In 1989 the "Ministerium für Staatssicherheit" of the former GDR tried to destroy all documents containing inculpatory material. A majority of the documents was only torn by hand. The resulting pieces are now stored in archives of the Bundesbehörde für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen DDR. Altogether there are approximately 17.000 bags each containing about 2.000 torn documents. Since 1995 25 people are working on reconstructing the pages by hand. So far only 300 bags are reconstructed.
Since September 2000, a group of students of the TU München - under supervision of Angelika Steger and her Ph.D. students - were developing a prototype of a software system for solving this problem. The project was finished and presented to the public on 20 May 2003 and showed that an automatic reconstruction of the Stasi files is basically possible.
M. Marciniszyn, A. Steger, A. Weißl
E-Jigsaw: Computerunterstützte Rekonstruktion zerrissener
Stasi-Unterlagen
Informatik-Spektrum 27, 2004, 248-254.
(©
Springer-Verlag)
In: Inf. Process. Lett. 91(4), 2004, 177-182.
