Review: God's Spies by Elizabeth Braw

Synopsis: East Germany only existed for a short forty years, but in that time, the country’s secret police, the Stasi, developed a highly successful “church department” that—using persuasion rather than threats—managed to recruit an extraordinary stable of clergy spies. Pastors, professors, seminary students, and even bishops spied on colleagues, other Christians, and anyone else they could report about to their handlers in the Stasi.

Thanks to its pastor spies, the Church Department (official name: Department XX/4) knew exactly what was happening and being planned in the country’s predominantly Lutheran churches. Yet ultimately it failed in its mission: despite knowing virtually everything about East German Christians, the Stasi couldn’t prevent the church-led protests that erupted in 1989 and brought down the Berlin Wall.

This presents a very different aspect of Cold War espionage. One simply does not expect this kind of spying when we think of agents and spies - but here they are, local religions figures within the community of not only East Germany, but other Eastern Bloc nations and Scandinavia.

Author Elizabeth Braw injects a personal, human element, through both family recollections and interviews with still living Stasi Officers, in particular, Joachim Wiegard, the Director of the Stasi Church division.

There is a hell of a lot of information to take in ... this is no quick read, despite the almost conversational style of writing. The reader must immerse themselves in the period, the politics, the religion, the mindset of those being the Iron Curtain. Braw writes that " Stasi Church espionage was exhilarating and mysterious and repulsive ...".

The Stasi was a formidable operation, with 1.7 million informants, and literally half the population being spied on in the German Democratic Republic. Christianity was Communism's greatest foe as it it represented a competing world view. The Pastor-spies were focused on social groups and associations who attracted many dissidents, in an effort to keep the Church powerless.

We are introduced to a number of Pastor-spies and their activities, whilst Braw takes us back to her conversations with Wiegard, who never quite reveals all that he knows. These agents, we are told, did not expect to get wealthy - they instead received material and consumers goods (a luxury in the East); travel permits; promotions; medications; cars, books; things we in the West took (and still take) for granted - "... the bonus being an agent in your own country was that your employer can make your life more comfortable..".

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of East Germany, the Stasis files were not completely destroyed - and the identities of the vast network of spies, not just the Pastor-spies, were revealed. Braw notes that whilst the Stasi were experts at collecting information, they were not so good when it came to what to do with it all! There was the presumptions that the GDR would last so there was no haste to destroy anything or put this information beyond reach. People's long hidden pasts was being raised up like a proverbial Lazarus.

A recommend read for all Cold War and espionage enthusiasts.