Stasi Museum

This guide to the Stasi Museum in Berlin opens with two gunshots on a Berlin square in September 1931, and follows the shooter, Erich Mielke, into decades of communist exile and back to this building as head of East Germany's secret police. You'll hear how his agency watched its own citizens so closely it kept a scent archive of suspects in sealed jars, and what officers found hidden in a safe at Mielke's house after the Berlin Wall fell. A listening tip: his office, on the minister's floor, survives almost untouched.