Rosewood files

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The Rosewood files comprise 381 data carriers ( CD-ROMs ) with around 350,000 files. These are mainly micro-filmed index cards from the Enlightenment Headquarters (HVA), the GDR's foreign intelligence service . An estimated 90 percent of this data does not concern unofficial employees (IM) of the Ministry for State Security (MfS), but rather people who came from the environment of the IM or were recorded for other reasons important to the MfS. Initially it was assumed that the files were mainly real names of agents who were active in the territory of the Federal Republic for the GDR foreign espionage.

Remaining after the turn

Acquired by the CIA

During the fall of the Wall , the files came into the hands of the US intelligence service CIA under circumstances that were not exactly clarified . It was an older version. The last current copy of the rosewood files was destroyed on March 28, 1990, after approval by the chairman of the citizens' committee for the dissolution of the headquarters of the Ministry of State Security.

According to the annals of the then Moscow CIA station chief Milton Bearden , the rosewood files were not captured when the Ministry of State Security was stormed on January 15, 1990 . Rather, the CIA office in Berlin was only commissioned with the procurement after a request from the then US President George HW Bush to the CIA boss.

According to former CIA agents , the microfilms of the HVA agent file that the CIA acquired after the fall of the Wall came from a KGB officer. An employee of the US secret service is said to have contacted him. The news magazine Der Spiegel reported that the KGB man reported to a US embassy in Eastern Europe in 1992 and offered a bad but still legible copy of the microfilms for which he had received US $ 75,000 .

One theory says that in December 1989 the HVA Lieutenant Colonel Rainer Hemmann received the order to transport the microfilmed files to Berlin-Karlshorst in order to hand them over to the KGB liaison officer Alexander Prinzipalow , because at that time it was believed that only in the Soviet Union to ensure safe custody. However, this soon turned out to be a miscalculation, because a CIA employee had very soon made contact with KGB Colonel Alexander Syubenko, who was stationed in East Berlin . This in turn established contact between Prinzipalow, the CIA employee and another KGB general. These three secret service employees managed to get the microfilms to the United States in the summer of 1992 during the turmoil caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Syubenko and Prinzipalov died soon after under mysterious circumstances. The Washington Post celebrated the CIA operation as the biggest intelligence coup since the beginning of the Cold War .

After the stocks were initially only evaluated in the USA, this also happened in other countries.

Return to Germany

After long negotiations, in which the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution is said to have played a role, the data carriers were handed over to the Federal Republic of Germany in 2003 . Because of the German intelligence agencies, the files are now also called "Rosenholz" - this was the name of the process under which they asked the CIA to hand over the data carriers. Why the return took so long is debatable.

As head of the CIA station in Bonn, Bearden campaigned for the rosewood files to be handed over to the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic (BStU), for which he received the Federal Cross of Merit.

The files are incomplete for unknown reasons.

Disclosure and processing

The BStU checked the data for translation and other errors and has been available to the public since March 2004. 350,000 records have been archived. About 1000 former IMs of the GDR intelligence service who were deployed in West Germany and have not yet been exposed can be researched. The Rosenholz data can be viewed by submitting an application to the BStU for a personal inspection of files .

In 2006, severe criticism was leveled at the previous approval practice. Die Zeit reported in “Who is Afraid of Rosewood?” That there was no question of the announced opening of the rosewood files for science and those affected, since in reality even scientists were only granted “very, very restrictive” access, This was the case with Hubertus Knabe , head of the Stasi memorial in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen , to whom the BStU only granted 15 permits for 192 requests to inspect files over a period of two years.

A scientific processing of the data in a publicly accessible report by the BStU itself will be delayed within the service department and the BStU employees involved will be muzzled . As for the background to this, it is reported that the Rosenholz files name, for example, a considerable number (42) of members of the Bundestag who are said to have worked as IMs for the GDR intelligence service. Other people from business and business associations are also listed by name, approx. 39 percent of the object sources in the rosewood files work in these areas. On the other hand, the BStU makes it clear that “residual doubts” about the IM activities of the persons mentioned made it very difficult to make a court-proof decision on access to this data.

On August 2, 2006, the BStU announced that the first documents on members of the 6th German Bundestag (1969–1972) would be published in response to corresponding applications to the media and science. They initially affect 16 of the MPs who are recorded on “Rosenholz” index cards with a so-called IMA note (IM file A). An IM file documented by "Rosenholz" cannot be used to infer an IM activity, as the files partly relate to contact persons who were not IMs and who were usually "skimmed off" unnoticed.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Helmut Müller-Enbergs (with the collaboration of Sabine Fiebig, Günter Finck, Georg Herbstritt, Stephan Konopatzky): "Rosenholz". A source review . (PDF) Berlin 2007., p. 4 f.
  2. ↑ Klaus Bästlein: Like a snake that changes its skin. The legend of the storming of the Stasi or: What really happened between the collapse of the GDR and Joachim Gauck's assumption of office as Federal Commissioner for the Stasi files . In: FAZ , July 27, 2015, p. 6.
  3. ^ "Rosewood" data comes from a KGB officer . Handelsblatt , April 16, 2005
  4. ↑ The "Rosenholz" file opens up new insights into the Stasi network . ( Memento from July 19, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Welt am Sonntag , July 6, 2003
  5. ↑ Helmut Müller-Enbergs: 'Rosenholz'. The Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the Former German Democratic Republic (BStU), page 66 , accessed on January 24, 2020 .
  6. ↑ Who is afraid of "rosewood"? In: Die Zeit , No. 26/2006
  7. ↑ The "Rosenholz" files . BStU
  8. ^ BStU : The German Bundestag 1949 to 1989 in the files of the Ministry for State Security (MfS) of the GDR. Expert opinion to the German Bundestag in accordance with Section 37 (3) of the Stasi Records Act, Berlin 2013, p. 177, [1] (PDF) also fully available in the holdings of the Library of Congress