(Transcript from World News Australia Radio)
The feared secret police of the former East German communist government, the Stasi, was famous for its high-level surveillance of citizens post World War two.
A vast network of agents spied on friends, colleagues and even family members.
It included a Jewish girl who left Berlin as a child refugee and settled in Melbourne, but later returned to Germany to pursue her political ideals.
Oliver Heuthe met Salomea Genin, the only Australian citizen known to have been an informer for the Stasi.
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"Those Germans who had abused me for being Jewish, who have taught me that I am nothing but a dirty Jewish vermin, who like a beetle, should be trod under foot," she says.
Only months before the start of the Second World War and not long after synagogues were burnt down in Nazi Germany, seven year old Salomea Genin escaped from Berlin to Australia with her mother and sisters.
As a family of Eastern-European Jews, life in Berlin had become much too dangerous.
Ironically, the Genin family had only just left Poland to escape segregation and discrimination by a mainly Catholic population.
Little did they know that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler had managed to turn the previously modern and tolerant German capital into a trap for all non-ethnic Germans.
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As she grew up she became politically active and in 1944 she joined the Eureka Youth League, an organisation for Young Communists.
However, after the end of World War Two, the political climate began to change.
Not only did the formerly-allied USA and Soviet Union drift apart, but Canberra also decided to take on Communists in Australia.
17-year-old Salomea decided to join the Australian Communist party in 1949, just as newly-elected Prime Minister Robert Menzies began his campaign to outlaw them.
"I am going into office with one thing clearly in my mind and that is to make and keep Australia safe."
Simultaneously, occupied Germany was divided into two countries - a capitalist West and a communist East.
Salomea says the treatment of Communists in Australia, and the opportunity to build a socialist society in the city of her birth, made her choice clear.
She decided to leave Australia, and go back to East Berlin.
"When I left, which was in 1954, it was the height of the Cold War and we comrades had been pushed into what was more or less a sect. So that my comrades, I had the feeling with numbers of them, also the Jewish comrades because there were quite a lot of Jewish comrades in the Communist Party at the time. They sympathised with me. I was going to a Socialist country, I was going to build Socialism. Some of them were actually a little envious. And as for the non-Communists around me, including my own family, they thought I was crazy."
Salomea was curious to find out what happened to the country she was once driven from.
She wanted to find out first-hand if a new start for a society with pacifist and anti-monetary ideals was really possible.
But her application for East German residency was rejected, as the authorites were reluctant to allow foreigners in.
So Salomea decided the next best place for her to be was West Germany.
She moved to West Berlin and began working as a secretary.
Aged in her twenties, Salomea Genin was living in West Berlin, but dreaming of spending her future in the East.
At that stage, foreigners were allowed to enter East Berlin for short periods, and she spent as much time there as possible.
She also cultivated contacts in the East, including a friend she refers to only as "Lucy".
And finally she got noticed by the Stasi.
"One day I was walking along an East Berlin shopping street and a gentleman approaches me; he certainly didn't look like anyone who was coming from the Stasi. He was small and round and fat. He said, 'Excuse me, may I introduce myself? I am a friend of Lucy's. May I invite you to coffee?' 'Yes, why not?' It was a very nice pleasant conversation and we agreed to meet a week later. And a week later, he came along with a friend who introduced himself as being from the Stasi. They asked me to work for them. Because with my knowledge of English and my Australian passport I was able to get to places where Germans would be looked upon very suspiciously."
Salomea was more than willing to get involved.
She still wasn't able to move to the East.
But her location in the West made her the perfect informer for the Stasi - die Staatssicherheit, the notorious state security arm of the German Democratic Republic, the GDR.
"They only took me in because at one stage the Stasi, which to me was an organisation that was protecting my state, which was very much in danger of being rolled back. After all, West Berlin was the centre of espionage at the time. So I knew the GDR was very much in danger of being destroyed and attacked, when the Stasi asked me to work for them in West Berlin, I said 'Yes!'"
However, Salomea wasn't as much use as they had hoped.
Her communist past in Australia prevented her from gaining access to any vital information.
"They (Stasi) wanted me to get a job as a secretary for one of the occupation powers. I said to them, 'That is not going to work because I was a known Communist in Australia and I cannot imagine that ASIO didn't send its reports that they must have written to the Germans or the Americans.' It was several decades later that I read the reports that ASIO sent to the CIA in West Berlin and in Holland. It was quite pointless for me to even apply for a job, they wouldn't have taken me."
Many years later, Salomea gained access to those ASIO files, which described her as:
"A very keen member of the Eureka Youth League, and a rabid supporter of the Peace Movement. She is very bitter and blames all the evils of the world on Capitalism. She applied for a job in East Germany with a Free German Women's Organisation but was not accepted. She is described as bad and unscrupulous and is very conscious of her Jewish origin."
Salomea's life changed.
She agreed to report back to the Stasi every two weeks.
In particular, she was asked to describe locations where Allied soldiers and other so-called enemies of the revolution met in West Berlin.
"I had an address, a flat and no one lived in it, fully furnished, where I met with my Stasi officer, where I told him everything that I had experienced in the last two weeks and told him everything I thought they might be interested in. I was quite sure that I was helping to protect my Socialism."
On the 13th August, 1961, Berliners woke up to a concrete wall, which cemented the division between communism and capitalism in Europe.
Radio report: "This morning East Berlin presents an eerie picture. Communist troops in force on every street corner, soldiers of the Communist National Army drawn up along the sector boundary with columns of armored cars and behind them, by the tens of thousands, the workers' militia in their sloppy brown uniforms and visor caps bearing an uncanny resemblance to the stormtroopers of Adolf Hitler. Platoons of people's police in their ink-blue uniforms in every subway and train station, barring the way to the platforms of trains that used to run to West Berlin. Groups of young men and women, arguing with militia men over their rights to pass down certain streets that have been sealed off. East Berlin is an armed camp. It is also a witch's cauldron gradually coming to a boil."
Even after the Wall went up, Salomea remained steadfastly loyal to East Germany.
In 1963 she was finally allowed to move permanently to East Berlin.
And she continued to work for what she believed was the greater good.
"I was absolutely convinced Lenin was right when he wrote, the problems under Socialism are the infantile disorders of the new society. After all, it was said at the time, Capitalism needed some 300 years to become a stable and developed society and since 1917, we only had so and so many decades, therefore, what we need is patience."
During the 1970s Salomea continued her work in the Stasi.
However, now she was informing on East Germans who the Stasi believed were a threat to the communist regime.
And her comrades were also keeping a close watch on her.
It was only years after the collapse of the Communist system that Salomea discovered some of those close to her, had informed on her.
Among them was a friend who had helped her run a feminist book club.
"I discovered from her report that this was an illegal group; I had no idea that it was illegal. As far as she was concerned it was illegal, because in the GDR you did not simply form an organisation because you felt like it. You were supposed to go and get official permission, which would never have occurred to me back in the 1970s."
It wasn't until the 1980s that Salomea realised that her work as an informer was serving not the ideals of Socialism, but a dictatorship.
"First of all I had to face up to the fact that this Socialism was nothing but a very banal police state, as they have existed throughout the ages. Facing up to the fact on 2nd of September, 1982, was something that caused me to become suicidal."
Salomea says the psychological strain had become too much.
She confessed her activities to some of those she had spied on - including a church group she had infiltrated.
"In 1985 I had come clean with myself sufficiently to be able to say to the head of the Protestant Academy, where I had been sent by the Stasi back in the 60s to spy on them, I confessed to her that I had been one of the many people who had sat in the meetings that she had headed, in order to report to the Stasi on what had happened there. She was very surprised and she nodded and it was after that that I knew I felt for the first time a dignity that I had not felt for many, many years. I was able to look myself in the face again, in the mirror."
On 9th November, 1989 the Berlin Wall was breached and Germany began the journey to reunification.
And in the years since the end of the Cold War, much has been revealed about the vast Stasi apparatus and its many thousands of citizens who reported on neighbours, colleagues, friends, and even close family members.
It's believed close to 20,000 former full-time Stasi members are still employed in Germany's public service today.
But despite the passing of more than three decades, Salomea Genin is one of the very few who is willing to acknowledge her role.
Sitting in the same Berlin apartment she moved to in 1963, she reflects that even those who she spied on eventually respected her for confessing to her activities.
"They respected the fact that I told them. People in the GDR respected what I did, and I am one of the very few people in the whole of this country who speaks openly about having worked for the Stasi. Most of them don't."
