As the Stasi grew, also these headquarters grew. To an extend that maybe, well, some over eight thousand people worked here in the end. In this area of German history, that´s, yeah, there´s a lot of myth about the Stasi.
One of the myths is that the Stasi is responsible for what went wrong in East Germany. But that´s actually not true. The Stasi functioned as basically a tool to the party leadership. They did what the party leadership decided, what they wanted of them. What they ordered them to do.This whole complex itself was not secret. The fact that the Stasi was here.There was a sign on the outside: Ministry for state security, but at least from the late seventies onwards you couldn´t see inside. So, it was known this was the Stasi, this was the headquarters of the Stasi, but what was going on in here was basically open to interpretation.The party leadership always knew what was going on with the Stasi and the Stasi itself understood themselves as, yeah, they called themselves "shield and sword" of the party and, uhm, they acted that way.