When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Stasi surveillance officers began feverishly tearing up evidence of their work. The new authorities vowed to glue the papers back together again. Twenty years after the project began, a lot of information is still in tatters.
After around 20 years of meticulously piecing together shredded Stasi files, the team behind the greatest jigsaw puzzle in European history need to try a new approach.
The beginning of 2016 marks an end to the manual reconstruction of the files, Roland Jahn, former East German dissident and federal commissioner for the project, told dpa.
But the project is lagging, he admits. Grand plans of using computer technology to match up the shreds of people’s lives have yet to become a reality.
Up until recently, four employees of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) have been given the cheerless job of putting the torn-up files back together by hand in an office near Nuremberg.
Since 1995, 1.5m pages have been reconstructed in this way.
But now Germany has other priorities, and particularly BAMF, as the organisation grapples with a wave of migration that has stretched resources in overwhelmed states.
By the end of 2015, Germany will have received over 1m applications for asylum. Many of the people are entitled to stay as refugees fleeing war and persecution in Syria and elsewhere.
Now Jahn’s staff are being relieved of their job and instead sent to assist the authorities with registering these new arrivals.
This, Jahn said, is more important. “The federal office helped us back in the day with personnel, now we are helping them.”
But still, thousands of files remain in tatters. As communism collapsed in 1989, staff at the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi as it is more commonly known, tried to burn some documents and tore up others. Activists rescued 16,000 sacks of shredded paper and enough intact pages to fill an 11km-long shelf.
Work began to reconstruct the files in 1995 and 15,500 sacks remain untouched.
Since 2007, the Frauenhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology has been developing software that can piece together the puzzle electronically. The pilot project has already received €6.5m in funding.
“The software for this globally unique technology is functioning, but more work is needed on a suitably efficient scanner,” Jahn said.
Finishing the job would not only mean satisfaction for the experts who have spent years puzzling over the records. “The victims also want to know what the files say,” Jahn said. For him, the injustice of the Stasi controlling people’s lives long after the East German intelligence agency disbanded is unacceptable.
While the software is able to recognize torn edges, handwriting and types of paper, only humans can feed the shreds of paper into a traditional, typically slow scanner.
Nonetheless, around 45,000 pages, or the contents of 13 sacks, have already been scanned into the archives in this way.
But as the long, hard slog continues, the future of the project is uncertain. Jahn’s current contract, which runs out in March 2016, is yet to be extended by German lawmakers.
And a group of experts is to meet early next year to discuss the progress of this mammoth task.
