The
reunification of East and West Germany did not totally happen until July of
1990. The West Germans were mostly in charge and trying to find a middle ground
for the economies. It was a complicated time because people were trying to get
their land back that was stolen from them. Entrepreneurs were investing in
businesses, but with the land claims, they no longer wanted to invest in too
risky of businesses. The East Germans also did not have adequate facilities for
most of their businesses. They had power shortages and had to rebuild the whole
rail system to try and keep up with West Germany. East Germany was slow to
recover because they had low production rates and few people wanted to invest
in their companies. Along with the low production rates were cheaply produced
goods. This made the Eastern Germans want to buy the Western goods because they
knew theirs were low quality. Eventually, with all of the money that was pouring
into East Germany, they were able to update their infrastructure and invest in
their economy.
The
Stasi are a secret police agency that was a part of East German culture
throughout the communist regime. Their job was to spy on the West Germans and
to return East German political figures who fled back to East Germany. They
were then executed. They also had a branch that was specifically for foreign intelligence.
Throughout all of this, the Stasi still had a focus on West Germany and planned
to infiltrate the government. The Stasi were feared by the people of East Germany.
This was justified because the Stasi kept files on many of the population of
the country. With the reunification of East and West Germany, the people were
allowed to see the files that the Stasi kept on each and every one of them.
They could only do this because the German government passed a law called the
Stasi Records Law that prevented the Stasi from burning or shredding the files.
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