Technology helps piece together files from an unsavoury past

By LOUISE MATTHEWS Herald correspondent

BERLIN - Technology is coming to the rescue of workers trying to piece thousands of torn files from the former East German secret police agency, the Stasi.

For eight years, staff in Zierndorf, a former West German centre in Bavaria, have had the unenviable job of trying to reconstruct 16,000 brown paper sacks of torn files.

The files, from the Stasi's Magdeburg office, were ripped up during the dying days of the communist regime under orders from Stasi chief Erich Mielke.

But shredding machines had broken down under their workload, so Mielke's staff dealt with these files in a typically German fashion. They were methodically torn into neat quarters and packed away.

To reconstruct them, the workers must lay out all the torn pieces in a huge hall, number them and walk around trying to match them up.

The centre has put together 300 sacks of documents but at the current rate it would take another 450 years to complete the job.

Now researchers at Berlin's Fraunhofer Institute have almost finished developing computer software which will identify and match each piece through the unique fingerprint of the torn paper edges.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, most of the communist regime's archives were rescued intact, leading to many successful prosecutions.

But the torn Stasi files contain valuable information, says Dr Jochen Staadt, of the Berlin Free University.

They include details of espionage activities in the West as well as of the day to day lives of ordinary citizens.

"Among other things, they reveal that the former East Germans - academics, journalists and others - who were thought to oppose the regime but were allowed to travel to the West for conferences and so on and were all the time working for the Stasi," said Staadt who is leading a project studying Stasi control and infiltration of western and eastern news media.

"These people were looked after by their Western hosts, who often took them into their own homes because they felt sorry for them, and the files are revealing how efficiently they reported back about everything, from the house right down to people's personal problems and vulnerabilities - basically a lot of personal gossip."

"It is unlikely the information will result in any more prosecutions, due to the time lapse, but it has immense public and historic importance.

"Reputations will be damaged and it has implications for people who are holding important positions in academia and society."

The primitive hand method of file reconstruction has already exposed a number of people, most notably Sascha Anderson, who in the 1980s was considered a radical young East German writer.

He "fled" to the West in 1987, two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and was welcomed by West German literary society.

After personal files were opened, he was accused by at least one artist of being in the pay of the Stasi, but continued to deny this until one incriminating torn Stasi file was pieced together.

The Stasi legacy continues to haunt the re-unified Germany which was shocked to discover how efficiently its agents had infiltrated the West German Government and other organisations such as Nato.

Marriages were wrecked as husbands or wives discovered their partners had "reported" on them to the communist regime.

People will have to wait for the remaining 15,700 sacks to give up their secrets.

Even with the new computer programme, says Staadt, it will take about two years to put all the pieces back together.