A multi-million dollar project meant to digitise files of East Germany's secret police, has been abandoned.

Millions of documents amassed by the Stasi were shredded soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Historians are restoring some of them by putting millions of bits of torn papers together.

But the scanning hardware being used to digitise the old documents is not sophisticated enough.

Al Jazeera's David Chater reports from Eastern Berlin, Germany.