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By Root 1769 0

to it Soviet interrogation records from the end of the war, a starter kit on which to build its own domestic intelligence service. But under the guiding hand of Erich Mielke, who became Minister for State Security in 1957, it underwent a kind of Marxist mitosis, its founding departments of counter-espionage, sabotage, and subversion subdividing into daughter offices responsible for coercion, intrusion and betrayal: fifteen Directorates, twelve Departments, four secretariats, the Dynamo Sports Club, the Feliks Dzerzhinsky Guard Regiment (named after the chief of the Soviet Union's Cheka), a publishing wing, a law school, a medical agency, as well as four work groups, including the fabulously titled Central Workgroup for Secrecy. At its height, the Stasi employed 91,016 staff and deployed a network of 180,000 informants (one for every sixty-two civilians).2

The MGB file on Strauss that we had been sent from St Petersburg contained references to three interrogations of the doctor carried out in Berlin between 1945 and 1949. Copies of these statements should be here, in the Ministry of Truth. 'Then there is the four-eyes principle.' The functionary is still talking. We can see from a typed pro forma that she is nowhere near the end of her presentation. It is now 11.30 a.m. 'The principle is designed to absolutely prevent intrusion into personal data.' There is no point mentioning that intrusion into the personal enabled the creation of these files in the first place. 'So a minimum of two members of staff are in the room with a file at any time. But these files are not actually here, so to speak, only copies. The originals are where they have always been, in another building, now controlled by the Federal Authority for the Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR.' She protectively strokes a binder.

All original Stasi and Nazi-era documents remain at the defunct ministry's headquarters three miles east, in Berlin-Lichtenberg, locked inside steel cabinets specially designed to bear the weight of a nation's secrets. The Stasi inherited this site, a block-and-a-half compound on Normannenstrasse, in 1950. Our functionary in pearls shoots out statistics: 'Side by side the paper files would stretch 122,000 metres... Microfiche: 46,500 metres. 360,000 photos. Negatives: 600,000. Slides: 24,000. Videos: 3,850. Movies: 730. And 1OO,OOO sound recordings.'

No one would really know the scale of the Stasi's enterprise until 15 January 1990, when pro-democracy campaigners of the recently formed GDR Citizen's Committee occupied the block-and-a-half and broke into the central archive. Here they found huge motorized card indexes of GDR citizens. Above were seven reinforced floors that held the files themselves and below a vast empty room lined with copper to prevent electronic interference, inside which the Stasi had been planning to install a supercomputer to accelerate the crunching of surveillance intelligence.3

The functionary smiles. 'We are the reading supervisors. We cannot talk to those working in the central archive at the former ministry. We are prohibited from visiting the Stasi central archive - as are you. All decisions on what is released by them are final,' she declares. Those files that are approved for public consumption are sent down Karl-Marx-Allee to Otto-Braun-Strasse under guarded transport, where reading supervisors like the one before us will censor them yet again.

'Can I be frank with you?' She has so far. 'You will see only a skeleton of information as we only have a fraction of what the Stasi actually produced. What is preserved in our archive are the deactivated papers. Cold cases put back in the store. Files on live objects or those out in the field have all vanished.'

Strauss died in 1984, six years before the Stasi ceased to exist. Is this enough time for him to become a cold case? And what of Kuchumov (dead in 1993)? And Schlossoberinspektor Henkensiefken (who, the author of the cryptic doodle insisted, was a vital source for Kuchumov)? We have no idea if he is alive or dead. It is now n.40