Stasi Archive Criticized

German politicians said that the authority currently overseeing the archives of the former East German Ministry for State Security Service, or "Stasi," should be integrated more into other German institutions.

Reinhard Grindel, of the Chrisitian Democrats -- part of the government's ruling coalition -- said the review of the Stasi documents should not be left up to the "Birthler Authority," the unofficial name given to the government office, headed by Marianne Birthler, responsible for researching the history of the GDR's Stasi.

Grindel said the mistakes made regarding the recent resurfacing of documents about the "shoot-to-kill" policy of the Stasi at the Berlin Wall showed that the responsibility for the investigation of such texts should be given to a research association, to which the Birthler office should belong.

"It is now clear that the processing of these documents should not be exclusively left up to the Birthler Authority," Grindel told broadcaster RBB.

Grindel also recommended that the Stasi document office be integrated into the German Federal Archives in Koblenz.

Dietmar Bartsch of the Left Party called the Stasi document office's work "ahistorical and unscientific."

Merging offices

German Culture Secretary Bernd Neumann, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, also said that in the mid-term the Birthler office should be integrated into the Federal Archives. He added that his party continued to find the office's work important and worth supporting.

Birthler has had to deflect criticism over the past few days that she made the announcement of the Stasi "shoot-to-kill" policy just days before the 46th anniversary of the start of the construction of the Berlin Wall. Some have accused her of "sensationalizing" information to gain attention for her office, particularly because the data had already surfaced 10 years ago in a scientific journal.

Klaus Schroeder, of the research center "SED-Staat" at the University of Berlin, told the daily Leipziger Volkszeitung that Birthler "without doing thorough research beforehand, left herself get caught up in the idea of announcing information that made it appear like an historically new, sensational discovery."

Information surfaced a decade ago

"That discredits the institution," he added. "When the Birthler authority knew about this 10 years ago, why was no one commissioned to research the matter further?"

The "shoot-to-kill" order, dated Oct. 1, 1973 was found last week in the regional archive office in the eastern city of Magdeburg and shows that the Stasi had told guards that they must "stop or liquidate" would-be defectors.

On Sunday, a spokesman for the Stasi archive confirmed that the "shoot-to-kill" passage had been printed in a historian's book on East Germany in 1997 but said it had not reached a wider audience.