Who Wrote the Manual on Modern Harassment

Today, many people know and some experienced coordinated online or offline harassment campaigns. What most don’t realize is the end goal of these attacks and who benefits from them. Before social media gave us coordinated pile-ons, doxxing, and algorithmic shadowbanning, state security services had already perfected similar principles and documented them well.

One of the most infamous examples comes from East Germany, where the state used an array of such tactics to undermine, isolate, or destroy dissidents - both personally and professionally. It's called “Zersetzung” (disruption, decomposition, corrosion).

Short remark: After World War II, Germany was divided into two distinct political and economic systems that coexisted for four decades: the Soviet-aligned German Democratic Republic (GDR), called East Germany and the market-oriented Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) - West Germany.

To defend the Soviet regime and neutralize opposition, East Germany set up the Ministry for State Security (MfS) - a.k.a. the Stasi, that employed covert campaigns against dissidents.

Their methods included surveillance, harassment, intimidation, and manipulation. The tactics were tailored to each target’s traits, exploiting personal qualities or weaknesses. First, Stasi built a target's profile, then used it to launch attacks.

These attacks, applied different psychological techniques that isolated targets from supportive resources, sowed doubt about their identity, and eroded trust in the outside world.

Forged letters and other fake evidence designed to make victims appear guilty or suspicious, provoked damaging rumors in their targets' communities.

Break-ins in which nothing was stolen and traces of someone’s presence were left, ominous calls and occasional public threats, kept victims in confusion and fear.

Wire‑tapping, monitoring of mail and phones, and placing informants in workplaces allowed the Stasi to track target's daily activities.

Systematic orchestration of professional and social failures undermined the self-confidence of targets.

Sometimes they made surveillance obvious to keep victims under constant stress and paranoia.

These tactics fueled smear campaigns branded targets as immoral or mentally unstable. Often, such attacks didn't leave an evident trace that could support victims' reports or claims, which made Zersetzung impossible to resist or challenge.

The end goal was to isolate a target, provoking paranoia, paralyzing public and personal life. That would lead to weakening a target and loss of resources.

Such techniques allowed the regime to neutralize opponents without attracting widespread attention or condemnation, preserving East Germany’s international image while inflicting profound harm behind closed doors.

The Stasi deployed a vast network of official collaborators who reported on friends, neighbours, colleagues and family members. It was widely known and this pervasive surveillance divided society and undermined trust among neighbours, friends and family. Beyond the official informant network, the Stasi worked with other collaborators such as “information providers” (AKP) and “Partners in Political-Operative Cooperation” (POZW).

Denunciations were not unique to East Germany. Some West Germans also contacted East German authorities to report on East German citizens. Der Spiegel reported one such case: a caller from West Berlin denounced his West Berlin friend for her connections with organizations that helped people escape to the West. He added that he liked her. Apparently, he liked her better behind the Wall.

After German reunification, many Stasi files were opened, revealing concrete evidence of techniques they used and destructive impact on human lives.

Let's look closer at two illustrative cases.

Regina Herrmann case.

In 1962, 14-year-old Regina was pulled out of class by Stasi agents and told she was expelled from advanced schooling because her family was not loyal to the state.

In the coming months and years, Herrmann often had the feeling she was being followed. Rumors spread in her town that she was a "Flittchen" - an easy girl. In her interview to Guardian (6 Nov 2019) she said she found in the Stasi archives showing that "secret police instructed five unofficial collaborators to target her in bars and nightclubs".

She was not part of any formal resistance group or other dissident organizations. But even minor independent criticism made someone vulnerable to repression. Shortly before her 18th birthday, she was arrested. The Stasi accused her of sedition and plotting to escape, and threatened her with imprisonment and the confiscation of her parents' property. Regina wanted to prevent her parents from suffering because of her and signed the declaration of commitment to the Stasi.

She started to avoid contact with those she was supposed to report on to the Stasi. She reportedly didn't provide them valuable information and managed to escape to West Germany soon. When the Stasi archives were opened in 1990 she applied for rehabilitation, and was successful.

However, she never got education, she dreamed of at an early age, she also never received compensation after German reunification. At 72 she was working as a receptionist at a security firm, to top up her €1,073 per month old-age pension.

Jürgen Fuchs's story is very different.

Jürgen Fuchs case

Jürgen Fuchs (1950-1999) was a writer and social psychologist who advocated for free speech. He came into conflict with East German authorities early on. After his critical statements during the student protests and the Prague Spring in 1968 his school administration had described him as “politically unreliable”. Universities were tightly controlled by state authorities and the "politically unreliable" label closed his access to university education. To begin studying social psychology he had to file an appeal. In 1973 he became a member of the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) - probably a required step to continue his academic career, but after his performance with the lyricist of the band Renft in 1975, he was expelled from the SED and the FDJ.

Shortly after completing his studies, the University of Jena’s disciplinary committee banned Fuchs from all universities for his poetry and prose and removed from an official government registry that listed who could legally work as a psychologist in East Germany.

Fuchs then worked in a church social institution - one of the few places where dissidents could find employment.

He was arrested on 19 November 1976 after his protest against the deprivation of Wolf Biermann's East German citizenship. Following international protests, Fuchs was released from prison and deported to West Berlin together with his family in August 1977.

In 1977 Der Spiegel published series of his articles, "Du sollst zerbrechen!" ("You're going to crack!"), in which he describes the Stasi's "operational psychology". The Stasi denied his claims, branding him as paranoid and so that Der Spiegel and other media would perceive him as suffering from a persecution complex. However, Fuchs’s words were later supported by official Stasi documents revealed after the fall of the Wall.

In West Berlin he was involved in civil movements and the Stasi targeted him again. They terrorized him with nighttime phone calls, blocked his landline, and sent unwanted magazines and brochures in his name to harass him and his family. The campaign escalated to direct attacks, including a bomb explosion in front of his house in 1986 and the sabotage of his car’s brake hoses.

From 1991, he worked with the agency that managed the Stasi archives, helping to document and preserve evidence of their crimes. He died in 1999 at 48 of a rare form of leukemia. His death fuelled rumors that the Stasi exposed prisoners to gamma radiation.

The cost of Zersetzung was profound. Those who were targeted often never fully recovered and never received justice. The tactics were designed not just to punish dissenters, but to make their lives unbearable. This process did lead, over time, to personality breakdown, anxiety disorders, social withdrawal and even suicide among some victims.

An atmosphere of fear and self‑censorship stifled creativity, scientific progress, and civic engagement during decades of surveillance. The Stasi mastered breaking people down one by one, but the damage extended far beyond individual targets.

Their tactics left lasting effects in many sectors after reunification: more unemployment days, lower income, lower self-employment probability. The Stasi surveillance culture fostered lower trust, less cooperative behaviour and weaker start-up culture in East Germany for generations.

In economics, despite ongoing efforts since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, large gaps exist between East and West Germany. As of 2023 - 33 years later, GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per capita in the east remains around two-thirds that of the west.While this gap has multiple causes, the erosion of social trust and cooperative networks under Stasi surveillance created lasting disadvantages and the adoption of identical formal institutions hasn't erased east-west differences in social capital, business networks, and economic behavior that trace back to the surveillance state era.

In their efforts to preserve the regime Stasi encouraged unskilled individuals and discouraged talented people, preventing intellectual resources from shaping Germany's future. They fractured entire communities, undermined trust in institutions, and left scars that still burden German society today. They could appoint five informants to harass a minor, but they were not able to ensure the viability of the system in long term. Because people are the main and most valuable resource of every state. And it's viability depends on the quality of the resource.

Although the Stasi is gone, the core tactics of Zersetzung did not disappear. The playbook is the same: intimidate, isolate, discredit, and demoralize the target into giving up. These tactics are used by a wide range of actors - from authoritarian regimes to modern democracies, from corporations to domestic groups.

With modern technology, surveillance, harassment, and rumor‐spreading have become easier than ever. False rumors can now be amplified to millions of people in minutes, ruining a target’s reputation faster than the Stasi’s forged letters ever could.

Around the globe, journalists, activists, and ordinary people with critical thinking often find themselves on the receiving end of such tactics.

Unlike in East Germany, where attacks were orchestrated by the state, well documented and later revealed due to historical circumstance, today’s attacks are distributed across multiple actors that makes them hard to trace or assign clear responsibility.

The cause and effect of attacks remain obscure, and rumors continue on their own turning ordinary crowds into tools of manipulators.

Such practices corrode society’s moral compass, leaving a lasting legacy of distrust, cynicism, and weakened ethical standards.

Modern society has little defense against them due to how they are valuable for attackers. On one hand, these techniques remain extremely effective: they’re hard to trace and easy to deploy while damage is hard to prove. On the other hand, they naturally filter critical thinkers and sharp minds out of public discourse, weakening open debate before it even begins.

It is widely believed that modern democracies were built to guard against tyranny. However, recent history shows how easily those very institutions can become tools for suppression when those in power silence critics, waging covert information wars across social platforms or when criminal networks infiltrate them. In such cases the same mechanisms meant to protect citizens are turned inward, turning democracy itself into another vector of intimidation.

If we accept that intimidation and manipulation techniques - whether state or privately orchestrated - continue to be used, education becomes the most effective countermeasure. However implementing comprehensive programs of critical literacy isn’t trivial since education demands resources, often missing when power seeks opportunities to suppress opponents. It doesn't matter whether the system is an authoritarian regime or a democracy when social media are used to spread rumors and manipulate public opinion.

Ultimately, it falls to communities themselves to safeguard their minds and their souls.

Supporting Sources:

• Zersetzung - Wikipedia
• The Long-Term Costs of Government Surveillance
• Stasi victims and their quest for compensation | The Guardian
• East German Snitching Went Far Beyond the Stasi
• Regina Herrmann
• Catch me if you can
• Dissidents say Stasi gave them cancer | BBC
• Jürgen Fuchs, 29. 9. 1987, West Berlin, Germany
• Stasi