ubiwar.com

These stories keep coming around:

It is painstaking work, almost a labour of love, but help is close for the nine people who have spent years sticking together millions of pieces of paper to decipher the workings of East Germany’s once-feared Stasi secret police [story, via the great yet erratic Bouphonia]

They’re still at it but, as I reported last year, it’s been greatly aided by computers:

Stasi employees started to destroy their secret files as the Berlin Wall fell. Initially they shredded them. But as the machines broke down under the strain, they were forced to tear documents by hand.

The waste was to be pulped or burnt, but “citizen committees” stormed Stasi offices across East Germany, seizing millions of files, along with 15,500 bags of torn-up documents.

The digital system simultaneously scans both sides of the torn documents before comparing shapes, colour, and pattern of script to work out how they fit together.

“About 90 percent of the content of each bag comes from the same material” so the machine, like the people sifting by hand, tackle the shreds layer by layer, much as would an archeologist.

“We find bits that quickly fit together and what is left stays in the system to be compared with new pieces,” said [Bertram Nickolay, director of the program]. “It’s the biggest puzzle in the world,” he added with pride.

In addition to speed, the computerised system should also allow for reconstruction of documents torn into very small pieces.

“One in five bags cannot be processed manually because the bits are too small,” according to the engineer who said some pages were torn into 50 to 60 pieces, “suggesting they contained really explosive material”.

Recreating the documents “is important to bring back to life what the powers-that-be of the time thought should best be done away with,” said [chief archivist Andreas Petter].

And, so, what results?

Reconstructed material has already allowed some Stasi informers to be uncovered, said Petter pointing to one Heinrich Fink, a theologian who spied on both the Church and his students when he taught at Berlin’s Humboldt University.

After the fall of the communist regime, Fink was appointed to head the university and was elected to parliament. His past caught up with him in 1995 when his file was finally pieced together.

Many documents still waiting to be reassembled likely deal with spying by the Stasi in the final years of the regime, not only against the political opposition at home, but against targets abroad, according to Petter.

Underwhelming, perhaps, but data never dies. Not naturally anyway.