THE STASI FILES

Piecing together the secrets of East Germany’s past.

- BURKHARD BILGER

Sacks filled with ripped-up Stasi records,  held in an archive in Germany. Destroying the files was exhausting work; reassembling them has been even more challenging.

The man who stopped Salomea Genin on the street in West Berlin, on that August morning in 1961, smiled as if he knew her. He was a “rather handsome gentleman,” she recalls, though he would have been hard to pick out in a crowd. He brought her greetings from East Berlin, from a woman whom Genin had met on a recent visit there—a secretary in one of the Arab embassies. He wondered if Genin would like to join him for coffee the next day. Genin was quite sure that she had never seen the man before in her life. Given her history, there was a good chance that he was an East German spy. She agreed to the meeting without hesitation.