German politicians criticize Stasi documents institute as additional facts emerge

Following the revelation of a document detailing former East Germany’s policy of “shoot-to-kill” at the border with West Germany, politicians are demanding a more comprehensive authority for addressing Stasi activities, Deutsche Welle reports. On August 12, a spokesman for the Stasi archive confirmed that the “shoot-to-kill” passage had been printed in a historian’s book on East Germany in 1997 but said it had not reached a wider audience.
German politicians said that the authority currently overseeing the archives of the former East German Ministry for State Security Service, Stasi, should be integrated more into other German institutions.
Reinhard Grindel, of the Christian Democrats said the review of the Stasi documents should not be left up to the “Birthler Authority,” the unofficial name given to the government office, headed by Marianne Birthler, responsible for researching the history of the GDR’s Stasi. Grindel told broadcaster RBB that the mistakes made regarding the recent resurfacing of documents about the “shoot-to-kill” policy of the Stasi at the Berlin Wall showed that the responsibility for the investigation of such texts should be given to a research association, to which the Birthler office should belong. He also recommended that the Stasi document office be integrated into the German Federal Archives in Koblenz.
Dietmar Bartsch of the Left Party called the Stasi document office’s work “ahistorical and unscientific.”
German Culture Secretary Bernd Neumann also said that in the mid-term the Birthler office should be integrated into the Federal Archives.
According to Deutsche Welle, Birthler has had to deflect criticism over the past few days that she made the announcement of the Stasi “shoot-to-kill” policy just days before the 46th anniversary of the start of the construction of the Berlin Wall. Some have accused her of “sensationalizing” information to gain attention for her office, particularly because the data had already surfaced 10 years ago in a scientific journal.
Klaus Schroeder, of the SED-Staat research center at the University of Berlin, told the daily Leipziger Volkszeitung that Birthler “without doing thorough research beforehand, left herself get caught up in the idea of announcing information that made it appear like an historically new, sensational discovery.”
He considers that discredits the institution.