Shredded East German secret police files being reassembled by computer

[fat mike]

(AP) - German researchers said Wednesday that they were launching an attempt to reassemble millions of shredded East German secret police files using complicated computerized algorithms.

The files were shredded as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and it became clear that the East German regime was finished. Panicking officials of the Stasi secret police attempted to destroy the vast volumes of material they had kept on everyone from their own citizens to foreign leaders.

So great was the task that it overwhelmed the shredding machines, and a large number of the documents were torn by hand into between eight and thirty pieces.

Some 16,250 sacks containing pieces of 45 million shredded documents were found and confiscated after the reunification of Germany in 1990. Reconstruction work began 12 years ago but 24 people have been able to reassemble the contents of only 323 sacks.

"Many important documents are slumbering in these sacks," Marianne Birthler, head of the Stasi archives, told Deutschlandfunk radio.

Berlin's Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology estimates that putting everything back together by hand would take 30 people 600 to 800 years.

Researchers are hopeful they will be able to put together 400 sacks in two years using new computer technology employed by the Frauenhofer Institute.

If the government-funded $8.53 million pilot project is successful, head researcher Bertram Nickolay said, researchers will be able to put together all of the bags in four to five years.

Using algorithms developed 15 years ago to help decipher barely legible lists of Nazi concentration camp victims, each individual strip of the shredded Stasi files will be scanned on both sides. The data then will be fed into the computer for interpretation using color recognition; texture analysis; shape and pattern recognition; machine and handwriting analysis and the recognition of forged official stamps, Nickolay said in a statement.

http://www.komotv.com/news/national/7423656.html

does this say something sad and funny about my people?

[Red]

so, instead of burning it, they shredded it... and then kept it.

[Malcolm Wright]

Well, I do wonder why they didn't burn the documents.
What is it about the German psyche that caused the Nazis to think of incinerating people to dispose of them, but for the Stasi to NOT think of incinerating paper documents to get rid of them?

M.

Edit: Red beat me to it...

[Mystlet]

Originally Posted by Red

so, instead of burning it, they shredded it... and then kept it.

They stuff their pillows with it and sleep on them in the hopes of absorbing the information. They also record themselves as they slumber in case they talk in their sleep & divulge secrets.

I think I've said too much already.

[fat mike]

Originally Posted by Malcolm Wright

Well, I do wonder why they didn't burn the documents.
What is it about the German psyche that caused the Nazis to think of incinerating people to dispose of them, but for the Stasi to NOT think of incinerating paper documents to get rid of them?

M.

Edit: Red beat me to it...

Mom tells me at Nuremberg our compulsive record keeping helped a lot of the convictions...

[Malcolm Wright]

Originally Posted by fat mike

Mom tells me at Nuremberg our compulsive record keeping helped a lot of the convictions...

I've heard that too...

M.

[fat mike]

boy slap up something about german police and the board dies...

[Kaliayev]

Thats pretty interesting, but isn't the German Federal Government fairly opposed to people trying to learn about the Stasi too much? I read an interesting book on the Stasi recently, and the author made it fairly clear the German government line is that they wished they never existed and would just go away, despite the incredible depth of many of their files.

[oki]

well yea many in germany just want to forget and move on. their past is hunting them. I can imagine, when your history, which is usually something to take pride in, is about nazis and stazi.
but I think its good if they can fix the files, there might be some interesting stuff there.

[grimrebuke]

What value could those files have to a free and democratic Germany?

[fat mike]

property disputes,liability issues-any number of things

[grimrebuke]

but it is all fruit of a poisoned tree. Testimonies were taken under duress and torture, which means that they will be largely unreliable. There was no accountability, so material evidence could easily have been altered. Since the information is reliable enough to build a case on, the only really useful information would be the private, personal information about citizens which could be used to blackmail or otherwise supress their freedoms and their ability to self-govern. This is why we have due process in much of the civilized world.

[oki]

it can have value to the victoms, and allso because its a piece of germany's history, its allways valueble to know what went on.
some people dont know what happened to family members who were arrested, dont know why they were arrested, who ratted them out, things like that. some guilty people might be caught.

[grimrebuke]

So the solution to having had to live under the threat of persecution by a capricious Party is to go after the citizens that caved under the threats of a capricious Party and may have helped that Party to protect themselves or their families?

[TGRR]

Originally Posted by Red

so, instead of burning it, they shredded it... and then kept it.

Bureaucracy is an animal with 10,000 heads and no brain.

[TGRR]

Originally Posted by grimrebuke

but it is all fruit of a poisoned tree. Testimonies were taken under duress and torture, which means that they will be largely unreliable. There was no accountability, so material evidence could easily have been altered. Since the information is reliable enough to build a case on, the only really useful information would be the private, personal information about citizens which could be used to blackmail or otherwise supress their freedoms and their ability to self-govern. This is why we have due process in much of the civilized world.

Why we HAD due process.

We're happily torturing people, now.

[fat mike]

Originally Posted by TGRR

Bureaucracy is an animal with 10,000 heads and no brain.

you can say that again-

really to a person who's lost someone though any clue would mean something-east germany had the strictest regime in the warsaw pact

[TGRR]

Originally Posted by fat mike

you can say that again-

really to a person who's lost someone though any clue would mean something-east germany had the strictest regime in the warsaw pact

I have no doubt of that.

Germans are polite, civilized people that wouldn't hurt a fly...until someone in uniform tells them to. Then they're just as meticulous and efficient about it as they are about engineering or hard-core perversions.

[oki]

Originally Posted by grimrebuke

So the solution to having had to live under the threat of persecution by a capricious Party is to go after the citizens that caved under the threats of a capricious Party and may have helped that Party to protect themselves or their families?

its called collaboration. It does depend on what exactly they did ofcoruse, and under what circumstances. the extemnt of the stazi's influence was enormous, something like half of the east egrmans spying on teh rest. it would be pointless to punish all those, but some are ofcoruse worse then others. Im sure theyll go for teh big guys.

[Kaliayev]

I wouldn't be. Just look at the relatively easy sentence Markus Wolf got. Traditionally, you either hang people like him, or ship them off to help the CIA. Not to mention the Germans let WMD weapon experts (manufacture and deployment) wander around the world without telling anyone until someone pulled it out of the Stasi files, a couple of years back.