Here is a translation of a German article on Merkel's relationship to the STASI.

http:// www.chronik-berlin.de/news/stasi_merkel.htm

Part 1

Merkel’s Stasi Environment

http:// www.chronik-berlin.de/news/stasi_merkel.htm

by Rolf Ehlers

When we want to evaluate what we can expect from a person, we always first inquire after his origins. We see to make a picture of him for ourselves, in which we feel out in what kind of environment someone lived in the past: who his friends and relatives were and what his convictions were and are. To not do this is called being naïve…But we German voters have been left in the dark for years about the environment from which our Chancellor comes. None of the respected newspapers have reported about this in more than a superficial way until now, in the Schweizmagazin (Swiss Magazine) from May 29, 2008, titled: “German Chancellor Merkel a STASI Snitch?”

In Anne Will’s talk show Oskar Lafontaine, who saw himself subjected to fierce attacks against his collaboration with Gregor Gysi as a supposed STASI informer, showed that it is in fact Chancellor Merkel herself who was an activist of the DDR system.

Information buried in the archives and which after reunification was not destroyed in the great effort to obliterate documents have already been commonly known to many for years. But their publication is “not opportune.” Apparently it pleases people with the authority to redact and publish [this information], or those with authority over them to protect Mrs. Merkel from all accusations. Do these people know themselves who they are holding hands with?

Angela Dorothea Kasner’s connections with the DDR regime (she took the name Merkel with her first marriage and kept it after entering into her second) are bound closely together with her family environment and her personal and political friends, which were almost without exception intertwined with the STASI. In this environment leading roles are played by her father, Horst Kasner, her life’s partner of many years Michael Schindhelm, Clemence de Maiziere as well as his offspring Lothar and Thomas de Maziere, Wolfgang Schnur, Manfred Stolpe, Klaus Gysi and Guenther Krause—with the exception of Thomas de Maiziere all of them full-blooded STASIs, if not strictly proved, then certainly suspect…

The Father: Devourer of Capitalists in Church Politics

Merkel’s father, Horst Kasner, was not a humble pastor, but instead an important man in DDR church politics, in which he together with the influential Clemence de Maiziere, a registered informant of the STASI advanced the DDR plan with regard to the churches, above all the separation of the Evangelical (Protestant) Church in the DDR from the Evangelical Church of the whole of Germany. He was a member of the Moscow controlled Christian Peace Conference (CFK) and in the State Security (STASI)-linked “Weissenseer Arbeitskreis (Weissensee Workshop)”. He had all the liberties that only the fat cats had: two cars and the right to travel to the West. In a diplomatic mission he traveled with the “National Front” to Italy, where he publicly explained that only the Communist Party of Italy could turn their country around. His own self-chosen biographer, the Christian Democratic Union political scientist Gerd Langguth (who has the reputation for doing serious analysis) informs us that the domineering pastor Horst Kasner “decisively stamped” his daughter Angela. Langguth describes the divine, who in 1954, at the height of the Cold War, crossed over from West to East, and later led in the church (temple?) in Brandenburg an important institution for the formation of clergy, as a sympathizer of the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) state. His political opinions there earned him the nickname “Red Kasner.” Only in the later part of the period of reunification did Angela Merkel first begin noticeably—according to Langguth—to emancipate herself from her father, who was “deeply enmeshed in the DDR system.”

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part 2

“I. M. Bachmann”, [ a pseudonym for a STASI agent], who among others was assigned to Havemann [ professor in E. Germany who criticized the regime], reported of Angela Kasner when she was a student that her “positive attitude regarding Marxism-Leninism” was outstanding. As the leading member of the Free German Youth [*E. German communist youth organization] cadre at her college-prep high school EOS Hermann Matern, she even organized the closing celebration for her graduating class. From the podium in the auditorium she called for donations for FRELIMO in Mozambique and other active communist groups in South Africa in their armed conflicts.

Because she had mastered in a brilliant way the Russian language, she was allowed to travel to Moscow for the “Russian Olympiad” international student competition.

Lover and Colleague: STASI “Informal Collaborator” [*https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unofficial_collaborator]

Likewise, on a student exchange to Moscow, she came to know a physics student named Ulrich Merkel who had been sent there. Her own father married them in 1977. Four years later she was no longer content with the marriage. After her exams she worked at the Central Institute for Physical Chemistry, a branch of the DDR’s Academy of Sciences in Berlin-Adlershof. During this time she was permitted a long stay in Prague and a prolonged private tour of the Soviet Union.

During this time she climbed the ladder of the Free German Youth to become chair of the FDJ Friendship Council and from being a member of the FDJ area leadership to secretary of the FDJ, and was the chair of this communist youth organization in the Academy of Sciences of the DDR. Her bureau worked together with a son of Havemann, whose family was hopelessly torn apart by the separation and divorce of the parents. Of her work at that time she later explained that she had [only] organized the purchase of tickets to the theater. But her function and certainly also her work was [as] the sole secretary for agitation and propaganda. (See politik.de/forum/)

In her work on her dissertation she became acquainted with her new lover in an adjoining office at the Institute—Michael Schindhelm. From 1984-1986 he and Merkel were employed in the elite central office of the Academy of Sciences of the DDR.

Schindhelm had made a formal commitment to be an unofficial collaborator in 1978 during his studies in Voronezh in the Soviet Union. Angela Merkel also made a commitment to the Ministry for State Security of the DDR as a precondition for keeping her work at the elite Institute of the DDR. She claimed that she had declined it.

part 3

The Political Running-board/Footboard Holder [?]: Registered Unofficial Collaborator and STASI Suspicions

With the exception of Helmut Kohl, to whom it apparently made no difference where someone came from, and likewise with the exception of the unspeakable Günther Krause, Angela Merkel’s rise, at the time of reunification, began with the support of people who had uniformly been collaborators with the STASI or who remain under suspicion of having done so. This includes Wolfgang Schnur, who while a STASI [agent] exposed the chairman of Demokratischen Aufbruch (Democratic Awakening– https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Awakening), Lothar Maiziere, who is suspected to be the informal collaborator “Czerny”, and Manfred Stolpe, assumed “secretary” of unofficial collaborators, who was in continual contact with Klaus Gysi, Minister of Culture and State Secretary for Church Questions in the DDR, and also the father of Gregor Gysi.

Ironically, Klaus Schnur had to get her on as the speaker of the board of the DA, and of all things Schnur and Lothar de Maiziere, the father of Horst Kasner’s buddy Clemence de Maiziere and Gunther Krause found occasion to warm Helmut Kohl up to Angela Merkel. The rest of the story is already known. It is interesting that Merkel got into the government as chancellor with the help of Thomas de Maziere, the grandson of her father’s buddy Clemence de Maiziere and the son of her own patron Lothar de Maiziere. Give and take over generations!

The Special Case/Outlier: Merkel’s Spying on the Dissident Robert Havemann

Since 1976, the home of the most important internal critic of the DDR, Robert Havemann, was under observation by the STASI with massive assistance from hundreds of Free German Youth activists. Angela Merkel was also there one day in 1980, completely publicly, at that time already married to Merkel and a leading Free German Youth cadet. For she can be seen in a photo closing in the tightly guarded house of Havemann. This house is located in a quarter of Berlin with which Merkel never had any business. Through her acquaintance with Havemann’s son, who lived outside the home, she would have known Havemann’s associates and not gone there without a special reason. She has the power to dispel the urgent suspicion [this raises]. But she does not deal with her past. Instead, she has led the faithful “Birthler agency” to pixelate the photo everyone recognized. (See schweizmagazin.ch/news/ - from May 9, 2008; spiegel.de/spiegel/ und de.indymedia.org)

part 4

It is interesting that Gregor Gysi, who represented Havemann against the authorities of the DDR—and naturally also against the STASI—has been presented by Merkel’s CDU and her “Birthler Agency” as a STASI informer. His talks with the STASI served to pursue the interests of his clients, and he had success, in that he brought about leniency [for them.]

The Resume

We have a chancellor who, with her entire personal environment and her strange ascent to become chancellor, was surrounded and supported by people firmly anchored in the DDR system, the most important being the State Security Service. It was not until the fall of the Wall that she made herself the opponent of the DDR dictatorship. Until then, she was a loyal servant of the system in which she wanted to continue to rise. And such a woman plays the judge of such weak natured people as Filbinger, who without murmuring let himself be used by the Nazi regime, while always secretly intriguing against it? One can say this much—she is not weak-natured. For whatever she declares as her credo, she also pursues with strong words—until the winds change, at any rate.

Would you want such a woman for your son, that you know has spent her whole life learning and doing the opposite of what she is doing now? It’s not a question of whether one can change their views. But whether or not one has really succeeded [in changing one’s views], and whether or not the track that person has run in before will not later bring him back to his accustomed ways again is an open question.

With Mrs. Merkel there are many reasons to assume that for her, the DDR has not been dead very long. The best example is her speech during the last election campaign, in which she remarked that one must not discuss whether all public places should really be monitored with cameras. She opined that such a thing one sho-uld “simply do.” Just so the STASI also never asked before it did something. If/when we have a chancellor with the unreconstructed mentality of a STASI supporter, nobody can be surprised if government surveillance soon looks no different than it did in the DDR.