|
Kommerzielle Koordinierung
Kommerzielle Koordinierung ( en, Commercial Coordination) was a secret commercial enterprise in East Germany, run by the Stasi officer Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski and called "KoKo" (short for ''Kommerzielle Koordinierung''). Origins and development KoKo developed from the official smuggling operations of the 1950s. Its main goal was to bring foreign currency to the German Democratic Republic. It was officially established in 1966 and was involved in business dealings and industrial espionage in Western countries. It is estimated that between 1966 and 1989 it generated nearly 25 billion DM. Operations KoKo operated 180 front companies in the West and brought their hard currency profits to secret accounts in East Germany. Its operations were controlled by Erich Honecker, Erich Mielke, and Günter Mittag. KoKo was involved in illegal arms deals with Iran, Third World regimes, and even the CIA; "selling" East German political prisoners to West Germany; purchasing of high technology p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
East Germany
East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR; german: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, , DDR, ), was a country that existed from its creation on 7 October 1949 until its dissolution on 3 October 1990. In these years the state was a part of the Eastern Bloc in the Cold War. Commonly described as a communist state, it described itself as a socialist "workers' and peasants' state".Patrick Major, Jonathan Osmond, ''The Workers' and Peasants' State: Communism and Society in East Germany Under Ulbricht 1945–71'', Manchester University Press, 2002, Its territory was administered and occupied by Soviet forces following the end of World War II—the Soviet occupation zone of the Potsdam Agreement, bounded on the east by the Oder–Neisse line. The Soviet zone surrounded West Berlin but did not include it and West Berlin remained outside the jurisdiction of the GDR. Most scholars and academics describe the GDR as a totalitarian dictatorship. The GDR was established i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stasi
The Ministry for State Security, commonly known as the (),An abbreviation of . was the state security service of the East Germany from 1950 to 1990. The Stasi's function was similar to the KGB, serving as a means of maintaining state authority, i.e., the "Sword and Shield of the Party" (). This was accomplished primarily through the use of a network of civilian informants. This organization contributed to the arrest of approximately 250,000 people in East Germany. The Stasi also conducted espionage and other clandestine operations abroad through its subordinate foreign intelligence service, the Office of Enlightenment, or Head Office A (german: Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung). They also maintained contacts and occasionally cooperated with West German terrorists. The Stasi was headquartered in East Berlin, with an extensive complex in Berlin-Lichtenberg and several smaller facilities throughout the city. Erich Mielke was the Stasi's longest-serving chief, in power for 32 of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski
Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski (3 July 1932 – 21 June 2015) was a politician and trader in the German Democratic Republic. He was director of a main department ('Hauptverwaltungsleiter') in the ''Ministry for Foreign Trade and German Domestic Trade'' (1956–62), the Deputy Minister for External Trade (1967–75), and head of the GDR's ''Kommerzielle Koordinierung'' (KoKo, 1966–86). Early life He was born in Berlin to a stateless ethnic Russian father and adopted by the Schalcks when he was eight years old. His biological father served as a Tsarist officer in World War I and became the head of the Wehrmacht's Russian language interpreter school in World War II; he did not return from Soviet captivity. His maternal grandfather worked for Stinnes in St. Petersburg. biography Schalck-Golodkowsky j ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Erich Honecker
Erich Ernst Paul Honecker (; 25 August 1912 – 29 May 1994) was a German communist politician who led the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) from 1971 until shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. He held the posts of General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and Chairman of the National Defence Council; in 1976, he replaced Willi Stoph as Chairman of the State Council, the official head of state. As the leader of East Germany, Honecker had close ties to the Soviet Union, which maintained a large army in the country. Honecker's political career began in the 1930s when he became an official of the Communist Party of Germany, a position for which he was imprisoned by the Nazis. Following World War II, he was freed by the Soviet army and relaunched his political activities, founding the SED's youth organisation, the Free German Youth, in 1946 and serving as the group's chairman until 1955. As the Security Secretary of the SED ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Erich Mielke
Erich Fritz Emil Mielke (; 28 December 1907 – 21 May 2000) was a German communist official who served as head of the East German Ministry for State Security (''Ministerium für Staatsicherheit'' – MfS), better known as the Stasi, from 1957 until shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. A native of Berlin and a second-generation member of the Communist Party of Germany, Mielke was one of two triggermen in the 1931 murders of Berlin Police captains Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck. After learning that a witness had survived, Mielke escaped arrest by fleeing to the Soviet Union, where the NKVD recruited him. He was one of the key figures in the decimation of Moscow's German Communists during the Great PurgeJohn O. Koehler, ''The Stasi; The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police'', page 51. as well as in the Stalinist witch-hunt for ideological dissent within the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. Following the end of World War II in 1945, Miel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Günter Mittag
Günter Mittag (8 October 1926 – 18 March 1994) was a German member of parliament, secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), and a central figure in East Germany's command economy. Biography Born to a working-class family in Stettin (now Szczecin). After completing vocational education with the Reichsbahn Mittag served in a flak regiment of the Wehrmacht in the Second World War. He joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1945, became a member of the SED in 1946 and by 1958, when he had earned his doctorate with a dissertation entitled "Die Überlegenheit der sozialistischen Organisation und Leitung im Eisenbahnwesen der DDR gegenüber dem kapitalistischen Eisenbahnwesen" (en: The Superiority of Socialist Organisation and Performance in the Railroads of the GDR to the Capitalist Railroads), he became Secretary of the Economic Commission at the Politbüro. In 1963 he became a member of parliament and (until 1971, and then again from 1979 to 1989) a member ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
West Germany
West Germany is the colloquial term used to indicate the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG; german: Bundesrepublik Deutschland , BRD) between its formation on 23 May 1949 and the German reunification through the accession of East Germany on 3 October 1990. During the Cold War, the western portion of Germany and the associated territory of West Berlin were parts of the Western Bloc. West Germany was formed as a political entity during the Allied occupation of Germany after World War II, established from eleven states of Germany, states formed in the three Allied zones of occupation held by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. The FRG's provisional capital was the city of Bonn, and the Cold War era country is retrospectively designated as the Bonn Republic. At the onset of the Cold War, Europe was divided between the Western and Eastern Bloc, Eastern blocs. Germany was divided into the two countries. Initially, West Germany claimed an exclusive mandate for all of Ger ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nomenklatura
The ''nomenklatura'' ( rus, номенклату́ра, p=nəmʲɪnklɐˈturə, a=ru-номенклатура.ogg; from la, nomenclatura) were a category of people within the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries who held various key administrative positions in the bureaucracy, running all spheres of those countries' activity: government, industry, agriculture, education, etc., whose positions were granted only with approval by the communist party of each country or region. Virtually all members of the nomenklatura were members of a communist party. Critics of Stalin, such as Milovan Đilas, critically defined them as a " new class". Richard Pipes, a Harvard historian, claimed that the nomenklatura system mainly reflected a continuation of the old Tsarist regime, as many former Tsarist officials or " careerists" joined the Bolshevik government during and after the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922. The ''nomenklatura'' formed a ''de facto'' elite of public powers in the f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Socialist Unity Party Of Germany
The Socialist Unity Party of Germany (german: Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, ; SED, ), often known in English as the East German Communist Party, was the founding and ruling party of the German Democratic Republic (GDR; East Germany) from the country's foundation in October 1949 until its dissolution after the Peaceful Revolution in 1989. It was a Marxist–Leninist communist party, established in April 1946 as a merger between the East German branches of the Communist Party of Germany and Social Democratic Party of Germany. Although the GDR was a one-party state, some other institutional popular front parties were permitted to exist in alliance with the SED; these parties included the Christian Democratic Union, the Liberal Democratic Party, the Democratic Farmers' Party, and the National Democratic Party. In the 1980s, the SED rejected the liberalisation policies of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, such as ''perestroika'' and ''glasnost'', which would lead t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Franz-Josef Strauss
Franz Josef Strauss ( ; 6 September 1915 – 3 October 1988) was a German politician. He was the long-time chairman of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) from 1961 until 1988, member of the federal cabinet in different positions between 1953 and 1969 and minister-president of the state of Bavaria from 1978 until 1988. Strauss is also credited as a co-founder of European aerospace conglomerate Airbus. After the 1969 federal elections, West Germany's CDU/CSU alliance found itself out of power for the first time since the founding of the Federal Republic. At this time, Strauss became more identified with the regional politics of Bavaria. While he ran for the chancellorship as the candidate of the CDU/CSU in 1980, for the rest of his life Strauss never again held federal office. From 1978 until his death in 1988, he was the head of the Bavarian government. His last two decades were marked by a fierce rivalry with CDU chairman Helmut Kohl.David Wilsford, ed. ''Political L ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Egon Bahr
Egon Karl-Heinz Bahr (; 18 March 1922 – 19 August 2015) was a German SPD politician. The former journalist was the creator of the ''Ostpolitik'' promoted by West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, for whom he served as Secretary of State in the German Chancellery from 1969 until 1972. Between 1972 and 1990 he was an MP in the Bundestag of the Federal Republic of Germany and from 1972 until 1976 was also a Minister of the Federal Government. Bahr was a key figure in multiple negotiation sessions between not only East and West Germany, but also West Germany and the Soviet Union. In addition to his instrumental role in ''Ostpolitik'', Bahr was also an influential voice in negotiating the Treaty of Moscow, the Treaty of Warsaw, the Transit Treaty of 1971, and the Basic Treaty of 1972. Life and career Bahr was born in Treffurt, in the Prussian Province of Saxony, the son of Hedwig and Karl Bahr, a high school teacher. After completing his secondary education in 1940, Bahr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Diensteinheit IX
The ''Diensteinheit IX'' ( en, Service Unit 9) was a special and covert counter-terrorism unit of the German Democratic Republic Volkspolizei. It was not the same as the ''9. Volkspolizei-Kompanie'' (English: ''9th People's Police Company'') since its structure was meant to handle anti-riot duties in East Germany. History The Munich massacre in 1972 and the increasing crime in East German cities led to initial attempts to create specialized police units in East Germany. With the establishment of the '' GSG 9'' and '' Spezialeinsatzkommando''s (SEK) in the early 1970s in West Germany, the Government of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) initiated the creation of a similar unit. Since no comparable force existed in East Germany at that time, it had to be created from scratch, i.e. from intelligence reports about Western and Soviet special forces units. The unit had been created in 1973 with provisional units before it was fully established in 1974 by Ernst Fabian with 3 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
.svg "Click for more on -> Erich Mielke")
