Working group of the minister, area of ​​responsibility "S"

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The working group of the minister's task area "S" or AGM / S for short (meaning: working group of the minister [for state security], task area "S" [for special questions, occasionally also special tasks]) was a structural unit of the Ministry for State Security (MfS) of the GDR . This structural unit emerged from the 15th administration of the Ministry of National Defense , whose tasks were transferred to the MfS in 1962.

The working group was responsible for training and deploying special forces (“Central Specific Forces” / ZSK) for special operations. The head of the working group, Alfred Scholz , was responsible for planning the murder . For the initial period of a war against the Federal Republic of Germany, he planned in 1972 the destruction of target objects of the Federal German infrastructure and individual terror. Stasi fighters should "increasingly use the scene of terrorist and violent crimes in order to use this camouflage and cover to prepare their combat tasks". The main official task was to combat terrorist forces using military, police and secret service methods. The AGM / S was an elite / special unit of the MfS. In the event of a crisis or armed conflict, it should operate as a paramilitary stay-behind organization behind enemy lines. For this purpose, the MfS trained around 3,500 underground fighters in the mid-1980s, who were to carry out bomb attacks against the Federal Republic in the event of war. As members of the DKP, they lived in West Germany and were referred to as the Ralf Forster group. With effect from April 1, 1988, AGM / S was renamed to Department XXIII ( Counter Terrorism) and subordinated to Main Department XXII (Counter Terrorism) on March 1, 1989. Heinz Stöcker was the head of the department for many years , which is why the letter S of the abbreviation is occasionally replaced with his name. In 2007 it became known that German investigators were investigating whether the unit was linked to the 1989 murder of German bank manager Alfred Herrhausen , which is generally attributed to the Red Army Faction (RAF).

In the spring of 1981 the RAF terrorists Helmut Pohl , Christian Klar , Adelheid Schulz and Inge Viett were instructed by AGM / S experts in the theory and practice of weapons and explosives. During a training program approved by Stasi chief Erich Mielke and his deputy Gerhard Neiber , the RAF terrorists carried out target exercises with the Soviet RPG-7 bazooka on an unarmored Mercedes at the Rüthnick military training area . Regine Igel claims in her book Terrorism Lies , which is received as a conspiracy-theoretical book , that the Stasi files contain evidence of active cooperation between the RAF and the MfS, especially in the 1980s. The RAF dropouts who were accepted in the GDR had been trained in paramilitary techniques by the AGM / S and had traveled several times to West Germany, assuming that these trips were mostly known to West German security authorities, according to the INPOL documents they found .

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  1. ↑ See Roland Wiedmann / Bernd Florath: Working Group of the Minister . In: Roger Engelmann / Bernd Florath / Walter Süß et al. (Eds.): Das MfS-Lexikon - terms, persons and structures of the state security of the GDR , Berlin 2011, p. 41.
  2. ↑ a b Doreen Hartwich, Bernd-Helge Mascher: History of the special combat leadership (Department IV of the MfS) - tasks, structure, personnel, tradition. BStU, June 18, 2007, accessed May 8, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Thomas Auerbach : Liquidation = murder? On the ambiguous semantics of the term in the MfS documents ( Memento of the original from February 17, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Horch und Guck , BStU magazine, issue 1/2008, pp. 4–7. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.horch-und-guck.info
  4. ^ Jochen Staadt : A German brotherhood in arms
  5. ↑ Cf. Regine Igel: Paramilitary Gladio units also involved in terrorism in the East . In: Telepolis of February 20, 2010, accessed on September 27, 2011.
  6. ↑ Tobias Wunschik: The main department XXII: "Defense against terrorism" (MfS manual) . Ed. BStU. Berlin 1996. p. 21, online
  7. ^ Lisa Erdmann: RAF attack: Investigators examine Stasi involvement in Herrhausen murder ; Spiegel-Online, September 17, 2007
  8. ^ David Crawford: The Murder of a CEO: Did East Germany's feared secret police help kill German businessmen? Wall Street Journal , September 15, 2007, accessed November 23, 2009 .
  9. ^ Jochen Staadt : A German brotherhood in arms. October 4, 2007, accessed on October 13, 2014 (also in the FAZ, October 5, 2007, No. 231 / page 12).
  10. ^ Regine Igel: Terrorism Lies. How the Stasi acted underground. S. 190 f., Herbig, 2012, ISBN 978-3-7766-2698-8
  11. ↑ Page no longer available , search in web archives: Schupelius asks! With Regine Igel. Gunnar Schupelius in conversation with Regine Igel, author of "Terrorism Lies: How the Stasi acted underground". TV report, tv-berlin, August 27, 2012@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.tvb.de