Spies, bikes and smuggled ink: Green activists in the shadow of the Berlin Wall

East Berlin, late November 1987, around midnight. In the basement of an old apartment building, 14-year-old Tim Eisenlohr is stapling pages from a printer smuggled out of the West. He and his friends publish a semi-legal magazine about the environmental problems plaguing their Socialist state, the German Democratic Republic: air pollution, dirty rivers, acid rain And dangerous nuclear reactors. Separated from Western Europe by a border fortified with a death strip and separated from West Berlin by the Berlin Wall, they seek to spread information that East German censors do not want anyone to see.

Suddenly the door bursts open and “about 15 armed members” Staatssicherheit Referring to the East German secret police, also known as the Stasi, Eisenlohr recalls: “They burst into the room, some with their guns drawn, led by a prosecutor. ‘Raise your hands, turn off the machine, stand up,’ they shout.” wall!”

Men call and Photograph He enters the room, confiscates the printer, and then one of them says the famous, cryptic phrase the Stasi used to interrogate people: “You have been called in to solve a problem.” One by one, Eisenlohr and the others are put into cars and taken to Stasi headquarters.

Called “Operation Trap” raids and arrests Was part of the Stasi’s initiatives Crush a group of people fighting for a cleaner environment – and for the right to speak out. The secret police’s tactics ranged from interrogation and prison to bizarre mind games. In one case, whistleblowers who managed to sneak into the environmental movement bought coffee from a communal pantry. without putting money into the coffee cat. This was a psychological maneuver aimed at creating conflict and distrust between groups.

This plan did not work; neither psychological manipulation nor dramatic pressure. On the contrary: Operation Trap became one of the very rare situations in history when the Stasi had to back down. What they were up against was a small group of self-described pacifists and eco-geeks who printed a magazine of only a few hundred copies and regularly ran out of ink. At some point, US Congress He even sided with the producers of the little magazine and stood by them. How did everything happen?

Interviews with dissidents from that period and internal reports from the Stasi’s secret archives, which were later opened Fall of the Berlin WallTell the surprising story of how a small environmental movement managed to take on a powerful dictatorship and eventually won.