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."

Shred and Destroy

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.

Guarded for Future Study

When angry East German protestors stormed the Stasi buildings shortly after the Berlin Wall came down, they managed to rescue some 16,000 brown bags of shredded Stasi files. They guarded them and called for the West German authorities to take over.

Over the past 10 years, teams of workers in Nuremberg have been hired to undertake the painstaking task of reconstructing the shredded papers by hand. They've managed to put together the contents of 323 bags, with some of the completed documents offering a wide range of unknown details about the communist regime.

Said Bormann: "We had some insights into the work of the secret police that surprised us. It was, just to give an example, the first time we ever learned of the existence of a military wing within the East German Communist Party."

The idea to reconstruct those shredded files is truly exciting. I'm very enthusiastic that the government has managed to put up the money for this pilot project."

The Pilot Project

Over the next two years, some 400 bags filled with shreds, will be reconstructed using a new software program developed by the Fraunhofer Institute of Production Facilities and Construction Technology in Berlin. The fragments will be scanned and digitally stored in a computer, which will compare them for shape, coloring, the pattern of their surfaces, the font size, which will make it possible to narrow down the possible matches quite quickly.

Bertram Nickolay, head of the department of security technology at the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin, announced the beginning of the pilot project at a press conference in Berlin Wednesday: "The task to automatically reconstruct 16,000 bags full of torn documents using a technical system is unique worldwide and presents an enormous technological challenge," he said.

Virtual puzzling, he continued, follows the logic of manual puzzling; to solve a puzzle is a test in patience. "There are a lot of features in relation to which a person decides whether two pieces fit or not and the virtual puzzle process starts in the same way."

"If the pilot project goes well," Bormann said, "there is a realistic chance that the government will finance the reconstruction of all the 16.000 bags full of shredded files providing an archival treasure trove of a difficult part of German history."