Media News - Thursday, April 03, 2008

Staff at Berlin newspaper call for probe into Stasi past

Staff at a Berlin newspaper, rattled by admissions by two editors they once worked for the feared Communist East German secret police, have called for a probe into their Stasi files. Employees at the left-leaning Berliner Zeitung, once the mouthpiece for East Germany's communist regime, have agreed to allow their Stasi files to be scrutinized following admissions by two editors that they worked for the dreaded East German secret police. Privacy laws prohibit the publisher from carrying out an investigation. But 85 of the 89 journalists working for the paper voted in favor of asking the administrators of the Stasi archive to carry out an investigation. Editor Thomas Leinkauf admitted on Saturday that he had been a Stasi informant for two years in the 1970s while he was a university student. At a staff meeting on Monday, a second editor, Ingo Preissler, announced he had been a Stasi informant for 10 years from when he was 18 until the peaceful revolution that toppled the Communist East German regime in 1989. Josef Depenbrock, the newspaper's editor-in-chief, said that the paper's ‘credibility and independence have been harmed’ by the revelations. (Deutsche Welle)

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