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A few days ago, the Financial Times Deutschland revealed that 17,000 civil servants in the current German administration had close links with the Stasi East German secret police. Tagesspiegel ironically reports that the news has sparked "an uproar. The morally irreproachable Federal Republic of Germany, which was supposed to wipe away the traces of its unscrupulous totalitarian neighbour, opened its doors to a flood of spooks." The question is "How should Germany react? Or should it react?"
The Berlin daily explains that the under the terms of the unification treaty signed in 1990, all East German civil servants were vetted for association with the secret police. A lot of the Stasi were fired but many of them succeeded in keeping their jobs, and there was a wide variation in vetting procedures between different former East German states. Some applied very strict selection criteria, while others proved to be much more superficial. For Tagesspiegel, it is important to bear in mind that in the 1990s, vetting was impeded by the fact that 75% of the East German secret police archives had yet to be studied. The daily goes on to argue that "today, we have much better view of what happened. Now is the right time to come to terms with the past."
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