Information security

Stasi files: scanner struggles to stitch together surveillance state scraps

The world’s biggest jigsaw puzzle may have to be solved by hand, as technology struggles to piece together millions of Stasi files ripped to shreds in the dying days of the East German regime.

The government-funded Stasi records agency confirmed this week that it had had to halt an €8m (£7m) project to digitally reassemble the contents of 23 bags stuffed with torn-up documents detailing the activity of the secret police, because the scanning hardware it was using was not advanced enough.

Over the 40-year existence of communist East Germany, the state security ministry built one of the most tightly knit surveillance states in recent history. The Stasi, short for the Ministry for State Security, created a vast web of full-time agents and part-time snoops, with some historians calculating that there was one informant per 6.5 citizens.

After German reunification in 1990 an archive was set up to allow the system’s victims to access their records, but not before stacks of paperwork were shredded or ripped up by hand to cover up the regime’s activity.

While there are no official figures on the volume of destroyed records, researchers estimate that 10-40% of the archive’s contents may be lost to history.