German officials have been quick to ascribe the fury of their citizens over U.S. spying to their own history with the excesses of the surveillance state. But victims of the fearsome Communist East German secret police say: Not so fast.
Video: Before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, East Germany jailed thousands for crimes against the state, including distributing banned books. We introduce you to one former prisoner and how he exacted some small revenge years later.
Allegations that the National Security Agency kept tabs on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone communications have threatened counterterrorism cooperation, a major trade deal and good relations between the longtime allies. Popular distrust of the United States also is widespread.
The secret police, or Stasi, roped in an estimated 190,000 part-time secret informants and employed an additional 90,000 officers full time — in total, more than one in every 50 adult East Germans as of 1990. East Germans who dared to criticize their government — even to a spouse, a best friend or a pastor — could wind up disappearing into the penal system for years.
In east Berlin sits the former Hohenschoenhausen prison, which was reserved for East Germany’s most politically sensitive cases.
Hubertus Knabe — a West German who smuggled banned books into the East and later discovered that he had been betrayed by a priest who had encouraged him to do so — now has a plate-glass view of the most perilous destination for victims of Stasi surveillance. He is the director of theHohenschoenhausen prison museum, which is hidden away in a Berlin neighborhood whose rows of imposing apartment blocks still house many former Stasi officers.
Knabe said the consequences of the Stasi’s excesses were far more devastating than anything associated with the NSA. “They forget what it’s like to live in a dictatorship versus a democracy,” he said of people who say that the NSA has behaved like the Stasi.
Former inmates lead tours of the dank, tiny cells in which they were incarcerated, and they say they sometimes run into their old tormenters on the street or at the grocery store.
Many Germans — from both sides of the border, because East German spying reached deep into its sibling country — can request to see the thick files that the Stasi kept on them. More painfully, they can also learn which of their friends or associates collected the information found in those files.
Thousands of collaborators have been chased from public life. Even now, new accusations of Stasi associations can dog politicians and celebrities in Germany.
“We hear that the Stasi was some kind of dilettante agency compared to the NSA,” because the latter is probably collecting more data overall than the East Germans did, Knabe said. “But East Germans know that the Stasi was a lot worse.”
Knabe said the East German system created a level of fear that few of his fellow citizens have about the American spying efforts. Nevertheless, he said, there were similarities. He has filed a criminal complaint about the NSA spying in a German court.
“The western system punished someone when they had committed a crime. The eastern system punished people when they were only thinking about committing a crime,” he said. If the NSA’s material starts being used not just for counterterrorism efforts but for other kinds of preemptive crime-fighting, he said, “that would be a completely different type of state.”
U.S. in low esteem
According to an ARD-Infratest dimap poll released Friday, just 35 percent of Germans find the U.S. government trustworthy, second only to Russia as a target of mistrust.
Many here want to give asylum to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked secret NSA files and is stuck in Russia without U.S. citizenship papers. Senior German officials have said that taking in Snowden would do too much damage to ties with the United States, but they are exploring whether he might testify about NSA programs from Russia.
Top German intelligence officials also traveled in recent weeks to Washington to push for a “no-spying” agreement, hoping to impose tough restrictions on U.S. spying operations in Germany.
The damage could last far into the future, jeopardizing the ability of European governments to muster support for military cooperation with the United States, said Wolfgang Ischinger, Germany’s ambassador to the United States during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Germany opposed.
“What I’m afraid will happen is that there will be a lingering sense of anti-Americanism that will be hard to manage,” Ischinger said this month at a discussion organized by the Washington-based Atlantic Council.
He said the NSA scandal was a bigger threat to the U.S.-German relationship than the 2003 dispute about the Iraq war, the most recent low point between the two countries.
“This one is, at the personal level, at the political level, a bit more difficult to overcome,” he said.
Analysts say there are other explanations for why Germans are so upset.
“The older generation might be a little different, but I’m not sure how much of it can be explained by German history,” said Johannes Thimm, an expert on U.S.-German relations at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
Some Germans may simply feel humiliated that their leaders have been treated with suspicion, especially because their country has been an unusually deferential and accommodating ally since immediately after World War II, Thimm said.
“The fact that we’re trying so hard to be good allies, in some sense, and then that this happens, is a complete breach of trust,” he said.
Deep suspicions
Germans also guard their personal privacy more jealously than do Americans, and Germany has robust data protection and privacy laws.
Many here are also deeply suspicious of spy agencies in general, more so than many Americans. Former chancellor Helmut Schmidt said this month that he never read a report written by Germany’s foreign intelligence agency during his 1974-1982 tenure. And Merkel had wanted a no-spy deal with Obama long before the NSA leaks, but she had been rebuffed, adding to the sense of insult that the United States had distrusted its partner, German officials say.
But for some, history still guides their reactions to the spying revelations.
Roland Brauckmann, 51, was locked away for 15 months in 1982 because he printed fliers for the Protestant church and the anti-nuclear movement. For him, the NSA memos brought back bad memories of the typewritten files the Stasi kept on him.
“Of course American services will not put us in prisons,” he said. “But the atmosphere of fear is coming again.”
Brauckmann said he trusted no government holding on to the minutiae of his daily life, because even the most harmless system could be replaced by a more dangerous one.
“No one knows which kind of people will take power in the future,” he said.
By
Petra Krischok contributed to this report.
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