Report: 17,000 former Stasi agents employed as public servants

Jul 9, 2009, 10:41 GMT

Berlin - Around 17,000 former employees of East Germany's Ministry of State Security, or Stasi, are working in local government in east German states despite checks on their background, the Financial Times Deutschland reported Thursday.

'These are dimensions no one suspected before,' Stasi expert Klaus Schroeder from Berlin's Free University told the newspaper, adding that vetting was superficial.

The Stasi had more than 275,000 full-time agents and 500,000 informers prying into every aspect of daily life until it was disbanded after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

An official in Mecklenburg-West Pommerania, one of the six East German states unified with West Germany in 1990, confirmed that more than 2,000 former Stasi agents were employed by the state.

The disclosure came a day after the Federal Crime Bureau admitted that 23 former Stasi agents were on its payroll, including one member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's security detail.

Last week, the local government in Brandenburg, which surrounds Berlin, admitted that 58 former Stasi officers were working for the state's Crime Bureau.

'Working in the public sphere is not the problem. The problem is which positions they land in,' Social Democrat deputy Stephan Hilsberg told the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung daily.

Hubertus Knabe, head of the Berlin Memorial Site to Stasi Victims, said former Stasi employees were treated leniently in many places in the east of Germany during the vetting process of the early 90s.

Noting it was no longer possible to dismiss them, he said efforts should be undertaken to ensure 'they do not have positions of authority or can influence decisions on personnel.'