Tina Rosenberg

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.