One of the most profitable activities was the sale of political prisoners to Western authorities. Of the eighty-seven thousand political dissidents who were arrested in the DDR between 1963 and 1989, about thirty-three thousand were sold to Western authorities. West German authorities also paid the DDR to issue more than two hundred thousand emigration permits. KoKo operations were done in secret, and prisoners often did not know why they were released. This shows that population surveillance and state secrecy often go hand in hand. Still, knowledge of the prisoner exchanges started leaking out after 1972 and discredited the DDR regime significantly.
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