Secret East German Stasi files may yield secrets soon

Berlin - German investigators are one step closer to reading thousands of secret service files, torn up during the final days of the East German regime, after a breakthrough in technology. The high-tech computer being built to reassemble millions of hastily torn-up files has learned to distinguish handwriting from typeface, project leader Joachim Haeussler told the German Press Agency dpa.

In addition, Hauessler said the machine can now recognize the color and contour of destroyed documents.

The Stasi record office, which looks after the former East Germany's secret police files, had hoped to begin 2010 making use of the new system to decipher 400 sackloads of documents, hastily torn up by ministry officials before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Technical delays at the start of the project three years ago mean this won't be possible before 2011, or early 2012.

In the final months of the East German regime, members of the security service resorted to tearing documents by hand, as their shredders overheated and stopped working in the panic to destroy evidence.

German authorities now hold up to 600 million fragments of paper, thought to contain key information about the final months of 1989. Since the mid-1990s, people have been tasked with painstakingly reassembling these documents by hand.

In many cases each page was torn twice, resulting in four pieces which landed in the same bag. However, the sheer volume of files has made the process slow and laborious.

After its 40-year existence, the Stasi left a legacy amounting to 160 kilometers worth of spy reports, recording suspicious-looking activities relating to the East German state.

In the months leading up to reunification, angry East Germans stormed the Stasi headquarters in East Berlin in January 1990, an event that will be memorialized in the coming days in Germany.

Source: Earth Times.
Link: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/302758,secret-east-german-stasi-files-may-yield-secrets-soon.html.