WEURZBURG NOTHING BUT COMPLETE HATE

Between 1950 and 1989, the Stasi employed a total of 274,000 people in an effort to root out the class enemy.[18][19][20] In 1989, the Stasi employed 91,015 people full-time, including 2,000 fully employed unofficial collaborators, 13,073 soldiers and 2,232 officers of GDR army,[21] along with 173,081 unofficial informants inside GDR[22] and 1,553 informants in West Germany.[23] Regular commissioned Stasi officers were recruited from conscripts who had been honourably discharged from their 18 months’ compulsory military service, had been members of the SED, had had a high level of participation in the Party’s youth wing’s activities and had been Stasi informers during their service in the Military. The candidates would then have to be recommended by their military unit political officers and Stasi agents, the local chiefs of the District (Bezirk) Stasi and Volkspolizei office, of the district in which they were permanently resident, and the District Secretary of the SED. These candidates were then made to sit through several tests and exams, which identified their intellectual capacity to be an officer, and their political reliability. University graduates who had completed their military service did not need to take these tests and exams. They then attended a two-year officer training programme at the Stasi college (Hochschule) in Potsdam. Less mentally and academically endowed candidates were made ordinary technicians and attended a one-year technology-intensive course for non-commissioned officers. By 1995, some 174,000 inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs) Stasi informants had been identified, almost 2.5% of East Germany’s population between the ages of 18 and 60.[18] 10,000 IMs were under 18 years of age.[18] From the volume of material destroyed in the final days of the regime, the office of the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records (BStU) believes that there could have been as many as 500,000 informers.[18] A former Stasi colonel who served in the counterintelligence directorate estimated that the figure could be as high as 2 million if occasional informants were included.[18] There is significant debate about how many IMs were actually employed.