The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [104]
This binder bulges with cross-references to Operative Personenkontrolle files (OPK), a dossier opened on any individual selected by the Stasi for further investigation. Each OPK began with a formulaic description: gender, age, height, hair colour, eye colour, distinguishing features. Then came an opening report, followed by a plan of action, requests for clandestine checks, with responses ranging from 'provisional arrest' to 'arrest' and from 'search' to 'interrogation'.
There were school and university records, curriculum vitae and statements taken from neighbours, co-workers, friends and family. There were maps of housing estates and written comments: 'Is it possible to get the keys to his apartment without telling him?' Or: 'Does this "object" have a mistress we could approach?' And: 'We are not aware of the address of Countess Schwerin in the Federal Republic of Germany. The source of the information is one of her relatives and has been passed to us by a reliable and trustworthy informant.'
From this ball of information some individuals became Operativ Vorgangs or OVs, targets for a full-blown investigation. Agents used a range of technological devices that made the task of peeling back the layers of privacy easier. Again more choices: 'A' measures (telephone tapping) or 'B' measures (bugging).30 Odour samples were requested, collected from crotches and armpits of 'hostile-negative elements'. The Stasi transferred the swatches to their 'smell conserve', to be brought out along with packs of hounds called the schnuffeltieren if a surveillance 'object' went AWOL.
There was also the van painted with the cheery slogan 'Fresh Fish from Rostock!' In GDR times everyone knew that inside were men and women stacked like trays of silvery mackerel, up to seven prisoners in one small vehicle that drove repeatedly around the suburban streets so everyone would know. Round up in daylight. Interrogate at night. The proliferating paranoia drove citizens to extraordinary lengths to protect themselves, secreting miniature pencils in body cavities when they feared the agents of the state were approaching, so that later they might have something with which to scribble a plea for help. The Stasi responded to by introducing the 'penis search'.31
Judging from the number of surveillance forms and OV files that are contained in this one binder, Enke was evidently in pursuit of a rich new seam of intelligence about the Amber Room.
Here we at last come across a small reference to the 1959 articles in Freie Welt (written by Gerhard Strauss, identifying for the first time that the Amber Room had survived the war). Enke wrote that much of the intelligence that he was acting upon came from readers of Freie Welt. 'Stolz', the former Stasi agent we had met in the Berlin Swissotel, had been right. By disguising the source of the Freie Welt story (the Stasi and KGB), readers had responded in their hundreds.
However, frustratingly, almost every detail that identified these readers and what they had volunteered, has been blacked out. All our potential leads and therefore any insight into the Stasi's thinking on the Amber Room have been obliterated by the Ministry of Truth's censors.
In some files only the 'Reg-Nr', the case number for a particular 'object', remains and the Ministry of Truth will not give us access to the corresponding name index. What has not been obscured was written deploying the terminology of Erich Mielke's Dictionary of Political-Operative Work, a 500-page lexicon of terms and definitions that was into its third edition when the Berlin Wall fell.32
Take the word 'hate'. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as 'A feeling of intense dislike, anger, hostility, or animosity'. The minister's favourite word, hass, was defined as 'one of the fundamental features of the passionate and irreconcilable