The Stasi Project: Solving the World's Biggest Puzzle

In Germany, a small team virtually piece together the history of a surveillance state in the Stasi Puzzle Project.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, employees at the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, frantically tore up hundreds of thousands of incriminating documents containing evidence of how they spied on dissidents and ordinary citizens. But before they could eliminate all evidence of their activities, citizen groups stormed into the Stasi headquarters, blocking its gates with buses and trucks and confiscating what was left of the documents.

To some degree, they were caught off-guard. "I think for a long time, Stasi employees believed that the ministry would continue to exist in another form," explains a member of the Stasi Puzzle Project. "So they didn't think their activities were over."