Witch hunt, in 19th year, raises questions about Germany

The integrity of Germany is in question tonight, as an extraordinary witch hunt that began 19 years ago continues to sow fear. tear families apart and wreck careers in the country. The targets are not even suspected of doing anything wrong wrong during a span of almost the past two decades. Yet despite this fact, words fan the witch hunt into a relentless manhunt that has divided families, led to tragic deaths and smeared thousands.
There are many who continue to defend the longest witch hunt on earth. They seek to bring discredit and ruin on those quite some years ago, in fact at any time going all the way back to the 1950s and ending in the 1980s, were recruited and sometimes forced with blackmail to act as informants for ex-East Germany's Stasi.
Yet even the damnable reality of Germany's ongoing witch hunt might not put the nation's integrity on the line, if it were not for an enormous fact. The country has, still today, declined to expose the tens of thousands of German Nazis who survived World War II. Some of them found an easy path to sensitive positions at the center of Germany's government.

The editor of the Berliner Zeitung, Joseph Depenbrock, called for an independent inquiry into the backgrounds of 120 editorial staff to "preserve the credibility of the newspaper". The only question? Were any of them Stasi infotmants way back in the old days.

In a commentary in the paper, Depenbrock said that journalists had been shocked by the revelations. Firstly Thomas Leinkauf, editor of the Berliner's magazine and a prominent page three news feature slot, admitted he had worked for the Stasi as an informant after a file detailing his activities surfaced at the paper. Leinkauf worked for the Stasi for two years as a student in the 1970s informing on fellow students.