East Germany's Stasi secret police resorted to unusual methods in the pursuit of potential dissidents: they collected their scent in a jar.

Stasi agents discreetly gathered the olfactory snapshots using a specially treated cloth. They also stole clothing from sports fields or workplaces, and even snuck tubes into homes to capture elusive air samples. The scents were then stored in the Stasi’s East Berlin offices as a record of potential dissenters who might warrant further surveillance. Thousands of samples were kept.

It was a disturbing tactic used by the East German secret police before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, one captured in the German movie The Lives of Others (2006), but it seems the practice didn’t stop altogether when the Berlin Wall fell. In an alarming incident that raised hackles again in 2007, German police admitted using Stasi ‘scent profiling’ methods to monitor G8 activists.

Stasi spies: hated and feared

East Germany’s Stasi secret police were among the most hated and feared institutions of the Cold War communist government. Officially, there was one Stasi secret policeman per 166 East Germans but if regular informers and part-time snoops were counted there was a shocking one informer per 6.5 citizens.

Full-time officers were stationed at major industrial plants, while designated watchdogs in apartment buildings reported to Volkspolizei (Vopo) representatives, who, in turn, were aligned with the Stasi. They reported overnight visitors and infiltrated schools, universities, and hospitals, co-opting doctors, lawyers, journalists, writers, actors, and even sports figures into spying.

Privacy was all but non-existent during the Cold War but the story of the scent samples is one of the most invasive - and some believe appalling - practices of the Stasi era. During some interrogations, ‘suspects’ sat on chairs with a yellow cloth secretly placed under the outer upholstery.

The interrogation often led to perspiration which the yellow dust cloth duly collected. The cloth - or a section of the chair - was then removed and sealed into a glass jar so the Stasi had the suspects’ scent in case they ever needed to track them down using sniffer dogs.
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Stasi sniffer dogs

Most of the 500 or so Stasi-trained pooches were used as guard dogs or for border duty but there were also reportedly 26 Stasi scent and tracking dogs, 15 ‘smell differentiation’ dogs, and 10 bomb dogs.

Although scent-tracking was a well-known police method used in criminal investigations, the samples couldn’t be admitted in court at the time as there was no scientific evidence that the method is infallible.

Samples were mainly collected from people suspected of crimes (or suspected of possibly committing crimes in the future) in the days when security officials operated without state limitation. Most of the samples were destroyed after 1989 and aren't listed in the Stasi files. 

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Smells like anarchy

In a story headlined The Scent of Terror, Spiegel reported that in 2007 that German authorities collected human scents to trace activists they believed might try to disrupt the G8 summit with violence. At that stage, German police no longer needed to collect scents in secret. Instead, investigators from the federal prosecutors' office stood on the doorstep of one suspect at 8 am and asked a 68-year-old left-wing radical for his smell. 

“The elderly gentleman had to hold little metal tubes in his hand for several minutes,” Spiegel reported. “The scent of terror has got Germany's investigators twitching with excitement.”

While DNA is subject to strict conditions, the law permits fingerprinting and scent recording if police deem it necessary for a criminal investigation. They often do.

Erhard Denninger, an expert on Germany's justice system, told Spiegel that he has no problem with scent analysis. "It's harmless by comparison with sledgehammer plans like searching people's computers.”

But Hamburg defense lawyer Gerhard Strate doesn’t believe in the infallibility of animals in court proceedings: "Then we could just replace the judges with dogs wagging their tails.”