ABSTRACT
In this paper I seek to make four points. The first is that border security was essential to the Communist police state. The police state of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) did not function properly in the years before 1961 because East Germans could escape it — either for a day or two, or forever. This is established by records of East Germany's Ministry of State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, or MfS) and, in particular, by records of its Hauptabteilung IX (Main Department IX). This was the Ministry's ‘investigation unit’ (Untersuchungsorgan); among other things, it was responsible for interrogating arrested spies. Its records are the principal source for this paper and they put the Second Berlin Crisis of 1958–63 in a new light. Espionage and subversion against the GDR were organized from a safe haven located right next to it and conducted over a border it had not yet managed to close. This was a challenge which the Soviet security service had not faced since the Bolshevik regime had signed the Treaty of Brest—Litovsk in 1918. In the Treaty's wake, the Bolsheviks had closed their state's western border.
