Nazi archive of the Ministry for State Security
The Nazi archive of the Ministry for State Security was a secret facility of the "Hauptabteilung IX / 11" of the State Security Service of the GDR from 1967 to 1990 . This was formally responsible for the "investigation and prosecution of Nazi and war crimes", in fact in cooperation with the "Hauptabteilung XX / 4" also for the propagandistic misuse of the information obtained from the files by the SED .
Creation and organization of the archive
The NS archive of the Ministry for State Security was founded in 1967 and was kept secret. It was housed together with the headquarters of the responsible "Main Department IX / 11" ("Investigation and prosecution of Nazi and war crimes") in the " Villa Heike " in Freienwalder Strasse 17 in the restricted area of the MfS in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen , which was previously used as a KGB prison and was transferred to the MfS by the Soviet Control Commission in 1951 . When the archive was closed, 7 to 11 km of files and numerous microfilms were stored in the former administration building and in the factory halls to the rear . The MfS brought together all the documents from the time of National Socialism that existed in the GDR , including personal files on around one million former NSDAP members from East and West.
Purpose and use
The "Hauptabteilung IX / 11" had the task of collecting, sifting and cataloging all documents available in the GDR from the time of the "Third Reich" in the NS archive in order to make them usable by the secret police . In “political-operational assignments”, target persons at home and abroad were prosecuted as Nazi and war criminals or blackmailed into working with the Stasi. In order to preserve the fiction of an anti-fascist state, perpetrators were only prosecuted if they did not have a prominent position in the GDR. That is why, for example, Johannes Adam (SS security guard and professor of biology in the GDR) and Rosemarie Albrecht (she was on the list of the most wanted Nazi war criminals at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in 2004 ), for whom documents were kept in the Nazi archive, remained unmolested. In addition, historians were able to inspect the files under supervision and to a limited extent.
The archive corpus was also used for propaganda purposes with the aim of politically destabilizing the Federal Republic of Germany and highlighting it as the “land of perpetrators”. Examples are the campaigns against Heinrich Lübke , Kurt Georg Kiesinger , Hans Globke and Theodor Oberländer . West German functionaries were branded as "National Socialists" via documents launched there for the press . The State Security also created the desired appearance with forgeries and the rearrangement of files. For example, “Hauptabteilung XX / 4” had fictitious anti-Semitic leaflets produced under the code names “Aktion Vergißmeinnicht” and “Aktion J” (“You have probably forgotten to gass up!”), Designed as supposed neo-Nazi propaganda by the German Reich Party and were sent from fictitious addresses in the Federal Republic of Germany to Jewish citizens.
The time after the fall of the Wall
After the archive was closed, the files were briefly placed under the supervision of the Central State Archive of the GDR in 1990 and, after it was closed, taken over by the Federal Archives . Official documents and documents processed by the MfS were removed from the inventory and transferred to the BStU .
literature
- Henry Leide: Auschwitz and State Security - Prosecution, Propaganda and Secrecy in the GDR . Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-946572-22-0 , PDF .
- Henry Leide: Nazi Criminal and State Security. The secret past politics of the GDR. (= BStU analyzes and documents. Volume 28). 3. Edition. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht , Göttingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-525-35018-8 .
- Dagmar Unverhau: The "Nazi Archive" of the Ministry for State Security. Stations of a development . (= Archive of the GDR State Security ). LIT Verlag , Münster 1998, ISBN 3-8258-3512-X .
Web links
- Video clip Auschwitz and the State Security of the BStU
- BStU , topic: State Security and Auschwitz
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f Alexander-Martin Sardina : "Hello, girls and boys!" - Foreign language lessons in the Soviet Zone and GDR. Wolff-Verlag , Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-941461-28-4 , footnotes 672 and 673.
- ↑ “The illusion is over. Stasi left useful Nazi criminals alone ”. In: Frankfurter Rundschau . March 5, 1997.
- ↑ Sabine Dumschat: Archive or "trash can"? The "NS archive" of the Ministry for State Security of the GDR and its processing in the Federal Archives. (PDF) Retrieved February 15, 2019 .
- ^ The SED dictatorship and the Nazi past in Germany. Retrieved February 15, 2019 .
- ↑ Sven Felix Kellerhoff : How Erich Mielke's “Special Storage” is emptied from the Federal Archives. October 14, 2005, accessed February 15, 2019 .
- ↑ Potsdam finishes indexing the NS archive of the Stasi. May 10, 2018, accessed February 15, 2019 .
- ^ Henry Leide: Nazi Criminals and State Security. The secret past politics of the GDR. 1st edition. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-525-35018-X , p. 81.
- ^ Hubertus Knabe : West work of the MfS: the interplay of "Enlightenment" and "Defense" . Ch. Links Verlag , Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-86153-182-8 , p. 85 f.
- ↑ Hauptabteilung IX / 11 (investigation of Nazi and war crimes). Retrieved June 14, 2019 .