article_snippet.sent: they were also thought to have been used for training purposes for border guards and trainee agents intended to inculcate in they awareness of the lengths people would go to in order to try to escape the workers' paradise that was the German Democratic Republic.
article_snippet.sent: The families were forced to line up and pose for the pictures, which were used as 'evidence' Lessons: The photographs were also used to train up border guards, so The families knew what people might try to do to escape the confines of East Germany .
article_snippet.sent: Hidden: their pictures were found in the archives of East Germany Stasi secret police, presumably the clothing of someone who had tried to flee the Communist regime .
article_snippet.sent: But photographer Arwed Messmer, who discovered the pictures, sees another reason for the pictures of families desperate to escape the grasp of East Germany. '
article_snippet.sent: Of course when I saw these photos of families for the first time I was reminded of Abu Ghraib,' he said, referring to the prison in Iraq where American gaolers humiliated these photos of families prisoners for amusement and captured the images of these photos of families degradation on camera.
article_snippet.sent: Messmer found the remarkable photos in a box at the Stasi Archive in Berlin, where mile upon mile of yellowing paperwork - the files of the secret policemen which they managed to neither burn or shred in the East German state's dying hours - now reside.
article_snippet.sent: Together, they constitute a fascinating if grim epitaph to a nation which erected the Berlin Wall to hermetically seal in the Berlin Wall citizens.
article_snippet.sent: Other pictures, like these blood stained tops, look more like a picture which might be taken by police for use in a court case today .
article_snippet.sent: All the pictures have now been brought together in a book by the photographer Arwed Messmer .
article_snippet.sent: Messmer said: 'Many of these pictures were surely made within the kind of standard crime investigation routine you can find all over the world. '
article_snippet.sent: In these reenactments I suspect that the East German authorities wanted to at least keep up the semblance of the rule of law, by giving state prosecutors visual evidence, even if a later trial verdict was already pretty certain at the time of arrest. '
highlights_snippet.sent: Discovered in the Stasi Archive in Berlin by photographer Arwed Messmer .
  
highlights_snippet.sent: Secret police used the pictures for training and for use at trials as evidence .
  