On January 15, 1990, thousands stood in front of the Ministry for State Security, the Stasi, finally wanting to paralyze the headquarters of the Secret Police. When the gate opened from the inside, the crowd entered a dark courtyard, only one building was lit up. There, glass was shattered, sheets of paper sailed out of the windows, doors were broken open inside. The only illuminated building was a supply wing. There were stores, a hair salon, a cinema. Obviously neither the secret police’s leaders nor any files were here. Soon the suspicion arose that the secret service agents had prepared themselves and were steering the crowd to where nothing significant could be found. And that they were responsible that evening for the destruction that was to burden the Peaceful Revolution.
As the “Shield and Sword of the Party”, the Stasi was the most important instrument of repression of the state party SED. One in fifty adults in the GDR worked for them. Two-thirds of them were informers, the rest worked full-time for the secret service. They monitored the population and filled files with information about millions of people. They fought opposition groups with devious and violent means. They were directed from Berlin-Lichtenberg; 7,000 people worked in the tightly guarded headquarters.
In early December 1989, opposition members occupied the 14 district administrations of the Stasi from Dresden to Rostock without violence. In the headquarters, of all places, the secret service could continue to work undisturbed. The democratic groups in the capital had a lot to do; they wanted to make politics for the whole GDR. At the Round Table, they negotiated with those in power about liberal reforms. There, they demanded the immediate dissolution of the Stasi. However, the government was still led by the state party SED, which tried to delay the process. It had renamed the Stasi to “Office of National Security” and claimed that those monitoring and the attack squads were just normal civil servants. The democratic groups did not want to accept this, and some of their representatives called for a demonstration in front of the Stasi headquarters on January 15. At noon on that day, civil rights activists from all parts of the GDR also arrived there. They no longer wanted to wait for their fellow East Berliners to act. For weeks, the Stasi in Lichtenberg had been destroying files that proved the injustice of the dictatorship.
When the crowd poured through the main gate of the Ministry in the late afternoon of January 15, it looked as if the destruction of evidence was finally over. From then on, the dissolution of the Stasi was supervised by engaged citizens. However, they could not prevent Stasi employees from destroying additional files. The fact that many papers were nevertheless preserved and have been accessible to those affected since 1992 via a new authority was a great achievement of the Peaceful Revolution.
