More than 17,000 employees in the current administrations of the five eastern German states had close links to the communist secret police, the report in the Financial Times Deutschland (FTD) says. Most of them were Stasi informants, who were charged with passing on information about the private lives of colleagues, friends and neighbors.

The report was based on findings gathered by a team of researchers at Berlin's Free University who specialize in East German communist rule.

The revelations have "a dimension, which no one could have ever expected," the paper quoted to the head of the research team, Klaus Schroeder, as saying.

Vetting in vain

The Stasi had 200,000 employees, about half of whom worked as informants. In effect, one in every 50 East Germans was linked to the Stasi.

Under German post-unification laws, adopted in 1991, all civil servants in eastern German state administrations were vetted for secret police collaboration.

But the FTD reports that while thousands of former Stasi were fired, many kept their jobs, not least because vetting procedures were interpreted differently in different states.

In the state of Saxony, for example, nearly half the civil servants found to be former Stasi were allowed to keep their posts.

Stasi researcher Klaus Schroeder described the vetting process in these states as "standardized and superficial."

The report emerges following news reports earlier this month that two policemen guarding German Chancellor Angela Merkel's weekend residence outside Berlin were allegedly former Stasi officers in charge of bugging telephones.

On Wednesday, Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) admitted that it hired 48 Stasi officers after unification in 1990, and that it still employed 23 of them.

The BKA admitted that one was indeed working in a bodyguard unit, but denied the connection to guarding the German chancellor.

Stasi victims outraged

East German victims of Stasi persecution speak of a scandal of considerable magnitude.

Ronald Laessig, spokesman for the Association of Victims of Stalinism (VOS), told reporters in Berlin on Thursday that it was "a slap in the face of every Stasi victim" that the past perpetrators were able to land jobs in "sensitive areas of state administration."

Gerhard Ruden, commissioner for Stasi affairs in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, demanded that all eastern German civil servants be vetted again for Stasi links.

This was necessary as "an act of political hygiene," he told the FTD.

But Brandenburg state Interior Minister Joerg Schoenbohm countered that the effort would be futile.

"Their employment contracts are legally binding", he told German ZDF public television. "Former Stasi employees can only be dismissed if they have wilfully deceived their employer about their past – a charge which cannot be brought against them after they have gone through the vetting process."

Re-opening the vetting process for civil servants is difficult. In 2006 the German parliament revised the law governing access to East Germany's secret police files, disallowing state administrations to look into the files of minor employees.

Uh/AFP/dpa/ap
Editor: Nathan Witkop