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The Untold Story Of the German Secret Police
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The sudden fall of the Communism in Eastern Europe caught Western leaders and the CIA off guard . As late as 1988, West Germany's chancellor, Helmut Kohl, said he doubted he would see German Unification in his lifetime and $151 million had been spent on a new parliament building in Bonn, begun only in 1986. By the late 80s, East Germany and Romania were the last of the hard-line Socialist states. The intrusive nature of the secret police, with 1 in 7 adults being a government informer, special privileges for the party elites and the obvious material wealth and freedom beamed from West German tv stations and growing economic stagnation , Gorbachev's renunciation of the Brezhnev Doctrine and Glasnost reforms were some of the major factors leading to East German collapse by 1989. The Lost World of Communism East Germany
That Was the GDR - A History of the Other Germany
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© Thomas Zimmerman 2007
