Stasi Museum

From 1950 until the collapse of East Germany in 1989–90, this complex in Lichtenberg was the administrative heart of the Ministry for State Security — the Stasi — one of history's most pervasive domestic surveillance operations, believed at its peak to have employed roughly one full-time officer or informant for every 60 East German citizens. The museum occupies House 1, the actual former headquarters building, and its centrepiece is the preserved office suite of Erich Mielke, the Stasi's longtime head, left largely as citizens found it when they stormed the building in January 1990.

Mielke's office is a genuinely strange time capsule — mid-century East German bureaucratic furniture, a bank of telephones, and a private apartment attached for a man who by most accounts rarely left the building. Elsewhere, the museum's collection of surveillance technology reads like spy-film props except entirely real: cameras hidden inside watering cans, briefcases and buttonholes; scent-sample jars used to track individuals with trained dogs; and disguise kits used by officers conducting covert operations.