- Joined
- Jul 28, 2003
Some facts:
By the most conservative estimates by 1989 Stasi had 91000 full time employees and 300000 informants (wikipedia); some put the figure of informants closer to half a million. Also, there were about 3000 informants among athletes in 1989 (source). Now, if there were 3000 informants among athletes, figure out how many GDR athletes could travel abroad, and yes, you will get the picture - most GDR athletes cooperated with the Stasi.
IMHO you're making an erroneous assumption here. You're assuming that once someone became a Stasi informant they were no longer suspects. That's simply not the case. Clearly, when an athlete becomes an informant only for the sake of his career, his heart is no really in it, and he may very well say something "subversive", and he could certainly try to defect. So no, the idea was indeed for informants to spy on each other.
Also, you have to understand how extensive the system is. The article I cited above describes one informant who passed on "information about his colleagues' extra-marital affairs, sexual orientation, drinking habits and political leanings." My guess is that the current investigations would tend to dismiss those informants who only ended up infoming on their cheating drunkard friends.
I do not really have a good response to that. However, let me take an educated guess. I would guess that most of those 157 officials were contacted by Stasi, probably agreed to spy, and then managed to scrape by pretending to have nothing of value to report.
Let me also mention that I do not excuse Steuer's actions. Unfortunately, neither German investigators not Steuer himself make it easy to form a real opinion in his case because we simply don't know what exactly his involvement did. I do not trust the reports that simply say that it was "serious", nor do I trust Steuer who is denying it all.
Finally, two little anecdotes. Back in Russia in the 80's, my parents had two friends who were contacted by KGB with orders to inform. Both were family men in their mid-30's, both Jewish, by now both live in the US. Both were engineers, never travelled abroad, but had hobbies that often put them in contact with foreigners.
One guy, F, refused flat out. A week later, F got a draft notice - he was being sent to Afghanistan (he was never in the military before, but all men are considered reservists, and all men who got higher education had a military rank, usually a leutenant). At first he ignored it, but draft notices kept coming, and it became clear that they were serious. This being Russia, of course, there was a way out. With every person F knew engaged in a search, finally someone found some secretary who for a large bribe moved his folder from one pile to another. He never got another notice again.
The other guy, G, did not refuse, because he understood that while he had no intention to cooperate refusing flat out was really asking for it. He told all of his close friends to be careful about what they say in front of him for the time being - there was always a possibility that there was another informant in a group, and G wouldn't very well be able to deny hearing something that another informant has alerady heard. Then for about a year he played dumb, did not pass on any information, but did not refuse either. Finally, the agents got exasperated with him and went away. There were no reprisals as in the case with F because he did not actually refuse to do anything.
What I'm trying to demonstrate here is how incredible difficult it was to shake off KGB even for mature men who did see the moral wrong of informing, and were willing to do just about anything to avoid it. Now compare it with a boy of 14 being approached with those same requests. Whereas both F and G had their careers, families, and hobbies, Steuer at 14 only had his athletic career to live for. Therefore, the fact that he technically became an informant is not something I would consider a problem. What could very well be a problem is a kind of information he passed on, and that is not something we can judge at this point.
Sorry for the extra long post, I usually try to avoid it.
