Tyler laments the trend in films to feature heroic resisters to the East German stasi, as if the region were a cauldron of dissent and liberalism held in check by nothing more than tyranny and a particularly efficient secret police force. Relatedly, I'm reading Hitler's Beneficiaries by Gotz Aly, which makes the point that the German people were basically supportive of the Nazis because they were showered in goods, gifts, and services taken from or funded by the residents of conquered lands and the hyper-taxed, eventually liquidated Jews. He writes:
To put the level of Nazi coercion into perspective: Communist East Germany would later employ 190,000 official surveillance experts and an equal number of "unofficial collaborators" to watch over a populace of 17 million, while in 1937 the Gestapo had just over 7,000 employees, including bureaucrats and secretarial staff. Together with a far smaller force of security police, they sufficed to keep tabs on more than 60 million people. Most Germans simply did not need to be subjected to surveillance or detention. By the end of 1936, four years after the Nazis had become Germany's largest political party and once their initial period of terror and violence against political opponents was over, only 4,761 people -- some of whom were chronic alcoholics and career criminals -- were incarcerated in the country's concentration camps.
Now, it could be that Communist East Germany, given its economic system, was simply very inefficient at suppressing dissent and both over-hired for the position and used it as an unofficial government jobs program, but it's an interesting contrast nonetheless.