German Government to Spend Millions Piecing Together Spy Past

PASSAU, Germany, May 9, 2007 — -- After several years of uncertainty, the German government has decided to spend some 6.3 million euros on a new pilot project that will put together the most complex jigsaw puzzle in the world.

The government is fitting together about 600 million shreds of secret files left behind by the Stasi, communist East German's secret police.

Guenter Bormann, chief of staff at the government agency in charge of analyzing the Stasi files, told ABCNEWS.com, "Initial findings have shown us that the files deal with important matters."

Former East Germany's Ministry for State Security, known as the Stasi, was the most comprehensive internal security operation of the Cold War.

The Stasi used a widespread network of informants to spy on the country's 16 million people, and secret files were kept on up to 6 million East German citizens, almost one-third of the entire population.

The agency monitored all phone calls from the West, censored the mail; barely any organization in East Germany escaped infiltration.

Many East Germans were persuaded or forced to spy on their own spouses, relatives and friends. Torture was an accepted method of gaining information from potential subversives, and the agency was authorized to keep tens of thousands of secret files on anyone it judged to be a threat.

In the last days of communist East Germany, and the chaos leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fall of communism in the Soviet Union and the 1990 reunification of the two Germanys, the agency's workers were ordered to destroy as many of those secret police files as they could.

Shredders were put to work around the clock, and many, many sensitive documents were ripped into confetti-size pieces to destroy all evidence of the decades of the agency's spying on its own people.

But, as there was too much material for the agents to cope with and not nearly enough shredders available, thousands of documents were just neatly ripped into quarters and packed into some 16,000 brown bags.

After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Stasi agents at the local archive in Magdeburg were ordered by their chief officer, Erich Mielke, to collect and burn those bags containing thousands of ripped-up files. But the agents couldn't find enough trucks to take away the shredded Stasi documents, so the bags were stored in the Stasi cellars and warehouses.