Zersetzung: The Dreadful Decomposition Of East Germany’s Political Opposition

vikthor (58)in #politics • 4 years ago (edited)

Zersetzung was a dreadful psychological warfare tactic used by the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR/DDR) targeted against the underground political opposition to the then dictatorial socialist state under, most notably, Erich Honecker (who ruled East Germany as General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party throughout the 1970s and 1980s).

Through this diabolically efficient-designed, evil technique, the goal of the Stasi at the time was to control and manipulate the representatives of the underground political opposition who could not be imprisoned by constantly deteriorating their relationships with the outside world, ranging from their interactions with their work colleagues, family, close friends, and, last but not least, official public servants of most state institutions.

The malevolent plan of the Stasi regarding these opponents of the state was created and directed in such a way in which total damage and fear had to be inflicted in order for them not to amount a truly important political opposition and contest elections as a powerful bloc.

German historian Hubertus Knabe explains very well what Zersetzung was all about in the following lines:

[…] the Stasi often used a method which was really diabolic. It was called Zersetzung, and it's described in another guideline. The word is difficult to translate because it means originally "biodegradation." But actually, it's a quite accurate description. The goal was to destroy secretly the self-confidence of people, for example by damaging their reputation, by organizing failures in their work, and by destroying their personal relationships. Considering this, East Germany was a very modern dictatorship. The Stasi didn't try to arrest every dissident. It preferred to paralyze them, and it could do so because it had access to so much personal information and to so many institutions.

The rough translation of the word 'Zersetzung' in English could either be 'biodegradation' or 'decomposition', both of them implying that the targeted individual would literally turn into a fear-induced paralysed vegetable man. Part of the Zersetzung agenda was to slowly and steadily infiltrate so-called Romeo agents who could seduce their victims in the attempt to gather information on the various opposition groups on the rise at that time in East Germany (D.D.R., kurz).

Below is a German-language documentary on Zersetzung and the way their officers had been subsequently unmasked after the German reunification: