(Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
East Germany’s Communist dictatorship ran one of the world’s most intrusive surveillance operations on its own people in a building only a little less ugly than that task. You won’t enjoy a visit to the scene of those crimes. But if you're in Berlin, you should.
That's especially true if you happen to do so after spending a few days covering IFA, a giant tech trade show in which a universe of devices features a camera or a microphone.
The Stasi Museum is a small part of a prison-looking box in a building that housed the Ministry for State Security—Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, “Stasi” for short—until 1990. Calling itself the party's “shield and sword,” the Stasi modeled itself after the KGB.
The exhibits quickly bring home the vast scope of the domestic spying it conducted for the German Democratic Republic. (FYI: Actual democracies don’t need to put that word in their names.) The first room off the entrance highlights the Stasi’s decades-long campaign to persuade, coerce, and otherwise enlist people to inform on their neighbors; photos reveal such unlikely collaborators as a civil-rights lawyer and the bass guitarist in a punk-rock band.
The Stasi called these informers "Inoffizielle Miterbeiter,” which roughly translates to “unofficial collaborators.” Of course, this agency had a bureaucratic shorthand for them: “IMs.”
(Rob Pegoraro)About 189,000 were on the books in 1989, the year the East German government’s stranglehold on a population of about 16 million fractured after months of protest that led to the November opening of the Berlin Wall.
In a country where the government controlled the economy, the Stasi could dole out a variety of rewards to make IMs feel valuable. The exhibits here also describe more than one collaborator who soured on the work and stopped informing, without consequences documented here.
A separate network of “information providers”—Auskunftspersonnen (AKP)—provided less frequent input about possibly subversive activity. In a town of 58,505, the Stasi counted 3,335 AKPs.
(If your travel time or budget doesn’t have room for this visit and its €12 admission fee, you can get a sense of how East Germany had so many people snooping on their neighbors by watching the 2006 German-language film The Lives Of Others, available for rent or purchase on Prime Video, Apple TV+ and other video streaming services and, hopefully, public libraries near you.)
The East German regime’s control-freak insistence on detecting and defeating dissent among its subjects can seem amusing at times. A poster labeled "This is how the enemy wants to harm and destroy us" includes such ideological threats from the decadent West as the heavy-metal band Iron Maiden.
But it was serious and deadly business as practiced by a tyrannical government that shot and killed hundreds of its own citizens in Berlin alone as they tried to flee to West Germany and then commended soldiers who pulled the triggers.
The Stasi had sweeping access to public and private records: "personnel and health files, tax assessments, insurance policies and bank statements,” per a label. It had employees in post offices to monitor and intercept mail, with suspicious envelopes steamed open and then ironed closed. If a letter included Western currency, the Stasi kept it. You can imagine that the Stasi would not have approved of cryptocurrency, much less end-to-end-encrypted messaging that could have blinded its eyes.
The Stasi went to extraordinary lengths to hide this surveillance, except for when its agents wanted suspects to know they were being watched. Exhibits here feature cameras hidden in such everyday objects as a wallet, a jacket, a watering can, a tie, a shopping bag, a belt buckle, a thermos, and a radio.
Residents suspected of subversion could quickly fall under even more intense Stasi inspection in the form of buggings and clandestine break-ins. You can see a microphone hidden inside a wall (powered by 15 Duracell D cell batteries, perhaps because Eastern Bloc batteries weren’t reliable enough), a pinhole camera tucked into the space between one flat and the next, and the Polaroid pictures taken by Stasi agents of a suspect’s flat.
Not even the ministry’s own offices were safe from this curiosity, as recounted in a display in a former bathroom that the Stasi saw fit to equip with microphones and cameras for two years in the 1960s.
The Stasi might have envied the technology of 2025, when ”smart glasses” with a camera are a retail item and always-on microphones in living-room devices are a selling point–as days of wandering through IFA exhibits had reminded me.
This also brought to mind American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Jennifer Granick’s talk at Black Hat in August, in which she urged tech companies to stop gathering “enticing repositories of information” that a government might demand later on.
(Feel free to stop reading this story for a moment and check the settings on your phone or tablet to see which apps have access to your device’s camera, microphone, or location. Do they need that information? Maybe. Do they need that when you’re not actively using them? Maybe not. For extra credit, look up that company’s last transparency report, in which they documented how they responded to government requests for information. If you can’t find one, consider that a red flag.)
Photos throughout the museum of Stasi employees at work at desks, looking like any other set of IT employees from the 1970s and 1980s who probably griped about the hardware that management inflicted upon them, offer yet another reminder: The inside of an awful system can look like everyday work. But the purpose of a system is what it does.
I had all of these reactions after visiting the Stasi Museum in 2018–as well as a realization of why Germany has a different attitude about privacy than the rest of Europe–but coming there from the United States in 2025 left me with new and less comfortable thoughts.
For example, what sort of parallel should somebody see between East Germany’s punishment of such borderline acts of dissent as "politically negative jokes" and the Trump administration defunding public broadcasting and conditioning a TV network’s merger on the company installing a “bias monitor”?
If it was intolerable for the Stasi to rummage through tax records to check for signs of disloyalty, what should we make of ICE gaining unprecedented access to IRS tax data so that it can find undocumented immigrants who have been paying Social Security taxes that will yield them no benefit?
And what about the bounties offered by anti-abortion laws in Texas and elsewhere to citizens who file lawsuits against their neighbors for allegedly violating those statutes? How far should a government go in persuading citizens to become snitches? What level of compliance invites describing people who take up those invitations as informal collaborators or just information providers?
I don’t have answers to all of those questions. But I do know this: Freedom is not a self-maintaining machine. If you weren’t clear about that before visiting this hive of one of its enemies, you should be afterwards.