Eyes Everywhere - Runde Ecke
Behind this unassuming Wilhelminian facade, Leipzig's Stasi district headquarters operated one of East Germany's most intensive surveillance machines, with 2,440 full-time officers and roughly 10,000 unofficial informers watching every corner of the city.
À propos de ce lieu
From 1950 to 1989, the building at Dittrichring 24 housed the Bezirksverwaltung für Staatssicherheit Leipzig, the local arm of East Germany's Ministry for State Security. By the end of 1988, the Leipzig district employed nearly 3,800 Stasi officers across the region, with 2,440 of them based in this single building. Around 200 clerks worked in shifts steaming open and resealing up to 1,200 letters a day before returning them to the postal system. In the basement, staff kept small sealed glass jars containing fabric swabs of individuals' body scent, so that trained tracker dogs could follow suspects hours or days later. On 4 December 1989, six weeks after the Wall fell, citizens arriving from a Monday peace march forced their way into this building. Staff had been quietly sent home, and the Stasi's attempt to hold the door by all means except violence failed. A citizens' committee took control overnight and ensured none of the remaining files were destroyed. Today, roughly ten kilometres of those files line the shelves of the museum Stasi, Macht und Banalität, which has operated here since August 1990.
À retenir
- 2440 full-time Stasi officers — The number of secret police based in this single Leipzig HQ building on 31 October 1989, with nearly 3,800 more deployed across the wider district.
- 10000 unofficial informers — Roughly this many ordinary Leipzig citizens were secretly reporting on their neighbours, colleagues and sometimes their own families for the Stasi.
- 10 km of files — The approximate length of shelving needed to store all the surveillance records now preserved in the museum archive, saved from destruction on one decisive December night.