BERLIN, 23 September 2003 — Rosenholz Files. The two words are the focus of an increasingly sharp debate in Germany, and are also probably causing worried and sleepless nights for many a western German public figure.

The debate is about the mysterious files compiled by the former communist East German security apparatus Stasi with the names of people who spied, informed for, or otherwise cooperated with the Stasi back in the Cold War days.

The files reportedly contain over 50,000 names. Around 40,000 of them are former east Germans, but the political dynamite is in the upwards of as many as 12,000 people in western Germany listed as those who cooperated with the Stasi between the 1950s and late 1989.

The tables have now been turned. After a period of soul-searching and embarrassing and often politically damaging revelations about eastern Germans who cooperated with the feared Stasi apparatus, now it’s the turn of some western Germans to face their past.

It’s all down on microfilm and compact discs under the codename “Rosenholz” and is in itself a fascinating story going back to the chaotic days after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

Somehow — under circumstances never fully revealed — the CIA in “Operation Rosewood” (Rosenholz) got hold of the Stasi’s lists of the names of people in the West who had worked for East Germany.

The most prominent theory is that the CIA paid handsomely to somebody on the inside of the Stasi headquarters in downtown East Berlin — or maybe a Soviet agent— to secure the files in late 1989.

After more than a decade of keeping the files in which it scoured the names for Americans who may have cooperated with the Stasi, the CIA turned them over to Germany in 2000.

But under the terms of the turnover, a cloak of secrecy had to be kept over the files until June 2003.

In charge of the file is the HVA, a government agency set up to administer the Stasi files.

The first major controversy about the Rosenholz Files after the period of secrecy expired broke out in late August when the HVA said the records showed that journalist and writer Guenter Wallraff was an “IM” or unofficial informer, for the Stasi, between 1968 and 1971.

Wallraff, who lives in Cologne, angrily denied it, though he did concede that he had been approached by the Stasi asking his cooperation.