Wolfgang Schwanitz, the former head of Communist East-Germany’s infamous secret police, the Stasi, has died aged 91.
Wolfgang Schwanitz, the final head of East-Germany’s infamous Stasi Secret Police, died on February 1, 2022, at the age of 91.
Schwanitz served as head of the organisation during the dying days of the Communist republic.
According to a report by Der Spiegel, Schwanitz’s death was announced by his publisher, the man having passed away in his apartment in Berlin.
Having served as the deputy of the East-German Ministry for State Security under the infamous Erich Mielke — the previous Stasi head who was convicted for murder in 1993 — Schwanitz became the head of the successor organisation, the Office for National Security, after his superior was forced to resign over the deteriorating state of the GDR.
Following the collapse of Communist East-Germany, Schwanitz became an author, writing several books on the work of East-German state security.
Critics have lambasted Schwanitz books as being revisionist, with controversy emerging in 2002 after a Stasi victim was thrown out of an event for one of Schwanitz books after expressing criticism.
At one event, the ex-GDR official was even forced to vehemently deny signing a “murder warrant” after being challenged by a critic, according to a report by B.Z. Berlin.
Schwanitz had also claimed that the East-German attempt at socialism was justified at the time, and that the actions of the Stasi were justified in protecting the socialist project.
“There is no reason to regret,” Der Spiegel reports the ex-secret police head as saying.
Developing 0ut of the security apparatus put in place by the Soviets in Eastern Germany after the Second World War, the Stasi was officially formed by the Communist German state in 1950.
Under the leadership of Erich Mielke from 1957-1989, the organisation soon became one of the most hated and feared institutions in the GDR.
Responsible for intelligence gathering both at home and abroad, the Stasi were infamous for supporting the operations of terrorist organisations in Capitalist West Germany, as well as for compiling files on civilians — including the current German Chancellor Olaf Scholz — via its network of between 500,000 and two million collaborators.
Shortly before the full dissolution of the GDR in October of 1990, the headquarters of the Stasi — where countless documents were in the process of being shredded by officials — was stormed by protesters in the hopes of preserving the sensitive documents.
As a result, Deutsche Welle reports that 111 kilometres of shelving worth of documents were kept intact, with a further 16,000 bags of paper shreds also being recovered.
Of this 16,000, a total of 23 bags worth of documents have been reconstructed, with the hopes that future technology may be able to speed up the process of recovering the shredded documents in the future for the historical record.