In the 1970s the East German SED Government attempted to gain international acknowledgment of the GDR as a country that “complied with human rights“.
By any means available.
Since the human right violations of the regime that had become known abroad were condemned internationally, the East German Secret Service (Stasi) came up with a special method with which to keep the East German population in check while pretending to the international public to be a democratic, law-abiding state.
For that “a transition from official judicial terror to subtle, covert methods of persecution and suppression took place“ (Dr. Pingel-Schliemann, „Zersetzung. Strategie einer Diktatur“, Page 86, published by the German Havemann Foundation in 2004). The Ministry of State Security (Stasi) issued the order to realize that transition into covert actions asap.
All that was required were well-trained “Zersetzer“, i.e. professional stalkers/mobbers/spiest hat could carry out the new method to suppress critical citizens and to systematically destroy their lives. The Stasi borrowed the term for that new/old terror method from the Third Reich, where the term of “Zersetzung“ had already been coined. The method with which people can be destroyed also shows direct parallels with the Nazis’ sadistic way of thinking. One one aspect about it was new: the perfidious systematics, the refined system how to attack the human psyche from all sides and destroy it over the years, how to push the target person into insanity or even suicide.
For the purpose of training their Stasi members in the new method, the “State Security“ established their very own faculty of “operative psychology“ at the University of State Security in Berlin-Potsdam. It was an individual special field of studies that simply turned around the true goal of psychology – to heal a troubled soul – with the aid of scientific findings of psychiatry. The developers of the method of “operative psychology“ realized that healthy souls can be made sick with the very same findings if only you continue with the method systematically and patiently – and so subtly that the victim’s environment does not witness it (or participates in the evil game themselves). That way any human being will become so insecure, isolated and desperate with time that eventually he or she simply has no more strength, energy or hope left, his or her daily life being staged and manipulated by others for years, while the victim senses it without knowing why, by whom, how and exactly what.
Those periodical, countless hidden little acts of destruction were based on the Chinese water torture, where a drop of water will be dripping on the same body part steadily and for days or weeks on end, or the tortured is forced to listen to the continuous dripping for an indefinite period. In the beginning it is harmless, but then he will be waiting for it, that drop of water will become more and more unbearable, and that without any hope for an end.
That is how the method of “Zersetzung” (“dissolution”) of the Stasi works. And it is extremely effective.
