'Puzzlers' reassemble shredded Stasi files, bit by bit

[steven johnson]

Many former Stasi informants in the former East Germany want the truth buried with shredded documents that were never burned after the fall of the GDR. Ah, the sins of our youth -- tsk, tsk.

The Stasi, which is said to have had more than 170,000 informers, succeeded in destroying thousands of files, shredding them in machines called "ripping wolves" until the equipment broke down under the weight of the task, then through burning and pulping (the contents, held in buckets in the archive, are known as "Stasi porridge"). At the end, agents tore them by bare hand as the teeming crowds smashed down their doors.

The shredded files, which any good German bureaucrat knows as vorvernichtete Akten or pre-destroyed files -- fill a staggering 16,000 mail sacks that contain about 45 million individual pages, or 600 million scraps. Thus far, the puzzlers are 440 sacks into the process.

The thousands who apply to see their files would probably agree. In addition to providing a historical record, the files can help people clear their names. Some, for instance, apply to gain proof that they were unjustly imprisoned by East German authorities, which may help them clear criminal records that prevent them from getting jobs or help them claim compensation for being persecuted.

The puzzlers are eventually due to be assisted by a computerized machine, known as the E-Puzzler, developed by scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute, the same lab that created the MP3 format. The E-Puzzler, believed to be the world's most sophisticated pattern-recognition machine, would work by scanning the small paper strips into a computer image file and analyzing their texture, shape, thickness and tear patterns to compose a digitalized image of a whole document.



'Puzzlers' reassemble shredded Stasi files, bit by bit

[Robb]

1. Fascinating

My brain can just barely wrap around how the technology to re-assemble this stuff would work. :)

[Chulanowa]

5. The Iranians used eyeballs and rubber bands on boards

And you can buy a book of the CIA documents they found in Tehran - which will be confiscated at customs as "classified" :)

[underseasurveyor]

2. Holy crap

16,000 mail bags and they're only into the 440th sack? Whew I guess that would be a great job to have if you like super tedious work. It would drive me nutz.

Best of luck to em tho.

[populistdriven]

3. we need to do this with dick cheneys shredded files!

Or did he burn them all?

[truedelphi]

4. We just watched the 3 star film "The Lives of Other People"

About the Stasi, and it really touched both of us. It showed how by the early 1980's almost the entire East German society was sick of the weirdness of being a police state.

If the files had been immediately shredded, then the final scenes would not have been able to be written that beautifully (Do not want to be a "Spoiler" -- just try and get this movie and see it for yourselves.)

It is a movie that shows how our individual thinking and small "insignificant" actions affect EVERYTHING. The most insignificant rebellion can be a starting point to a larger movement down the road.