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In this gripping narrative, John Koehler details the widespread activities of East Germany’s Ministry for State Security, or “Stasi.” The Stasi, which infiltrated every walk of East German life, suppressed political opposition, and caused the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of citizens, proved to be one of the most powerful secret police and espionage services in the world. Koehler methodically reviews the Stasi’s activities within East Germany and overseas, including its programs for internal repression, international espionage, terrorism and terrorist training, art theft, and special operations in Latin America and Africa.Koehler was both Berlin bureau chief of the Associated Press during the height of the Cold War and a U.S. Army Intelligence officer. His insider’s account is based on primary sources, such as U.S. intelligence files, Stasi documents made available only to the author, and extensive interviews with victims of political oppression, former Stasi officers, and West German government officials. Drawing from these sources, Koehler recounts tales that rival the most outlandish Hollywood spy thriller and, at the same time, offers the definitive contribution to our understanding of this still largely unwritten aspect of the history of the Cold War and modern Germany.
- Sales Rank: #370875 in Books
- Brand: Koehler, John O.
- Published on: 2000-08-17
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.20" w x 6.00" l, 1.46 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 478 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Amazon.com Review
As human rights activist Rainer Hildebrandt observed in 1948, communist East Germany resembled nothing so much as a vast "concentration camp in which only the warders and those who hand out the food can still live well." Those warders were known collectively as the Ministerium für Statessicherheit, or Stasi. As John Koehler suggests in the impressively detailed Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police, their history is the history of totalitarian East Germany. Including informants, the Stasi at one point would number one operative for every 66 East German citizens; so ruthless and efficient were they in their efforts to squelch dissent that even the KGB found itself occasionally appalled by the Stasi's methods.
Right up to its 1990 demise, the Stasi cast a huge net of spies and agents around Europe and the rest of the world, enlisting as many as 30,000 West Germans as secret operatives, and involving more than a few American intelligence personnel in traitorous dalliances that would badly damage NATO defense capabilities during the Cold War. Koehler, a longtime foreign correspondent with Associated Press and onetime aide to president Ronald Reagan, based much of his research on the vast archive of secret Stasi documents discovered after the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent unification of Germany. Although this book is only the tip of the iceberg, he has provided a fascinating look into the inner workings of one of the most dangerous, but least known, organizations of the 20th century. --Tjames Madison
(After the collapse of the Berlin Wall and unification of Germany, journalist Timothy Garton Ash gained access to his Stasi file and began interviewing the people who contributed to it. The results of his investigation are found in the compelling The File.)
From Publishers Weekly
A former U.S. Army intelligence officer and an AP correspondent for 28 years (including a stint as Berlin bureau chief), Koehler does much to illuminate the workings of the Stasi, the much feared East German secret police. To illustrate the Stasi's formidable reach, he cites some astounding numbers provided by famed Nazi hunter Simon Weisenthal: while Hitler's Gestapo policed 80 million Germans with a force of 40,000, the Stasi kept 17 million people in line with 102,000 officials, a number that doesn't even include the legion of casual informers that made the notion of privacy in East Germany something of a cruel joke. Following a swaggering yet hair-raising account of his own meeting with Stasi chief Erich Mielke in 1965, Koehler delves into many incidents that show how the Stasi frequently operated beyond the borders of East Germany and, with connections to the KGB, conducted espionage operations against the West and colluded with terrorist organizations. Reading in part like an insider's jargon-filled report, this thorough and engrossing work is replete with such heavy-handed Communist spy tactics as sexual blackmail, but it also contains fresh tidbits?such as the case of the "Delicatessen Spy," who hid espionage paraphernalia beneath her dead son's ashes in a cremation urn. Photos.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
An AP Berlin bureau chief and a U.S. Army Intelligence officer, Koehler offers a study spanning the history of the GDR, a time in which Stasi brutality sustained an illegitimate Communist regime. Interviews and documentary evidence reveal a violent war against internal "enemies," a "hugely successful" infiltration of most West German institutions, and collaboration with international terrorists. Koehler is at his best depicting such personalities as Stasi chief Erich Mielke, Col. Rainer Wiegand, and the infamous Gunter Guillaume, whose exposure brought down the government of Chancellor Willy Brandt. The Stasi's often uneasy relations with the Soviet KGB and the claim that the "most" Stasi recruits in West Germany were Social Democrats are surprising. While the absence of broader political and theoretical considerations linked to the regime may narrow the book's importance, it is the most complete work available in English. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.?Zachary T. Irwin, Pennsylvania State Univ., Erie
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
26 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
This is the book on the Stasi I had been waiting for
By A Customer
Mr. Koehler provides a vivid picture of what made the DDR tick. He has deftly chronicled the intimate details of his interviews with former Stasi apparatchiks and victims of the Strasi's surveillance and intimidation. Koehler interprets the lurid details of East Germany's most sensitive government files which the Stasi never dreamed would be seen by western eyes.
It is clear from Koehler's book that much of the eastern bloc's demise, in particular the DDR's, was due to the enormous drain of hard currency assets and manpower required to support an intensive domestic and foreign intelligence network. Koehler also chronicles the obsessive "fraternal support" of Nicaragua by East German leader Erich Honecker during the 1980s which further drained the limited resources of the DDR.
It is fair to ask why it took Koehler nearly 10 years since the collapse of East Germany to complete his book. The Stasi documents which are the source for Koehler's research have been opened up in recent years to a limited number of journalists. In many cases, Koehler has an insiders account based on his exclusive access to recently released Stasi files. Koehler brings the best evidence yet of the Stasi's repression as he presents the facts of what it was like to have lived in the DDR more vividly than I have seen written anywhere else.
As a traveler to East Germany during the Cold War years and the months leading up to reunification, I would have enjoyed an additional chapter detailing the Stasi's surveillance of western visitors to the former DDR. I found this book to be the intensive study of the East German secret police that I had been waiting for.
18 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
This is the one book on the STASI you must have!
By A Customer
The East German security and intelligence service is known to the world as the MfS, or STASI. Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Western historians and scholars have bemoaned the lack of books, in English, on the subject. The delays in publishing have not been for lack of interest, but rather a lack of knowledgeable authors. John Koehler's, "STASI", is the missing book and provides an outstanding contribution to the history of espionage, the Cold War, and the German people.
For more than eight years Koehler conducted detailed interviews with the original participants; a feat unheard of ten years ago. The result is an unparalleled "insider's look" at the scope of STASI intelligence and security operations. Koehler's background as a reporter and intelligence professional provide him with both an understanding of espionage and the ability to tell a compelling and interesting story.
The STASI operated as the "little brother" to the much larger Soviet "Committee for State Security", or KGB. It earned the KGB's complete respect through the total repression of the East German people at home, and the skilled intelligence operations of the HVA (the Main Administration of Foreign Intelligence) outside it's borders.
New details are presented about the pervasive infiltration of HVA operatives into West Germany's government, military, and industrial complex. The revelations of these infiltration's are so sensitive they still destabilized German politics after a decade. Other details reveal operations targeted against US forces and NATO including: the first penetration of U.S. Army intelligence by an East German spy as well as an expose of Americans selling our most sensitive defense secrets to the communists. Where some intelligence writers approach their topic with limited details and knowledge, Koehler involves the reader with a mastery of intelligence "tradecraft" that would make Tom Clancy jealous. Why read fictional accounts of espionage when the "inside" events of the Cold War are infinitely more intricate and fascinating? Spy fiction novelists will be using Koehler's book as a source for story plots and technical details for years to come. No single book can ever tell the complete history of espionage in the Cold War. Koehler's "STASI" does a through job of defining one piece of the giant jig-saw puzzle on Cold War spy history. Combine it with David Murphy's "Battleground Berlin; CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War" (Yale University Press, 1997) to provide another piece of the puzzle that looks at the "frontlines" of the Cold War in Berlin from the perspective of the other two major players in the area, the CIA and KGB.
H Keith Melton Author of "The Ultimate Spy Book"; (Dorling Kindersley, 1996)
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Stasi by John Koehler brings contrasts to life
By A Customer
Stasi is an excellent study in constrasts and merits the attention of anyone interested in current affairs, terrorist studies, European history, political science and intelligence history. Since the author has met many of the people discussed in the book, it is a text loaded with anecdotes and details that many biographers or historians never get to probe. The author shares these singular observations with his readers.
The dark side is sad indeed. Koehler begins by exposing the feudal world of East German leftist radicals and how the Stasi organization emerged from thier international machinations. Erich Mielke, who became the Minister for State Security, built the Stasi into an unbelievable machine that promoted evil. In order to do this he became a feudal serf of the KGB, and a king in East Germany. Ultimately, he became a pill-popping addict despite his successful, shameful reign of terror. Under his tutelage, Stasi officers, most of whom had the barest rudimentary education, spied on their neighbors, bugged confessionals, and tortured countless German citizens. One citizen, Josef Kneifel, described his life under Mielke's world of concrete control as similar to that of a "dazed animal" while the "vassals of Moscow" worked overtime to destroy the lives, marriages, and occupations of numerous frightened East Germans.
Koehler contrasts the absolute despair of living under the Stasi against the dedication and committment of freedom-loving people to bring an end to the Stasi kingdom of cruely, ruthless power- mongering and paranoia. The agencies and individuals who sacrificed much to bring freedom and civility to life in the Stasi empire were understaffed and risked many dangers. Traitors from within their own ranks motivated only by money or the need to feel superior to others sold them out time and again. Koehler faithfully catalogues the close calls, successes and failures of these brave people. Undaunted, they continued to pursue their goal of freedom for those in communist countries with the help of average people such as lathe operators, secretaries, pastors, and railroad dispatchers. Erich Mielke believed that Poland's working classes could never upend the communist regime in Poland. Ultimately, as Koehler shows, the Stasi chief underestimated them.
This book also touched on virtual terrorism's birth. Both IBM and Texas Instruments unknowlingly employed Stasi spies who gathered information about computers and communications apparatus. Another group had developed a unique particle spray, similar to a chemical weapon, to spread over enemy communication stations and disrupt correspondence in case of war.
Finally, Koehler warns readers that former Stasi officers, well-trained in terrorist techniques, are unemployed and looking for work today. They also continue to maintain connections to the Russian mafia which operates in a land full of uncharted and unclaimed fissile material. Mielke's men still lurk in the underworld, unwilling and unable to function in civil society again.
I love books by journalists because they are packed with information. Koehler does a masterful job of keeping the numerous personalities and their activities from becoming a jumbled morass of confusing paragraphs. The book is structured well and easy to read. The excellent topic, clear prose, detailed insights and good organization make this book very much worth buying and reading.
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