Wanting to know everything. The Stasi and its documents

For 40 years, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) ruled East Germany. A central pillar of its dictatorship was the Ministry for State Security (MfS): the Stasi. It was simultaneously a secret police force, an investigative agency, and a foreign intelligence service; it spied, manipulated, and monitored – it wanted to know everything. The Stasi was dissolved in the wake of the Peaceful Revolution.

The evidence of their actions, such as documents, index cards, audio tapes, and photographs, has largely survived. The Stasi Records Archive is legally mandated to catalog these millions of documents and make them available for research. Since 2021, it has been part of the Federal Archives.

The traveling exhibition displays 21 objects from the holdings of the Stasi Records Archive in seven display cases. These include a Stasi planning map created to monitor the 1981 visit of West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and East German leader Erich Honecker to Güstrow, an event that involved nearly 5.000 Stasi personnel. QR codes on the display cases provide access to historical and biographical background information, as well as deeper insights into the ideology, structure, and methods of the Stasi.


More information:

• More information about the exhibition