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The Grey Men

Pursuing the Stasi into the Present

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About this listen

By 1990, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the East German state security service folded. During 40 years, they had amassed more than a billion pages in manila files detailing the lives of their citizens. Overnight, almost 100,000 Stasi employees, many of them experienced officers with access to highly personal information, found themselves unemployed. This is the story of what they did next.

Former FBI Agent Ralph Hope uses critical insider knowledge and access to Stasi records to track and expose ex-officers working everywhere from the Russian energy sector to the police and even the government department tasked with prosecuting Stasi crimes. He examines why the key players have never been called to account and, in doing so, asks whether we have really learned from the past at all. He highlights a man who continued to fight the Stasi for 30 years after the Wall fell, and reveals a truth that many don’t want spoken. The Grey Men comes as an urgent warning from the past at a time when governments the world over are building an unprecedented network of surveillance over their citizens.

©2021 Ralph Hope (P)2021 Dreamscape Media, LLC Espionage Europe Freedom & Security Germany Politics & Government True Crime Russia Soviet Union Surveillance
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Wonderfully well researched and thoughtful book. However, the terrible crimes of the GDR have clearly left the author with a strong bias against left wing groups/ ideas of all kinds regardless of they’re history or beliefs. This is quite blatant and can be jarring to hear all left wing groups including those in the social democratic tradition in Europe tarred with the one brush.

Great historical insights but bias is clearly on show

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Absolutely brilliant. I have learned so much from reading this book. I visited Hohenschönhausen two years ago and it is a visit I will never forget.

A Must Read

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I thought I knew how the Stasi operated.

I did, but I had no idea they still operate!

Eye opening and shocking

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If u substitute with the relevant nomenclature this was the script that executed all over satélite Eastern Europe. Communism and its horrors were never punished, so these days we have people walking around with the signage of the communist states and exalting the “achievements”, meanwhile nobody is talking about half a century of terror, concentration camps etc … the real face of communism.
Let’s not forget how the progeny of nomenclature, turned into powerful businessmen overnight, meanwhile the bating had to pay billions of foreign borrowing during communism

Great impassioned view of fall of communism and the mimicry of the dreaded nomenclature and their progeny in united Germany

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This is a must-read for anyone who sees the rightful position of Germany in the last two or more decades as one of the best democracies in Europe. It shows how the Stasi, the secret police of the most repressive communist country of the Cold War East Germany, murdered and ruined the lives of hundreds of thousands of its own citizens with complete impunity. How, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, they worked hard to cover their tracks, How they took over important positions in modern Germany, And how they are still working hard to rewrite history to further cover their tracks and to promote their murderous regime. It is quite shocking to read how influential they still remain, perhaps more than ever as Angela Merkel (an impressively open-minded socialist conservative), leaves her throne. This has to be one of the most impressive exposes of corruption and evil in a basically good country in modern times.
I really didn't like the reading style but still very well worth the time spent listening.

A terrible warning for the future

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