Evil Empire indeed.
Link from Instapundit.
