'Puzzle Women': Piecing together the files destroyed by East Germany's secret police
In 1989, East Germany's Communist regime collapsed with the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the Berlin headquarters of the Stasi, the all-powerful secret police, panicked orders were given to immediately destroy the millions of cards and files that documented decades of police surveillance. When the crowd finally entered the Stasi headquarters, 111 kilometres of archives and 16,000 sacks full of paper strips – the remains of millions of shredded or ripped-up files – were saved by East German citizens.
