Editing Stasi (section)

===Personnel and recruitment===
{{See also|Informal collaborator}}
<!--
{| class="wikitable" align=right
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! Officers || System
|-
| 1 per 166 citizens<ref name="koehler9">{{Harvnb|Koehler|2000|p=9}}</ref> || The Stasi in East Germany.
|-
| 1 per 273 citizens<ref name="Albats23">KGB: state within a state. Yevgenia Albats. p. 23</ref> || The [[Federal Security Service (Russia)|FSB]] in Vladimir Putin's Russia.
|-
| 1 per 428<ref name="Albats23"/>-583<ref name="koehler9"/> citizens || The [[KGB]] in the Soviet Union.
|-
| 1 per 900<ref>Stasi: shield and sword of the party. John C. Schmeidel. p. 26</ref> || The [[StB]] in the Czechoslovakia.
|-
| 1 per 1,500 citizens<ref>http://www.napawash.org/pc_management_studies/dhs.html {{Dead link|date=February 2022}}</ref> || The [[DHS]] in the United States 2011.
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| 1 per 2,000 citizens<ref name="koehler9"/> || The [[Gestapo]] in Adolf Hitler's Germany.
|}-->{{quote box|The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. When the regular informers are added, these ratios become much higher: In the Stasi's case, there would have been at least one spy watching every 66 citizens! When one adds in the estimated numbers of part-time snoops, the result is nothing short of monstrous: one informer per 6.5 citizens. It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests. Like a giant octopus, the Stasi's tentacles probed every aspect of life.
| source = — [[Jack Koehler|John O. Koehler]], German-born American journalist<ref>{{Cite news |last=O. Koehler |first=John |date=1999 |title=Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police |work=The New York Times |url=https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/k/koehler-stasi.html?_r=1 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180627022035/https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/k/koehler-stasi.html?_r=1 |archive-date=27 June 2018}}</ref>
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Between 1950 and 1989, the Stasi employed a total of 274,000 people in an effort to root out the class enemy.<ref name="koehler8">{{Harvnb|Koehler|2000|pp=8–9}}</ref><ref name="Fulbrook 2005 228">{{harvnb|Fulbrook|2005|pp=228}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|title=Political prisoners in the German Democratic Republic|url=https://communistcrimes.org/en/political-prisoners-german-democratic-republic|access-date=2020-11-24|website=Political prisoners in the German Democratic Republic {{!}} Communist Crimes|language=en|archive-date=25 September 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200925070547/https://communistcrimes.org/en/political-prisoners-german-democratic-republic|url-status=live}}</ref> In 1989, the Stasi employed 91,015 people full-time, including 2,000 fully employed [[unofficial collaborator]]s, 13,073 soldiers and 2,232 officers of the GDR army,<ref>Gieseke 2001, pp. 86–87</ref> along with 173,081 unofficial informants inside the GDR<ref>Müller-Enbergs 1993, p. 55</ref> and 1,553 informants in West Germany.<ref>Gieseke 2001, p. 58</ref>

Regular commissioned Stasi officers were recruited from conscripts who had been honourably discharged from their 18 months' compulsory military service, had been members of the [[Socialist Unity Party of Germany|SED]], had had a high level of participation in [[Free German Youth|the Party's youth wing's]] activities and had been Stasi informers during their service in the Military. The candidates would then have to be recommended by their military unit [[Political commissar|political officers]] and Stasi agents, the local chiefs of the District ([[Bezirk]]) Stasi and [[Volkspolizei]] office, of the district in which they were permanently resident, and the District Secretary of the SED. These candidates were then made to sit through several tests and exams, which identified their intellectual capacity to be an officer, and their political reliability. University graduates who had completed their military service did not need to take these tests and exams. They then attended a two-year officer training programme at the Stasi college (''[[Hochschule]]'') in [[Potsdam]]. Less mentally and academically endowed candidates were made ordinary technicians and attended a one-year technology-intensive course for non-commissioned officers.

By 1995, some 174,000 [[informal collaborator|''inoffizielle Mitarbeiter'' (IMs)]] Stasi informants had been identified, almost 2.5% of East Germany's population between the ages of 18 and 60.<ref name="koehler8"/> {{Dubious|Using John Koehler as a source|date=May 2023}} 10,000 IMs were under 18 years of age.<ref name="koehler8"/> According to an interview with [[Joachim Gauck]], there could have been as many as 500,000 informers.<ref name="koehler8"/> A former Stasi Colonel who served in the counterintelligence directorate estimated that the figure could be as high as 2 million if occasional informants were included.<ref name="koehler8"/> {{Dubious|Using John Koehler as a source|date=May 2023}} There is significant debate about how many IMs were actually employed.