Section 15: Rooms 114 and 114c

Rundgang 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
Postal and telephone surveillance – Departments M and 26

The Ministry of State Security examined 1,500–2,000 suspicious letters every day which were posted or arrived in the Leipzig district; it also actively searched for conspicuous items of mail. Violation of the privacy of the post was hence not just limited to a few isolated cases but practised in a thoroughly institutionalised form. Department M built up a storehouse and tried to collect a sample of the handwriting of everyone from the Leipzig area who sent letters abroad. In order to be able to accurately classify personal data, a copy of their ID card was ‘obtained’ from the police and also filed. In Leipzig this file comprised some 100,000 addresses.

Department M was especially meticulous in its examination of correspondence with non-Communist countries and for example extracted cash from envelopes. About 3–5% of the letters opened never reached the recipient because they were simply retained by the Stasi.

Several pieces of equipment used for postal surveillance, including for opening, examining, copying, gluing and flattening letters, have been preserved for the museum. All relevant letters (photocopies or originals) were sent to the responsible department for further processing. A copy of every telegram received in the Leipzig district was also printed at the Stasi’s district headquarters.

The staff in Department 26 tapped telephone conversations, which were diverted directly to the “Runde Ecke” through cables specially laid for this purpose. The new extension to the Stasi’s headquarters contained a phone-tapping centre which enabled up to 300 conversations to be recorded simultaneously – an enormous number bearing in mind the very few private telephones which existed in East Germany. The conversations were written down word for word and the tapes were used again. A major part of the tapes Stasi was using were confiscated from parcels coming from West Germany. Apart from tapping telephone conversations, Department 26 was also responsible for various technical forms of surveillance, for example for the use of hidden microphones (bugs).