Absence of german people's rights: the Stasi
Regarded as having been one of the best intelligence agencies in the world, the Ministry for State Security, or the Stasi, was the German Democratic Republic's equivalent mix of the National Security Agency (NSA-US) and the Soviet Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (KGB-USSR).
To keep the Soviet Union in the loop, as it was required for the other Warsaw Pact states, the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB) embedded units into each of the eight Stasi directorates. Due to the two organizations being so close and working so well together, the Soviet Union invited the Stasi to embed some of its units in Moscow and Leningrad to watch East German tourists who visited the fellow Communist state.
Werner Fischer, a human rights activists and a citizen of the GDR at the time of the fall of the wall, was a person of interest to the Stasi. To gather intelligence on him, the Stasi employed the only person that Werner could trust: his mother, Erna Fischer. Over four years, she helped compile 67 files that the Stasi kept on him, all of which Werner read and discovered that the information was from his mother. In an interview in 2002 with the Telegraph Newspaper in London, Werner told why he went public with the story:
"I decided to go public with this story because it reveals something important about the nature of East Germany. I was an enemy of the state to my mother," Mr Fischer told the Telegraph. "As far as I am concerned, whatever relationship I had with her is now over. I do not intend to see her again".
-- Werner Fischer in an interview with the Telegraph.
For her service to the state, she was awarded the East German Service Cross, as well as paid for the four years she gathered intelligence. She was one of an estimated 2 million informers used by the Stasi to, against human rights, spy on the general public for threats against the state.
To keep the Soviet Union in the loop, as it was required for the other Warsaw Pact states, the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB) embedded units into each of the eight Stasi directorates. Due to the two organizations being so close and working so well together, the Soviet Union invited the Stasi to embed some of its units in Moscow and Leningrad to watch East German tourists who visited the fellow Communist state.
Werner Fischer, a human rights activists and a citizen of the GDR at the time of the fall of the wall, was a person of interest to the Stasi. To gather intelligence on him, the Stasi employed the only person that Werner could trust: his mother, Erna Fischer. Over four years, she helped compile 67 files that the Stasi kept on him, all of which Werner read and discovered that the information was from his mother. In an interview in 2002 with the Telegraph Newspaper in London, Werner told why he went public with the story:
"I decided to go public with this story because it reveals something important about the nature of East Germany. I was an enemy of the state to my mother," Mr Fischer told the Telegraph. "As far as I am concerned, whatever relationship I had with her is now over. I do not intend to see her again".
-- Werner Fischer in an interview with the Telegraph.
For her service to the state, she was awarded the East German Service Cross, as well as paid for the four years she gathered intelligence. She was one of an estimated 2 million informers used by the Stasi to, against human rights, spy on the general public for threats against the state.