Credit: Museum in der Runde Ecke If the “W”-shaped, two-letter steam distribution grid was an “upgrade,” then the ultimate “deluxe” Stasi steam device for manually opening letters with hot water vapor is the “Arbeitstisch der Heißdampf-Öffnungsanlage 532” (English: Work Table for Hot Steam Opening System 532). This modular table was constructed for Department M by […]
Credit: Museum in der Runde Ecke Like other devices constructed in the 1970’s and ‘80s by Department M and the Stasi OTS, this “Aufdampftopf” (“steam pot”) was fashioned using a basic household appliance as a starting point. Starting with a “cooking pot,” as it’s called in the Museum in der Runde Ecke index, the vessel […]
The Museum in der Runde Ecke in Leipzig has an amazing collection of devices found in the Leipziger district administration office (BVfS) during the dissolution of the Stasi. These are listed online in a thorough index with photos and descriptions. Their images are much better than those I was able to make through the glass […]
Department M, along with the Stasi OTS (Operativ-Technische Sektor), developed and implemented numerous technical tools, intelligence checks, and operational activities to speed their postal surveillance in the GDR. By the 1970’s, the department was already using various modified household appliances or industrial devices to assist in steaming open and closing letters. One example is this […]
In the beginning of the 1970s most of the work of Department M was performed by hand. This labor included sorting and selecting suspicious mail, manually steaming it open, examining the contents, transcribing, copying or photographing the interior or exterior of the letter, in some cases, examining the letter for conspiratorial or stealth writing, resealing […]
Today I made this diagram to describe the manual labor and flow of mail from the Deutsche Post stream through the Stasi’s Department M surveillance operations. It’s a fairly boring flow chart but gets at the heart of the organizational processes and divisions of labor they developed to speed their work. […]
Similar to how Facebook uses a user’s connections to determine information about them, the Stasi considered all information they could gather about a person in their intelligence campaigns. They incorporated not only the contents of a target’s mail, but information about professional and personal relationships, love affairs, and organizations to which they belonged. (Reinicke, 106) […]
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During the seven years Gerd Reinicke worked for Department M the scope of surveillance grew steadily. This is particularly evident in the 1980s, when as the government became more and more concerned of the “class struggle,” they dramatically increased the number of operators in Department M, more than doubling the size from 1980 to 1989. […]
In the essay, “Eavesdropping for the class struggle: Postal control of the Stasi,” from the book, “Secret readers in the GDR: Control and distribution of illicit literature” (ed. Siegfried Lokatis), Gerd Reinicke describes his work in the “evaluation and information” section of the Stasi’s Department M. He explains his job was to assess and classify […]
Thanks to the implementation of index cards across the MfS, Department M had access to sender and receiver addresses, contacts, relatives, etc. to inform their surveillance work. By 1970, the department had instituted the following operational steps for examining mail. Numbers 3–6 were considered highly secretive and operations were performed under the codename “Eagle Flight”. […]
Read More… from Stasi / Facebook / Big Data DAAD Day 14 – Department M OibE groups