Informers: secrets, truths, and dignity

Over 100,000 individuals acted as secret informers reporting to state security police in Czechoslovakia during the Communist years. The contents of all their reports were saved in extensive police files. Similar dynamics occurred throughout all of Eastern Europe.

The intricacies of informers, the mist of their secrets and muck of their revelations, has even inspired novelists and song writers. For example:

We’d like to know a little bit about you for our files
We’d like to help you learn to help yourself
Hide it in a hiding place where no one ever goes
Put it in your pantry with your cupcakes

Simon and Garfunkel, ‘Mrs. Robinson’ (1968) from the album Bookends

‘[O]ur only immortality is in the police files.’

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Aaron Asher tr, Faber & Faber 1996)

Why do people inform on others—including neighbors, family members, co-workers, friends, lovers—to the secret police in repressive societies? Once repression abates, and regimes democratize, how should law and political transition approach erstwhile informers?

Emotions are among key drivers that motor people to inform on others. Four emotions in particular should be noted:

• resentment (getting even and settling scores)
• desire (getting ahead and grabbing things)
• allegiance (to an ideology, to the state, to a vision)
• fear (of the state, of the police, of being exposed)

Informing is a tool of social navigation: in the words of Simon and Garfunkel, as a way for people to help themselves. Informers, for the most part, are marginal ordinary folks who are victimized by the state and, in turn, victimize others.

Informers are not limited to one place in time; they are not boxed into post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe. Indeed, they are everywhere, including very close to home. The only part of the United Kingdom to be occupied by the Nazis—the Channel Islands—was chock-full of informers and collaborators, along with resisters, during World War II, and all are featured in a local museum in Jersey. No state or social movement—no matter how virtuous or vile, how maudlin, Machiavellian, or magnificent—can operate without informers. As early as one month into the Russia-Ukraine war, thousands of Ukrainians faced prosecution for collaborating with, and supplying information to, the invading Russians. Indeed, armed with our iPhones, we are all recorders, informers, and cancellers now. We are all whistleblowers, for better or for worse.

What should one do with informers after the repressive regime falls? In post-Communist Czech Republic, informers were largely scapegoated and ostracized. They were purged from public offices and jobs. They were openly mocked. Politically, this was an easy task because, throughout history and across cultures, informers are largely seen as sniveling rats, moles, snitches, turn-coats, and finks. These words used to describe informers reveal near universal disdain.

What is more, the Czechoslovak Communist secret police files—a major data source—were opened to the public to peruse and review. These files are even being digitized. Their subjects thereby became immortalized, to draw from Kundera. As a result, the life-stories of informers became gossipy grist for the public mill. But so too did all the scurrilous and embarrassing details of what they reported about the lives of others—namely, individuals we call the informed-upons—such as affairs, outbursts, addictions, indiscretions, inanities, awkwardness, incompetence, petty crimes, dysfunctions, and health woes.

Transparency and clarity measures have been mainstreamed as part of transitional justice. The United Nations has declared March 24^th as the international day for the right to the truth. That said, our findings cast some doubt upon the unadulterated nature of this embrace. We believe there may be cause to pause the pursuit of ‘the truth’ at all costs. The right to the truth can lead to grotesque privacy invasions. Ultimately, in the Czech Republic, the scapegoating of informers delivered comfort to many people otherwise complicit in Communist dictatorship while the opening of the files visited cruelties upon many others.

In 2025, collaborator archives in the Netherlands will go public after having been shuttered for 75 years. These archives contain the files of a special court, the Bijzondere Rechtspleging (BR). The BR was established after WWII to prosecute alleged Nazi collaborators. The BR investigated over 300,000 individuals; it tried 65,000. Some of those tried were executed, some imprisoned, and others stripped of their civil rights. The BR archive, however, implicates a much larger array of individuals, including persons whose investigations were interrupted, stopped, never started, and those who were falsely accused. Understandably, opening these archives to the public has triggered controversy, just as it did in the Czech Republic. One big difference in the Dutch case is that almost all the collaborators have passed away. But they have families, children, and grandchildren. The dead, moreover, can never explain, clarify, apologize, cry, or argue.

Informing—driven by basic human emotions we identify as resentment, desire, allegiance, and fear—sits uneasily with many transitional justice measures. Our work offers a new lens—rooted in dignity—through which to manage this controversy, alleviate this unease, and ensure that transitional justice is more ‘emotionally intelligent’, respects fairness, and does not succumb to politics.

_{Featured image by Grianghraf on Unsplash.}