Var Stasi blot en almindelig efterretningstjeneste?

På Danmarks Kommunistiske Parti/Leninister/Marxisters hjemmeside kan man finde en artikel, oprindeligt bragt i dagbladet Arbejderen., skrevet af Hanne Rosenvold. Denne artikel kommenterer bl.a. en artikel skrevet Thomas Wegener Friis, der omhandler DDR’s efterretningsvirksomhed. Hanne Rosenvold konkluderer, at artiklen:

”'afslører' for [hende] at se ikke nogen opsigtsvækkende nyheder. DDR havde, som vel hovedparten af Europas stater, også under den kolde krig en efterretningsvirksomhed!”

Hanne Rosenvolds kommentar demonstrerer på bedste vis, at fortrængelsen af kommunismens menneskefjendtlige gerninger lever i bedste velgående blandt nulevende kommunister. Der stadig er brug for en Bent Jensen og Richard Pipes (i hvert fald på dette område). Som det fremgår af dette uddrag af John E. Koehlers’s bog ”STASI the untold Story of the East German Secret Police”, var STASI så langt fra en efterretningsvirksomhed som dem der fungerede i ”hovedparten af Europas stater” under den kolde krig. Jeg skal her blot bringe enkelte af bogens citater:

"When the regime collapsed, the Stasi had 102,000 full-time officers and noncommissioned personnel on its rolls, including 11,000 members of the ministry's own special guards regiment. Between 1950 and 1989, a total of 274,000 persons served in the Stasi.

The people's ire was running equally strong against the regular Stasi informers, the inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs). By 1995, 174,000 had been identified as IMs, or 2.5 percent of the total population between the ages of 18 and 60. Researchers were aghast when they found that about 10,000 IMs, or roughly 6 percent of the total, had not yet reached the age of 18. Since many records were destroyed, the exact number of IMs probably will never be determined; but 500,000 was cited as a realistic figure. Former Colonel Rainer Wiegand, who served in the Stasi counterintelligence directorate, estimated that the figure could go as high as 2 million, if occasional stool pigeons were included.

"The Stasi was much, much worse than the Gestapo, if you consider only the oppression of its own people," according to Simon Wiesenthal of Vienna, Austria, who has been hunting Nazi criminals for half a century. "The Gestapo had 40,000 officials watching a country of 80 million, while the Stasi employed 102,000 to control only 17 million.".

The Soviet Union's KGB employed about 480,000 full-time agents to oversee a nation of 280 million, which means there was one agent per 5,830 citizens. Using Wiesenthal's figures for the Nazi Gestapo, there was one officer for 2,000 people. The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. When the regular informers are added, these ratios become much higher: In the Stasi's case, there would have been at least one spy watching every 66 citizens! When one adds in the estimated numbers of part-time snoops, the result is nothing short of monstrous: one informer per 6.5 citizens. It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests."