Simon Wiesenthal made his name as a Nazi hunter, spending decades tracking down those members of the Third Reich who had managed to escape justice by fleeing abroad. His analysis of the East German secret police was a very blunt one: “The Stasi was much, much worse than the Gestapo, if you consider only the oppression of its own people. The Gestapo had 40,000 officials watching a country of 80 million, while the Stasi employed 102,000 to control only 17 million.”[cdxxii] Roughly 2% of the East German population were informants, an enormously large percentage once one stops to think about it.
