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The Staatsicherheit was the Secret Police of East Germany. Their job was to find dissenters and torture them into becoming production members of the state. And boy, were they good at their job! [1] At their height, they had one officer for every 166 East German citizens. The FSB in Putin's Russia can work about 1 officer for 273 citizens! The best the Gestapo could manage was one officer for 2000 citizens!
Being people of good humour, the East Germans had numerous jokes about their Big Brothers:
- How can you tell that the Stasi has bugged your apartment? There's a new cabinet in it. [they may have had a lot of people, but their tech was horrible]
Just about anything that takes place in East Germany will include the Stasi.
- The Lives of Others: the central character is a member of the Stasi
- Night Crossing: referred to as the "SSD", or Staatsicherheitdienst
- Appears in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
- Anna Funder's Stasiland is a non-fiction novel following Australian journalist Funder as she collects stories from ex-Stasi men and their victims.
- ↑ An old saying is "The Gestapo were bone breakers. The Stasi were soul breakers."