Two top journalists for a Berlin paper have admitted they worked as informants for the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, prompting an investigation of the paper’s editorial staff, the Guardian reports. Berliner Zeitung’s top editor ordered an inquiry after a senior stafffer was identified as a 1970s informant; two days later, another editor told colleagues he’d spied for a decade.
The first staffer had written articles condemning a fight for legal action against Stasi officers. The news is a blow to the credibility of the Zeitung, one of the main East Berlin papers during Communist rule, and which in the past fired workers associated with the regime. “We are the newspaper that can least get away with something like this,” the editor said. (More Stasi stories.)