Almuth Beck  Almuth Beck (born 4 October 1940) is a German former teacher and politician (SED/PDS). After reunification she became the first member of a German parliament ("Landtag") to be deprived of her parliamentary mandate on account of activities as an Informal collaborator for the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) in what was, at that time, East Germany. This, and successful legal challenges touching on her case, attracted attention across the nation. Almuth Beck was born in Sonneberg, a small and in some ways isolated town in the to the south of Erfurt. When she was 4 war ended and the region found itself in the Soviet occupation zone, relaunched in October 1949 as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany). She passed her school final exams and went on to study between 1958 and 1962 at the University of Jena, during which time, in 1961, she married. She emerged qualified as a school teacher of History and German: between 1962 and 1965 she taught at the secondary school in Föritz (Sonneberg) where she was also a deputy school director. Between 1965 and 1990 she served as an advisor on labour law at the Education Department of the Sonneberg district council. Between 1970 and 1973 she completed a distance-learning study course at the Karl-Marx University (as it was then known) in Leipzig which resulted in a degree in Educational psychology. In 1957 she became a member of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (""Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands"" / SED) at a relatively young age. After 1990 it emerged from the work on Stasi files that in the context of her advisory work with the local education department she had signed a "Declaration of Duty" (""Verpflichtungserklärung"") for the Ministry for State Security, although she denied this. In 1990 she took a teaching job at the school in Mengersgereuth-Hämmern, then working between 1992 and 1994 as an adult education teacher. Regional elections took place on the same day as the general election, on 16 October 1994. Nationally the result was not encouraging for the former SED which had been relaunched, formally at the end of 1989, as the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) as part of a broader relaunch intended to prepare for a democratic future. In the states that had been East Germany (""neuen Bundesländer"") support for the PDS increased from the low-point of 1990, however, and in the party won nearly 17% of the votes cast, which translated into 17 seats in the 88 seat parliament (""Landtag"").