God's Spies

The inside story of how the Stasi turned Christians into spies during the war.

When the Berlin Wall came down, the files of the East German secret police, the much-dreaded Stasi, were opened and read. And among the shocking stories revealed was that of the Stasi's infiltration of the Church. Almost 10% of the Lutheran Church's workforce were, it appears, busy involved in spying on each other, and on the Church's congregations. The Lutheran Church was the only semi-free space in East Germany, where those who rebelled against the regime could find a way of living at least a little out of the government's iron grip. Even the organisations that smuggled Bibles were infiltrated.