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Directive No. 1/76 on the Development and Revision of Operational Procedures, which outlined the use of Zersetzung in the Ministry for State Security. The Ministry for State Security (German: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS), commonly known as the Stasi, was the main security service of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany or GDR), and defined Zersetzung in its 1985 dictionary ...
It had secret police, commonly referred to as the Stasi, which made use of an extensive network of civilian informers. [30] From the 1970's, the main form of political, cultural and religious repression practiced by the Stasi, was a form of 'silent repression' [ 31 ] called Zersetzung ("Decomposition").
Zersetzung was designed to side-track and "switch off" perceived enemies so that they would lose the will to continue any "inappropriate" activities. [n 1] Anyone who was judged to display politically, culturally, or religiously incorrect attitudes could be viewed as a "hostile-negative" [38] force and targeted with Zersetzung methods. For this ...
The Stasi would often identify refusal to collaborate, using another jargon term, as "enemy-negative conduct" ("feindlich-negative Haltung"), which frequently resulted in what they termed "Zersetzungsmaßnahmen", a term for which no very direct English translation is available, but for one form of which a definition has been provided that begins:
Wehrkraftzersetzung is composed of three parts: Wehr means 'defence' (a cognate of the English word "war"); kraft means power, force, strength; zersetzung means decay, decomposition, disintegration, dissolving (especially by acids), but also subversion or corruption.
BERLIN (Reuters) -A former officer for Communist East Germany's Stasi secret police was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Monday for the fatal shooting of a Polish firefighter at a border ...
By 1989, it was estimated there were at least 189000 informants in every sphere of East German society, and files on millions of citizens. By the late 1970s, the Stasi had moved from overt persecution to a programme of psychological harassment known as Zersetzung. The goal was the "fragmentation, paralysis, disorganization, and isolation of the ...
3 More references in Stasi article. 1 comment. 4 Zersetzung-Proof People. 1 comment. ... 6 'Alo. 1 comment. 7 The accusation vs. the methods of Zersetzung. 1 comment ...