Photo Gallery Reconstructing the Cold War
Almost 16,000 bags of shredded secret-police documents from the end of the East German regime are still undeciphered. Now a group of computer scientists will try to scan and reassemble the fragments.
Jan Schneider, head engineer on the Fraunhofer Institute's new project to reconstruct millions of Stasi files, shows pieces of the puzzle.
Foto: AP
Shredded Stasi documents in a small plastic sack. The pilot project will analyze fragments from 400 garbage bags of documents and rearrange them digitally by shape, ink color and handwriting style.
Foto: DPA
The document scraps will be fed into a scanner by conveyor belt. The files are expected to give up information on domestic spying in East Germany at the end of the Cold War.
Foto: DPA
The test phase of the project will take about two years, and if it's successful, the Fraunhofer Institute will get funding to analyze the remaining 16,000 garbage bags of fragments.
Foto: DPA
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