Shredded Secret Police Records Reconstruncted By Government Agency

MAGDEBURG, GERMANY - JANUARY 25: Sacks containing the torn remains of documents that once belonged to the former East German secret police, the Stasi, lie stored in a warehouse at a branch of the federal archive in charge of the Stasi files on January 25, 2012 in Magdeburg, Germany. The German government, in partnership with the Fraunhofer Institute, is pursuing a pilot project to scan the torn documents and use computer software to piece them back together. Stasi members, in the final weeks before the communist government of East Germany collapsed in 1989, shredded and tore up thousands upon thousands of documents relating to their activities of spying on East German citizens. So far efforts relying on piecing the torn remains together by hand, which started in 1995, have allowed archivists to process only 500 of 16,000 sacks containing the torn documents. The pilot project, which is still in the software development stage, would greatly speed up a process that would otherwise take decades. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)