Guenter Schachtschneider once ran a network of 35 informers for East Germany's secret police. Today, he sells investments.
"As a Stasi agent, I learned how to sell people on a cause," he said. "It's a good skill for a stockbroker."When the Berlin Wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989, Schachtschneider was a captain in a branch of the state security police called the Department for the Political Securing of the East Berlin Health System.
His job for the security police, called the Stasi, was to prevent the defection of nurses and doctors. His spies alerted him when their colleagues seemed to be preparing to flee - taking long vacations, selling their houses, grumbling about the government.
Now the 40-year-old Schachtschneider has 10 employees selling American grain futures and stocks to east Berliners. Business is so good that he and his family are leaving the 20-story apartment building near the old Stasi headquarters in the gritty Lichtenberg district where they have lived 12 years.
The new VCR and TV, his wife's exercise bike, the complete works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, all are being packed into crates to move to a seven-room house on the city limits.
"The suburbs, ja?" said Schachtschneider, slapping his thigh and laughing about how life has changed for the former communist functionary.
Dictatorships come and go, but ambitious people find a way to move up, said Joachim Gauck, the former Lutheran minister in charge of the 108 miles of file cabinets that Schachtschneider and 90,000 fellow Stasi employees left behind.
Former East German spies are banned from most government posts in reunited Germany. A few dozen have been jailed for murder or other capital crimes. But the private sector offers opportunities, and most of the powerful of yesteryear have landed on their feet.
"In socialism, to get ahead, they learned to use their elbows," said Gauck.
Some had head starts.
Apparatchiks stole the equivalent of $16 billion in the final days of East Germany's collapse, liquidating state property and laundering the proceeds through new private businesses, said Manfred Kittlaus, who heads a police unit investigating "unification crimes."
Half of Kittlaus' suspects are former West Germans, whose eastern contacts often extend back to the days when they illegally provided East Germany with western technology.
Real estate is a growth industry for former East German officials. So are private security firms, which are booming in crime-ridden Berlin. The muscle these firms rent is Stasi-trained. Even Germany's finance minister has been reported to have former Stasi men as bodyguards.
The money networks "are so far-reaching and well-hidden that they never will be uncovered," said Joerg Drieselmann, a human rights activist who spent 1975 in the cellar of one of East Germany's most notorious prisons.
Drieselmann, 39, now runs a research center on Stasi crimes a floor above secret police chief Erich Mielke's old office in the former Stasi headquarters.