ABSTRACT

The MfS was deeply embedded in the GDR's system of political justice, a feature which one former ZAIG officer has described as a cancer in that political police measures were applied to problems which the MfS was in no position to solve. 1 The nature of the interaction between secret police and justice will be explored in this chapter with reference to the collaboration of SED and Stasi, the ministry's penetration of the legal profession and, above all, the repressive elements of a state which remained a post-totalitarian dictatorship despite an amelioration in conditions during Honecker's rule. Before examining the ministry's role, especially that of Main Department IX, several aspects of the judicial and the legal system deserve comment. As Klaus Marxen, Professor for Criminal Law at the Humboldt University, has argued, the SED treated law as an instrument of politics. 2 The undoubted primacy of politics over law was asserted by Mielke in uncompromising terms at a service conference in July 1979: 'Power is the most important position from which to fulfil the historical mission of the working class, to establish Communist society . . . Socialist law is an important instrument of exercising, enhancing and consolidating power'. 3