Word: german
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Thousands of Opel workers in Germany are breathing a huge sigh of relief after the last-minute deal to rescue GM's European operations. German unions had always supported Austrian-Canadian company Magna International's takeover of GM Europe, wary that the rival bid from Fiat was just an attempt, as one union official put it, to "pinch German engineering." The unions regard Magna as an innovative company that put forward the best plan to secure the long-term future of Opel. At the carmaker's headquarters in the town of Rüsselsheim near Frankfurt, workers were hugging friends...
...Klaus Franz, the head of Opel's works council tells TIME. "Of course I'm also worried about my U.S. friends, but I'm happy the bridge financing plan for Opel has worked out and all GM's European assets have been guaranteed," he says. But despite the German relief, major sacrifices among GM Europe's 55,000 workforce are unavoidable in the coming months. (See pictures of General Motors Factory-scapes...
...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 to move to East Germany, but he was persuaded to stay...
...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...
...files to suggest that Kurras was acting on direct Stasi orders to kill Ohnesorg. But the discovery that it was a Stasi spy who shot him has raised new questions about the history of the student movement. Prime among them: how might the student protest movement have developed if Germans had known at the time that Kurras was in the pay of the East German secret police? The question is all the more sensitive since that movement spawned the Red Army Faction, postwar Europe's most deadly terrorist organization, which killed at least 34 people in a series of flamboyant...