Word: berlins
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...Chancellor got her way. On Saturday, a beaming Angela Merkel held a news conference in Berlin to announce the breakthrough. There was no hiding her delight, and relief. "The deal is a real chance for Opel workers," Angela Merkel said. "The workers aren't responsible for this crisis. The mismanagement at GM in the U.S. was to blame," she said. (Read about Merkel in the TIME...
...researcher working for a government agency that manages the old communist regime's secret police records stumbled across the new information as she was carrying out research on another project. The former West Berlin cop, Karl-Heinz Kurras, has a bulging Stasi file of some 7,000 pages. Kurras, it turns out, was a member of the East German SED Communist Party as well as an active Stasi agent. He joined the West Berlin police at the age of 22 in 1950, but five years later he switched sides and went to the authorities in East Berlin. Kurras wanted...
...discovery of the new Kurras file confirms the view that the East German secret police, the Stasi, was also active in West Berlin and West Germany and had agents in important positions, as well as being active of course in East Germany," says Hans Altendorf, director of the Birthler Agency, which preserves the old Stasi files. "But no one would have thought that Kurras, a police officer, was also a Stasi man. It was unimaginable for us, for researchers, historians and ordinary Germans...
...access to the files kept on them by the Stasi. According to the Birthler Agency, 87,000 applications to examine the files were submitted in 2008, fewer than the 100,000 applications that were sent in 2007. But this year's 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall has sparked renewed interest and heightened demand. "It's important that the Stasi files are open and there is access for victims, researchers, historians and Germans to learn about their personal histories," says Altendorf. "Many people need a certain distance to deal with their own past, and that could explain...
...Kurras, now 81, lives in Berlin with his wife, but his retirement is no longer peaceful. The Interior Minister of Berlin, Erhart Koerting, has called for Kurras' police pension to be put under review. And Berlin prosecutors have retrieved the old Kurras files from the archives in order to review the criminal case. However those issues play out for Kurras, the revelations offer further proof that the final version of Germany's shadowy postwar history has yet to be written - indeed, it may never...