The Stasi didn’t need penal camps to stifle Christianity

God’s Spies
By Elisabeth Braw,
Eerdmans, 288pp, £20/$25

The Stasi, the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security), existed for barely four decades – from 1950 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989– but it gained a reputation for surveillance second to none, principally of its fellow citizens of East Germany (the GDR).

As Elisabeth Braw, the author of this engrossing study (subtitled The Stasi’s Cold War Espionage Campaign Inside the Church) says, although the Stasi were distinctly less brutal than many of their sister Warsaw Pact police agencies, they “perfected the art of snooping”. (There was a joke that after German reunification many ex-Stasi officers became taxi drivers – you didn’t need to give them an address, just a person’s name).