[8] About half of the material is held in the Stasi Records Agency's headquarters in Berlin, and the rest is in its 12 regional offices.

[10] The agency was formally known by the title of its lead official, the "Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic" (German: Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik).

In addition to providing access to files, it also has exhibitions, tours and public events related to the Stasi and the history of the GDR.

[13] There were also 12 regional offices of the organisation in Dresden, Erfurt, Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, and Halle, Chemnitz, Gera, Leipzig, Magdeburg, New Brandenburg, Rostock, Schwerin and Suhl.

[14] The offices in Dresden, Erfurt, Frankfurt-an-der-Oder and Halle all had permanent and changing exhibitions, offer tours to the public and host events and educational programmes relating to the activities of the Stasi in their region.

On the morning of 4 December, dark smoke was seen coming from the chimneys of the Stasi district headquarters in Erfurt, and it was deduced that files were being burned.

[citation needed] In summer 2008, the German Parliament decided to found an expert commission to analyze the role and future of the BStU.

[21][22] The destruction had initially been performed using industrial shredders, but these soon broke down and officers resorted to tearing files by hand before stuffing the pieces into bags that were then meant to be burned or chemically treated.

[22] By early 2007 the contents of around 350 of these bags had been manually reconstructed by a small team of full-time workers,[23] a task that is being continued by the Federal Archives since it absorbed the BStU.

[22] According to the archives, an additional "few thousand" bags containing very finely shredded paper were also secured by the BStU, but these were all disposed of by the agency in 1991 and so cannot be the subject of any attempts at reconstruction.

[24][25] This pilot project attempted reconstruction on the contents of 400 bags and demonstrated that the concept worked in principle,[24][22] but a wider deployment was not undertaken due to limitations in scanner technology and concerns over cost efficiency.

In 2011, the German government asked the UK's MI5 to return the files they have, but they refused due to concerns that British Stasi spies could be exposed.