These chilling images of people caught trying to escape East Germany are portraits of desperation
They were forced to reenact their failed escapes
On the evening of January 15, 1990, about two months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, crowds began forming outside the Stasi headquarters in former East Berlin, chanting, “Stasi raus” (“Stasi out!”), eventually overwhelming police officers outside the building and storming the inside.
Inside the building, they found files on six million people — almost a third of East Germany’s population at the time — and seized some 45 million pages of shredded and half-shredded documents. But even more compelling than the documents were the photographs: albums and albums of them, taken by the Stasi, carefully documenting foiled escape attempts from East Germany.
The photographs, the earliest of them in black-and-white, the later ones in color, were taken for training purposes. Even though the majority of faces are blurred out for privacy reasons, they’re still haunting. The Stasi didn’t just take mug shots of the accused; they made the accused reenact their crimes of fleeing East Germany — Republikflucht, as such desertions were called — even if that meant making mothers pose clutching babies, or elderly parents pretend to hide in the trunks of cars.
Now in the possession of the German government and the Federal Stasi Records Agency — and available to the public, researchers, and journalists — the pictures are a chilling reminder of a time when governments thought a wall was the solution to all their problems.
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