BRITAIN has been accused of “sheltering communists” after refusing to hand over a cache of Stasi files revealing the names of British spies who worked for the former East German secret intelligence agency during the Cold War.

The cache belongs to a set of microfilm images, known as the Rosenholz (Rosewood) records, that contain 280,000 files giving basic information on employees of the foreign intelligence arm of the former GDR.

The records were obtained by the CIA in murky circumstances shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. American agents analysed the data before distributing relevant portions to countries in which the Stasi were active.

A swath of files relating to Stasi activity in the UK were given to MI5 (British security service) by the Americans in the 1990s. Now Germany wants the files back, to add to its extensive archives on the GDR’s ministry for state security, commonly known as the Stasi.

If the files are returned to Germany, they will be be made available, unredacted, to scholars and historians. That means that British Stasi sympathisers and spies could be outed for the first time.

Today, Germany only has those sections of the Rosenholz discs relating to activity in former West Germany — though the governments of Norway, Denmark and Sweden recently indicated they were ready to hand over the Rosenholz files they were given by the CIA more than 10 years ago.

Since the return to Berlin of the West German portion of the Rosenholz files in 2003, a number of public figures have been outed as Stasi collaborators, most recently a priest who allegedly spied on Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.

“We need access to these British files in order to understand the Cold War, which was a war fought by secret intelligence operatives all over the world,” said Helmut Muller-Enbergs, one of the world’s leading scholars on the Stasi.

Muller-Enbergs, together with fellow academics, is demanding that Britain return its share of the Rosenholz files to the Stasi archives in Berlin. “Given that the Brits have long been considered world class in intelligence gathering, it is especially important for us to understand how the Stasi was able to operate in the UK.”

“The UK is not a country known for sheltering communists, so why then will they not reveal to us who in Great Britain was working for a communist regime?” said Muller-Enbergs, a researcher at the Stasi archives in Berlin (BStU) and visiting professor at Gotland University, Sweden.

Roland Jahn, the federal commissioner for the Stasi archive, said: “These records could offer an important complement to those Stasi files we already have, and thus make an important contribution to the reappraisal of the role of East German state security in Europe.”

The Stasi archives already encompass 111km of files, including 39 million index cards, 1.4 million photos and 34,000 video and audio recordings. But the Rosenholz files are key because of the systematic and deliberate destruction of most of the records relating to a Stasi division known as the Hauptverwaltung A (HVA), which was responsible for running an extensive network of spies in the West.

— The Guardian, London