Stasi archive model for exorcising ghosts of old regimes
A dreary building in a rundown part of Berlin is proving a popular attraction for experts hoping to uncover the secrets of the world's dictators, military juntas and totalitarian regimes.
Once home to East Germany's feared Ministry for State Security, the complex in the city's Lichtenberg district now holds an extensive archive containing the files of the secret police, known as the Stasi.
Although set up to help Germans deal with the collapsed communist country's legacy of oppression, the archive has also become a model for several nations trying to sift through similarly troubled pasts.
'We've had visitors from Iraq and from as far away as Argentina and South Africa, not to mention our long-standing contacts with Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe,' said Christian Booss, the archive's spokesman.
'Germany has definitely set the standard of how to go about such things.'
But it is not just the millions of efficiently categorised and preserved documents that have so impressed experts tracing the paper trail left by Saddam Hussein's regime or Argentina's junta from the 1970s. Many also come to Berlin to study the archive's legal framework, which regulates access to the files and is widely regarded as having struck the right balance between transparency and privacy.
With one of the world's most extensive spy networks, the Stasi were notorious for their complete saturation of East German society. They had files on millions of citizens, including Andreas Hoppe, who fell foul of the secret police for distributing political fliers at school as a teenager.
'They had stuff on me running from 1975 to the last days of the regime in October 1989,' the 46-year-old mineral and gem merchant said. 'The detail was astounding and ridiculous. There was one entry about me leaving the house at 10.34am, supposedly with two plastic bags of western origin.'
The Stasi Records Act passed by the German Parliament in 1991 guarantees victims like Mr Hoppe a chance to see their files. If they wish, Germans can even find out the identities of those who spied on them or denounced them to the secret police. But to protect the privacy of others, including even former Stasi agents, access to their files is restricted.
It is a policy that has proven so effective that some countries like Slovakia have copied the German law nearly verbatim. Kanan Makiya, the founder of the US-based Iraq Memory Foundation, hopes any future government in Baghdad will follow suit.
'We're working on a set of guidelines based on it,' he said. 'We've come to Germany to learn how to handle the information.'
