Tina Rosenberg

The regular television newscasters

suddenly appeared in military uniforms.

"What a relief to be interned by men in Polish helmets ratherthan Russian ones," joked Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the Catholic in-tellectual.

"Himmler got the order from Hitler but did notcarry it out. He turned many prisoners, especially women in Ra-vensbriick, over to the Swedish. He saved many people. Do wenow call Himmler a just man?"

The Committee on Constitutional Responsibility seemed to betaking an excruciating and at times absurd route to the correctverdict. Jaruzelski's defense of lesser evil had been seen in courtbefore—at the Nuremberg Tribunals. Hitler's acting justice minis-ter, Franz Schlegelberger, had led several other Third Reich judi-ciary officials in arguing that they had stayed at their posts toprevent worse men from taking their place.

During martial law, an inmate of Bialoleka prison calling himselfAndrzej Zagozda wrote: "Here no one can detain you 'for explana-tions,' here you have nothing to fear. It is paradoxical, I know, butif in the morning you are woken up by someone banging on thedoor, you are not afraid of uniformed guests: you know it is onlyyour kindly jailer bringing you your morning coffee. Here you feelno fear when you see an informer with restless eyes: here the spy isharmless. Bialoleka is a moral luxury and an oasis of freedom."

the first legal case in one of the nearly six hundreddeaths at the intra-German border.

I had been wondering why I thought of the border guards asyoung boys, even though they had been twenty-two and twenty-three at the time of the shooting, certainly not children. It was be-cause the system made children out of everyone.

In addition, theStasi possessed 1,181 safe houses, 305 vacation homes, 98 sportsfacilities, and 18,000 apartments for meetings with spies. The Stasi

had a budget of 4 billion East German marks. It had 97,000 full-time employees—after the army, it was East Germany's largest em-ployer.

here were 39separate departments—even a department to spy on other Stasimembers.

—the cards for people named Muller alone reach a hundredyards