[Elsie]

This event is often compared to the overrunning of Stasi headquarters in East Germany during the collapse of Communism some decades earlier.

Those who fail to learn from history...

[Elsie]

Reassembling the destroyed files[edit]

Some of it is very easy due to the number of archives and the failure of shredding machines (in some cases "shredding" meant tearing paper in two by hand and documents could be recovered easily). In 1995, the BStU began reassembling the shredded documents; 13 years later, the three dozen archivists commissioned to the projects had only reassembled 327 bags; they are now using computer-assisted data recovery to reassemble the remaining 16,000 bags – estimated at 45 million pages. It is estimated that this task may be completed at a cost of 30 million dollars.^[73]

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi