Communist Secret Files

Berlin - Like an unwanted gift that keeps on giving, files from the spying machines of the former East European dictatorships continue to come into the public eye 20 years after their creators did their utmost to destroy them. Sometimes the revelations border on the asinine - a recent report showed that the East German secret police, or Stasi, kept tabs on Michael Jackson fans to see who had pro-Western tendencies.

Others are weightier, such as when accusations of his cooperation with the state secret police forced Warsaw's Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus to resign in a blaze of controversy in 2007.

But what is clear is that secret police agencies across Eastern Europe employed thousands of agents and informers to track every detail of peoples' lives, keeping an eye out for any sign of subversive behaviour.

In one noted case, Vera Lengsfeld, an activist in East Germany and a politician in today's Germany, discovered while viewing her files that her husband had been a secret informant against her.

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