Securitate
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Romania Warsaw Pact Departamentul Securităţii Statului · DSS - this page is a stub Departamentul Securităţii Statului (Department for State Security) (DSS), commonly known as the Securitate, was the secret police agency of the Socialist Republic of Romania, during most of the Cold War. It was establised with help from the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD, later KGB) on 30 August 1948 as the General Directorate for the Security of the People (DGSP) [1]. Under president Nicolae Ceauşescu, 1 it was one of the most brutal secret police forces in the world.
At its height, the Securitate had 11,000 agents 2 and 500,000 informants on a population of 22 million [1]. It was responsible for the arrests, torture and deaths of thousands of people. Like its sister organisations in other East European countries, such as the Stasi (DDR), the StB (Czechoslovakia) and ÁVH (Hungaria), it kept files on dissidents, placed them under surveillance and tapped their telephone lines. The latter was the responsibility of General Directorate for Technical Operations, that had been established in 1954 with help from the Soviet intelligence services. The archives of the former Securitate are now publicly accessible – partly online – via the Romanian National Council for the Study of the Security Archives CNSAS [3]. It also allows individuals to access their personal Securitate file.
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