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