Beispielakten-Talk. Eine „Grenzprovokation“ der Umweltgruppe Robin Wood

On the morning of December 6, 1983, around 20 people gathered on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin and unfurled a banner reading "It stinks like the plague in East and West". Shortly afterwards, young men began throwing pine crowns from the Grunewald forest over the border wall. They belonged to the environmental group "Robin Wood", which wanted to draw attention to the cross-border pollution of the air with this action.

In addition to the West Berlin police and the Sender Freies Berlin radio station, soldiers from the NVA border troop and Stasi employees also observed the event. The latter had already been informed about the upcoming action the evening before.

The secretariat of Gerhard Neiber, one of the deputies of the Minister for State Security, opened a report file on these and other activities of the environmental group "Robin Wood". Since 2024, this has been part of the Stasi Records Archive's collection of examples in the exhibition "Insight into Secrecy"

On the third evening of the sample file talk series on 24 November 2025, Dr. Martin Stief (historian, Federal Archives) will use this file as an example to explain the role of the State Security in the observation and suppression of environmental groups in the East and West. A member of "Robin Wood" will describe the activists' view of environmental work in divided Berlin in the 1980s.

Before the event, there will be an express tour of the permanent exhibition with a look into the archive at 17:00.
Registration is requested at einblick-ins-geheime@bundesarchiv.de or by telephone on 030 18 665-6699.
Places are limited.