Erich Fritz Emil Mielke (; 28 December 1907 – 21 May 2000) was a German communist official who served as head of the
East German
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 ...
Ministry for State Security (''Ministerium für Staatsicherheit'' – MfS), better known as the
Stasi, from 1957 until shortly after the fall of the
Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall (german: Berliner Mauer, ) was a guarded concrete barrier that encircled West Berlin from 1961 to 1989, separating it from East Berlin and East Germany (GDR). Construction of the Berlin Wall was commenced by the government ...
in 1989.
A native of
Berlin
Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...
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
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (russian: Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел, Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, ), abbreviated NKVD ( ), was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union.
...
recruited him. He was one of the key figures in the decimation of Moscow's German Communists during the
Great Purge
The Great Purge or the Great Terror (russian: Большой террор), also known as the Year of '37 (russian: 37-й год, translit=Tridtsat sedmoi god, label=none) and the Yezhovshchina ('period of Nikolay Yezhov, Yezhov'), was General ...
[John 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
The International Brigades ( es, Brigadas Internacionales) were military units set up by the Communist International to assist the Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. The organization existe ...
during the
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War ( es, Guerra Civil Española)) or The Revolution ( es, La Revolución, link=no) among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War ( es, Cuarta Guerra Carlista, link=no) among Carlists, and The Rebellion ( es, La Rebelión, lin ...
.
Following the end of
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
in 1945, Mielke returned to the
Soviet Zone of
Occupied Germany
Germany was already de facto occupied by the Allies from the real fall of Nazi Germany in World War II on 8 May 1945 to the establishment of the East Germany on 7 October 1949. The Allies (United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and Franc ...
, which he helped organize into a Marxist-Leninist
satellite state
A satellite state or dependent state is a country that is formally independent in the world, but under heavy political, economic, and military influence or control from another country. The term was coined by analogy to planetary objects orbitin ...
under the
Socialist Unity Party (SED), later becoming head of the Stasi.
The Stasi under Mielke has been called by historian Edward Peterson the "most pervasive police state apparatus ever to exist on German soil". In a 1993 interview, Holocaust survivor and Nazi-hunter
Simon Wiesenthal
Simon Wiesenthal (31 December 190820 September 2005) was a history of the Jews in Austria, Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer. He studied architecture and was living in Lwów at the outbreak of World War II. He surviv ...
said that, if one considers only the oppression of their own people, the Stasi under Mielke was "much, much worse than the
Gestapo
The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one organi ...
".
[Koehler (1999), page 8.]
During the 1950s and 1960s Mielke led the process of forcibly forming
collectivised farms from East Germany's family-owned farms, which sent a flood of refugees to
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 O ...
. In response, Mielke oversaw the construction (1961) of the
Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall (german: Berliner Mauer, ) was a guarded concrete barrier that encircled West Berlin from 1961 to 1989, separating it from East Berlin and East Germany (GDR). Construction of the Berlin Wall was commenced by the government ...
and co-signed
orders to shoot fatally all East Germans who
attempted to leave the country. He also oversaw the establishment of pro-Soviet police states and paramilitary insurgencies in Western Europe, Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.
In addition to his role as head of the Stasi, Mielke was also an
Army General
Army general is the highest ranked general officer in many countries that use the General officer#French (Revolutionary) system, French Revolutionary System.
In countries that adopt the general officer four rank system, it is rank of genera ...
in the
National People's Army
The National People's Army (german: Nationale Volksarmee, ; NVA ) were the armed forces of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from 1956 to 1990.
The NVA was organized into four branches: the (Ground Forces), the (Navy), the (Air Force) a ...
(''Nationale Volksarmee''), and a member of the SED's ruling
Politburo. Dubbed "The Master of Fear" (german: der Meister der Angst) by the West German press, Mielke was one of the most powerful and most hated men in East Germany.
After
German reunification
German reunification (german: link=no, Deutsche Wiedervereinigung) was the process of re-establishing Germany as a united and fully sovereign state, which took place between 2 May 1989 and 15 March 1991. The day of 3 October 1990 when the Ge ...
in 1990, Mielke was arrested (1991), prosecuted (1992), convicted, and incarcerated (1993) for the
1931 murders of Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck. Released from prison early due to ill health in 1995, he died in a Berlin nursing home in 2000.
Early life
Erich Mielke was born in a
tenement
A tenement is a type of building shared by multiple dwellings, typically with flats or apartments on each floor and with shared entrance stairway access. They are common on the British Isles, particularly in Scotland. In the medieval Old Town, i ...
in
Berlin-Wedding
Wedding (german: der Wedding; ) is a locality in the borough of Mitte, Berlin, Germany and was a separate borough in the north-western inner city until it was fused with Tiergarten and Mitte in Berlin's 2001 administrative reform. At the same ti ...
,
Brandenburg
Brandenburg (; nds, Brannenborg; dsb, Bramborska ) is a states of Germany, state in the northeast of Germany bordering the states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Saxony, as well as the country of Poland. With an ar ...
, on 28 December 1907. During the
First World War
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
, the neighborhood was known as "Red Wedding" due to many residents' Marxist militancy. In a handwritten biography written for the
Soviet secret police
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
, Mielke described his father as "a poor, uneducated woodworker," and said that his mother died in 1911. Both were, he said, members of the
Social Democratic Party of Germany
The Social Democratic Party of Germany (german: Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, ; SPD, ) is a centre-left social democratic political party in Germany. It is one of the major parties of contemporary Germany.
Saskia Esken has been the ...
(SPD). After his remarriage to "a seamstress," the elder Mielke and his new wife joined the
Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany
The Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (german: Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, USPD) was a short-lived political party in Germany during the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. The organization was establish ...
and remained members when it was renamed the
Communist Party of Germany (KPD). His son Erich claimed "My younger brother Kurt and two sisters were Communist sympathisers."
Despite his family's poverty, Mielke was sufficiently academically gifted to be awarded a free
scholarship
A scholarship is a form of financial aid awarded to students for further education. Generally, scholarships are awarded based on a set of criteria such as academic merit, diversity and inclusion, athletic skill, and financial need.
Scholarsh ...
in the prestigious
Köllnisches Gymnasium, but had to leave it a year later, for being "unable to meet the great demands of this school." While attending the Gymnasium, Mielke joined the
Communist Party of Germany in 1925, and worked as a reporter for the
communist
Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a s ...
newspaper ''
Rote Fahne
''Die Rote Fahne'' (, ''The Red Flag'') was a German newspaper originally founded in 1876 by Socialist Worker's party leader Wilhelm Hasselmann, and which has been since published on and off, at times underground, by German Socialists and Communi ...
'' from 1928 to 1931.
Under the
Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic (german: link=no, Weimarer Republik ), officially named the German Reich, was the government of Germany from 1918 to 1933, during which it was a constitutional federal republic for the first time in history; hence it is al ...
, the KPD was the largest communist party in
Europe
Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...
and was seen as the "leading party" of the communist movement outside the
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
. Under
Ernst Thälmann
Ernst Johannes Fritz Thälmann (; 16 April 1886 – 18 August 1944) was a German communist politician, and leader of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) from 1925 to 1933.
A committed Marxist-Leninist and Stalinist, Thälmann played a major r ...
's leadership, the KPD was completely obedient to
Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretar ...
, and from 1928 the Party was both funded and controlled by the
Comintern in
Moscow
Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...
.
Until the end of the Republic, the KPD viewed the
Social Democratic Party of Germany
The Social Democratic Party of Germany (german: Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, ; SPD, ) is a centre-left social democratic political party in Germany. It is one of the major parties of contemporary Germany.
Saskia Esken has been the ...
(SPD), which dominated German politics between 1918 and 1931, as their mortal enemy.
In keeping with Stalin's policy towards
social democracy
Social democracy is a Political philosophy, political, Social philosophy, social, and economic philosophy within socialism that supports Democracy, political and economic democracy. As a policy regime, it is described by academics as advocati ...
, the KPD considered all SPD members to be "
social fascists
Social fascism (also socio-fascism) was a theory that was supported by the Communist International (Comintern) and affiliated communist parties in the early 1930s that held that social democracy was a variant of fascism because it stood in the way ...
". The KPD also believed that all other
political parties
A political party is an organization that coordinates candidates to compete in a particular country's elections. It is common for the members of a party to hold similar ideas about politics, and parties may promote specific ideological or pol ...
were "
fascist
Fascism is a far-right, Authoritarianism, authoritarian, ultranationalism, ultra-nationalist political Political ideology, ideology and Political movement, movement,: "extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and pol ...
" and regarded itself as "the only
anti-fascist Party" in Germany.
Nevertheless, the KPD closely collaborated with the
Nazi Party
The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right politics, far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that crea ...
during the early 1930s and both Parties intended to replace the democratically elected government of the
Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic (german: link=no, Weimarer Republik ), officially named the German Reich, was the government of Germany from 1918 to 1933, during which it was a constitutional federal republic for the first time in history; hence it is al ...
with a
totalitarian
Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of control and reg ...
single party state.
Soon after joining the Party, Mielke joined the KPD's
paramilitary wing, or ''Parteiselbstschutz'' ("Party Self Defense Unit"). At the time, the ''Parteiselbstschutz'' in Berlin was commanded by KPD
Reichstag Representatives
Hans Kippenberger
Hans Kippenberger (15 January 1898 – 3 October 1937) was a German politician ( KPD). Between 1928 and 1933 he sat as a member of the National Parliament (''Reichstag'').
Like many Communist Party members at the time, he also operated under " ...
and
Heinz Neumann
Heinz Neumann (6 July 1902 – 26 November 1937) was a German politician from the Communist Party (KPD) and a journalist. He was a member of the Communist International, editor in chief of the party newspaper ''Die Rote Fahne'' and a member of the ...
.
According to John Koehler, "Mielke was a special protege of Kippenberger's having taken to his
paramilitary training with the enthusiasm of a
Prussian Junker
The Junkers ( ; ) were members of the landed nobility in Prussia. They owned great estates that were maintained and worked by peasants with few rights. These estates often lay in the countryside outside of major cities or towns. They were an impo ...
.
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
veterans taught the novices how to handle pistols, rifles,
machine gun
A machine gun is a fully automatic, rifled autoloading firearm designed for sustained direct fire with rifle cartridges. Other automatic firearms such as automatic shotguns and automatic rifles (including assault rifles and battle rifles) a ...
s, and
hand grenades. This clandestine training was conducted in the sparsely populated, pastoral countryside surrounding Berlin. Mielke also pleased Kippenberger by being an exceptional student in classes on the arts of conspiratorial behavior and
espionage
Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information (intelligence) from non-disclosed sources or divulging of the same without the permission of the holder of the information for a tangibl ...
, taught by comrades who had studied at the secret M-school of the
GRU
The Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, rus, Гла́вное управле́ние Генера́льного шта́ба Вооружённых сил Росси́йской Федера́ци ...
in
Moscow
Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...
."
[Koehler (1999), page 38.]
According to John Koehler, members of the ''Parteiselbstschutz'' "served as
bouncer
A bouncer (also known as a doorman or door supervisor) is a type of security guard, employed at venues such as bars, nightclubs, cabaret clubs, stripclubs, casinos, hotels, billiard halls, restaurants, sporting events, schools, concerts, or ...
s at Party meetings and specialized in cracking heads during street battles with political enemies."
Besides the ruling SPD and its paramilitary
Reichsbanner forces, the arch-enemies of the ''Parteiselbstschutz'' were the
Stahlhelm, which was the armed wing of the
Monarchist
Monarchism is the advocacy of the system of monarchy or monarchical rule. A monarchist is an individual who supports this form of government independently of any specific monarch, whereas one who supports a particular monarch is a royalist. ...
German National People's Party
The German National People's Party (german: Deutschnationale Volkspartei, DNVP) was a national-conservative party in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Before the rise of the Nazi Party, it was the major conservative and nationalist party in Wei ...
(DVNP),
Trotskyites
Trotskyism is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Ukrainian-Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and some other members of the Left Opposition and Fourth International. Trotsky self-identified as an orthodox Marxist, a ...
, and "radical nationalist parties."
According to Koehler, the KPD's Selbstschutz men "always carried a ''Stahlrute'', two steel springs that telescoped into a tube seventeen centimeters long, which when extended became a deadly, 35-centimeter weapon. Not to be outdone by the Nazis, these street-fighters were often armed with
pistol
A pistol is a handgun, more specifically one with the chamber integral to its gun barrel, though in common usage the two terms are often used interchangeably. The English word was introduced in , when early handguns were produced in Europe, an ...
s as well."
In a 1931 biography written for the Cadre Division of the
Comintern, Mielke recalled, "We took care of all kinds of work; terror acts, protecting illegal demonstrations and meetings, arms-trafficking, etc. The last work, which was accomplished by a Comrade and myself, was the Bülowplatz Affair" (german: "Wir erledigten hier alle möglichen Arbeiten, Terrorakte, Schutz illegaler Demonstrationen und Versammlungen, Waffentransport und reinigung usw. Als letzte Arbeit erledigten ein Genosse und ich die Bülowplatzsache.").
Bülowplatz murders
Planning
![Bundesarchiv B 145 Bild-P046279, Berlin, Liebknecht-Haus am Bülowplatz](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Bundesarchiv_B_145_Bild-P046279%2C_Berlin%2C_Liebknecht-Haus_am_B%C3%BClowplatz.jpg)
During the last days of the
Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic (german: link=no, Weimarer Republik ), officially named the German Reich, was the government of Germany from 1918 to 1933, during which it was a constitutional federal republic for the first time in history; hence it is al ...
, the KPD had a policy of assassinating two Berlin police officers in retaliation for every KPD member killed by the police.
On 2 August 1931, KPD Members of the
Reichstag Heinz Neumann
Heinz Neumann (6 July 1902 – 26 November 1937) was a German politician from the Communist Party (KPD) and a journalist. He was a member of the Communist International, editor in chief of the party newspaper ''Die Rote Fahne'' and a member of the ...
and
Hans Kippenberger
Hans Kippenberger (15 January 1898 – 3 October 1937) was a German politician ( KPD). Between 1928 and 1933 he sat as a member of the National Parliament (''Reichstag'').
Like many Communist Party members at the time, he also operated under " ...
received a dressing down from
Walter Ulbricht
Walter Ernst Paul Ulbricht (; 30 June 18931 August 1973) was a German communist politician. Ulbricht played a leading role in the creation of the Weimar-era Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and later (after spending the years of Nazi rule in ...
, the Party's leader in the Berlin-Brandenburg region. Enraged by police interference and by Neumann and Kippenberger's failure to follow the policy, Ulbricht stated, "At home in
Saxony
Saxony (german: Sachsen ; Upper Saxon: ''Saggsn''; hsb, Sakska), officially the Free State of Saxony (german: Freistaat Sachsen, links=no ; Upper Saxon: ''Freischdaad Saggsn''; hsb, Swobodny stat Sakska, links=no), is a landlocked state of ...
we would have done something about the police a long time ago. Here in Berlin we will not fool around much longer. Soon we will hit the police in the head."
Enraged by Ulbricht's words, Kippenberger and Neumann decided to assassinate
Paul Anlauf
Paul may refer to:
*Paul (given name), a given name (includes a list of people with that name)
*Paul (surname), a list of people
People
Christianity
* Paul the Apostle (AD c.5–c.64/65), also known as Saul of Tarsus or Saint Paul, early Chri ...
, the 42-year-old Captain of the Berlin Police's Seventh Precinct. Captain Anlauf, a widower with three daughters, had been nicknamed "Schweinebacke", or "Pig Face" by the KPD.
According to historian John Koehler, "Of all the policemen in strife-torn Berlin, the reds hated Anlauf the most. His precinct included the area around
KPD headquarters, which made it the most dangerous in the city. The captain almost always led the riot squads that broke up illegal rallies of the Communist Party."
On the morning of Sunday 9 August 1931, Kippenberger and Neumann gave a last briefing to the hit-team in a room at the Lassant beer hall. Mielke and
Erich Ziemer were selected as the shooters. During the meeting,
Max Matern Max Matern (19 January 1902 – 22 May 1935) was a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) who was convicted of murder and executed for his role in the assassinations of Police Captains Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck. The murders took plac ...
gave a
Luger pistol
The Pistole Parabellum—or Parabellum-Pistole (Pistol Parabellum), commonly known as just Luger or Luger P08 is a toggle-locked recoil-operated semi-automatic pistol. The Luger was produced in several models and by several nations from 1898 ...
to fellow lookout Max Thunert and said, "Now we're getting serious. We're going to give Schweinebacke something to remember us by."
Kippenberger then asked Mielke and Ziemer, "Are you sure that you are ready to shoot Schweinebacke?" Mielke responded that he had seen Anlauf many times during police searches of Party Headquarters. Kippenberger then instructed them to wait at a nearby beer hall which would permit them to overlook the entire
Bülow-Platz. He further reminded them that Anlauf was accompanied everywhere by Senior Sergeant Max Willig, whom the KPD had nicknamed, "
Hussar".
Kippenberger concluded, "When you spot Schweinebacke and Hussar, you take care of them." Mielke and Ziemer were informed that, after the assassinations were completed, a diversion would assist in their escape. They were then to return to their homes and await further instructions.
That evening, Anlauf was lured to
Bülow-Platz by a violent rally demanding the dissolution of the
Prussian Parliament
The Landtag of Prussia (german: Preußischer Landtag) was the representative assembly of the Kingdom of Prussia implemented in 1849, a bicameral legislature consisting of the upper House of Lords (''Herrenhaus'') and the lower House of Represent ...
.
According to Koehler, "As was often the case when it came to battling the dominant SPD, the KPD and the Nazis had combined forces during the pre-plebiscite campaign. At one point in this particular campaign,
Nazi
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...
propaganda chief
Joseph Goebbels even shared a speaker's platform with KPD agitator
Walter Ulbricht
Walter Ernst Paul Ulbricht (; 30 June 18931 August 1973) was a German communist politician. Ulbricht played a leading role in the creation of the Weimar-era Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and later (after spending the years of Nazi rule in ...
. Both parties wanted the parliament dissolved because they were hoping that new elections would oust the SPD, the sworn enemy of all
radicals. That fact explained why the atmosphere was particularly volatile this Sunday."
Murder at the Babylon Cinema
![Bundesarchiv Bild 102-12159, Berlin, Trauerzug für ermordete Polizisten](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Bundesarchiv_Bild_102-12159%2C_Berlin%2C_Trauerzug_f%C3%BCr_ermordete_Polizisten.jpg)
At eight o'clock that evening, Mielke and Ziemer waited in a doorway as Anlauf, Willig, and Captain
Franz Lenck Franz may refer to:
People
* Franz (given name)
* Franz (surname)
Places
* Franz (crater), a lunar crater
* Franz, Ontario, a railway junction and unorganized town in Canada
* Franz Lake, in the state of Washington, United States – see ...
walked toward the Babylon Cinema, which was located at the corner of Bülowplatz and Kaiser-Wilhelm-Straße. As they reached the door of the movie house, the policemen heard someone scream, "Schweinebacke!"
[''The Stasi'', p. 41.]
As Anlauf turned toward the sound, Mielke and Ziemer opened fire at point blank range. Willig was wounded in the left arm and the stomach. However, he managed to draw his
Luger pistol
The Pistole Parabellum—or Parabellum-Pistole (Pistol Parabellum), commonly known as just Luger or Luger P08 is a toggle-locked recoil-operated semi-automatic pistol. The Luger was produced in several models and by several nations from 1898 ...
and fired a full magazine at the assailants. Lenck was shot in the chest and fell dead in front of the entrance. Willig crawled over and cradled the head of Anlauf, who had taken two bullets in the neck. Before he died, Sergeant Willig heard the Captain gasp, "''Wiedersehen... Gruss...''" ("So Long... Goodbye...").
Meanwhile, Mielke and Ziemer made their escape by running into the theater and out an emergency exit. They tossed their pistols over a fence, where they were later found by Homicide Detectives from the elite Mordkommission. Mielke and Ziemer then returned to their homes.
According to Koehler, "Back at Bülowplatz, the killings had triggered a major police action. At least a thousand officers poured into the square, and a bloody street battle ensued. Rocks and bricks were hurled from the rooftops. Communist
gunmen fired indiscriminately from the roofs of surrounding apartment houses. As darkness fell, police searchlights illuminated the buildings. Using megaphones, officers shouted, "Clear the streets! Move away from the windows! We are returning fire!" By now the rabble had fled the square, but shooting continued as riot squads combed the tenements, arresting hundreds of residents suspected of having fired weapons. The battle lasted until one o'clock the next morning. In addition to the two police officers, the casualties included one Communist who died of a gunshot wound and seventeen others who were seriously wounded."
Anlauf's wife had died three weeks earlier of kidney failure.
[Koehler (1999), page 41.] The murder of Anlauf thus left their three daughters as orphans. Their oldest daughter was forced to rush her planned wedding in order to keep her sisters from being put in an
orphanage
An orphanage is a Residential education, residential institution, total institution or group home, devoted to the Childcare, care of orphans and children who, for various reasons, cannot be cared for by their biological families. The parent ...
. Lenck was survived by his wife.
Willig was hospitalized for 14 weeks, but made a full recovery and returned to active duty. In recognition for Willig's courage, the Berlin Police promoted him to Lieutenant.
After the murders, the act was celebrated at the Lichtenberger Hof, a favorite
beer hall of the
Rotfrontkämpferbund, where Mielke boasted: "Today we celebrate a job that I pulled!" (german: "Heute wird ein Ding gefeiert, das ich gedreht habe!")
Fugitive
![Rotmord - Fahndungsplakat der Berliner Polizei (1933)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Rotmord_-_Fahndungsplakat_der_Berliner_Polizei_%281933%29.jpg)
According to Koehler, "Kippenberger was alarmed when word reached him that Sergeant Willig had survived the shooting. Not knowing whether the sergeant could talk and identify the attackers, Kippenberger was taking no chances. He directed a runner to summon Mielke and Ziemer to his apartment at 74 Bellermannstrasse, only a few minutes walk from where the two lived. When the assassins arrived, Kippenberger told them the news and ordered them to leave Berlin at once. The parliamentarian's wife Thea, an unemployed schoolteacher and as staunch a Communist Party member as her husband, shepherded the young murderers to the
Belgian
Belgian may refer to:
* Something of, or related to, Belgium
* Belgians, people from Belgium or of Belgian descent
* Languages of Belgium, languages spoken in Belgium, such as Dutch, French, and German
*Ancient Belgian language, an extinct languag ...
border. Agents of the Communist International (
Comintern) in the port city of
Antwerp
Antwerp (; nl, Antwerpen ; french: Anvers ; es, Amberes) is the largest city in Belgium by area at and the capital of Antwerp Province in the Flemish Region. With a population of 520,504, supplied them with money and forged
passport
A passport is an official travel document issued by a government that contains a person's identity. A person with a passport can travel to and from foreign countries more easily and access consular assistance. A passport certifies the personal ...
s. Aboard a merchant ship, they sailed for
Leningrad
Saint Petersburg ( rus, links=no, Санкт-Петербург, a=Ru-Sankt Peterburg Leningrad Petrograd Piter.ogg, r=Sankt-Peterburg, p=ˈsankt pʲɪtʲɪrˈburk), formerly known as Petrograd (1914–1924) and later Leningrad (1924–1991), i ...
. When their ship docked, they were met by another Comintern representative, who escorted them to
Moscow
Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...
."
Beginning in 1932, Mielke attended the Comintern's Military Political school under the alias Paul Bach. He later graduated from the
Lenin School
The International Lenin School (ILS) was an official training school operated in Moscow, Soviet Union, by the Communist International from May 1926 to 1938. It was resumed after the Second World War and run by the Communist Party of the Soviet Unio ...
shortly before being recruited into the
OGPU.
Trial
![Bundesarchiv Bild 183-C00678, Berlin, Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Kranzniederlegung](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-C00678%2C_Berlin%2C_Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz%2C_Kranzniederlegung.jpg)
According to Koehler, "In mid-March 1933, while attending the Lenin School, Mielke received word from his OGPU sponsors that
Berlin police had arrested Max Thunert, one of the conspirators in the Anlauf and Lenck murders. Within days, fifteen other members of the assassination team were in custody. Mielke had to wait six more months before the details of the police action against his Berlin comrades reached Moscow. On 14 September 1933, Berlin newspapers reported that all fifteen had confessed to their roles in the murders. Arrest warrants were issued for ten others who had fled, including Mielke, Ziemer, Ulbricht, Kippenberger, and Neumann."
Koehler also stated, "Defenders of Mielke later claimed that confessions had been obtained under torture by the Nazi
Gestapo
The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one organi ...
. However, all suspects were in the custody of the regular Berlin city criminal investigation bureau, most of whose detectives were SPD members. Some of the suspects had been nabbed by Nazi
SA men and probably beaten before they were turned over to police. In the 1993 trial of Mielke, the court gave the defense the benefit of the doubt and threw out a number of suspect confessions."
On 19 June 1934, the 15 conspirators were convicted of
first degree murder
Murder is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse, especially the unlawful killing of another human with malice aforethought. ("The killing of another person without justification or excuse, especially the ...
. The three deemed most culpable, Michael Klause,
Max Matern Max Matern (19 January 1902 – 22 May 1935) was a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) who was convicted of murder and executed for his role in the assassinations of Police Captains Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck. The murders took plac ...
, and Friedrich Bröde were sentenced to
death
Death is the irreversible cessation of all biological functions that sustain an organism. For organisms with a brain, death can also be defined as the irreversible cessation of functioning of the whole brain, including brainstem, and brain ...
. Their co-defendants received sentences ranging from nine months to fifteen years incarceration at hard labor. Klause's sentence was commuted to life in prison based upon his cooperation. Bröde hanged himself in his cell. As a result, only Matern was left to be executed by
beheading
Decapitation or beheading is the total separation of the head from the body. Such an injury is invariably fatal to humans and most other animals, since it deprives the brain of oxygenated blood, while all other organs are deprived of the i ...
on 22 May 1935.
Matern was subsequently glorified as a
martyr
A martyr (, ''mártys'', "witness", or , ''marturia'', stem , ''martyr-'') is someone who suffers persecution and death for advocating, renouncing, or refusing to renounce or advocate, a religious belief or other cause as demanded by an externa ...
by KPD and East German
propaganda
Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded ...
. Ziemer was officially
killed in action while fighting on the
Republican-side during the
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War ( es, Guerra Civil Española)) or The Revolution ( es, La Revolución, link=no) among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War ( es, Cuarta Guerra Carlista, link=no) among Carlists, and The Rebellion ( es, La Rebelión, lin ...
. Mielke, however, would not face trial for the murders until 1993.
Career in Soviet intelligence
The Great Terror
Although Moscow's German Communist community was decimated during
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretar ...
's
Great Purge
The Great Purge or the Great Terror (russian: Большой террор), also known as the Year of '37 (russian: 37-й год, translit=Tridtsat sedmoi god, label=none) and the Yezhovshchina ('period of Nikolay Yezhov, Yezhov'), was General ...
, Mielke survived and was promoted.
In a handwritten autobiography prepared after
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
, Mielke recalled, "During my stay in the S.U. (
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
), I participated in all Party discussions of the K.P.D. and also in the problems concerning the establishment of
socialism
Socialism is a left-wing economic philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership of the means of production as opposed to private ownership. As a term, it describes the e ...
and in the
trials
In law, a trial is a coming together of parties to a dispute, to present information (in the form of evidence) in a tribunal, a formal setting with the authority to adjudicate claims or disputes. One form of tribunal is a court. The tribun ...
against the traitors and
enemies
Enemies or foes are a group that is seen as forcefully adverse or threatening.
Enemies may also refer to:
Literature
* ''Enemies'' (play), a 1906 play by Maxim Gorky
* '' Enemies, A Love Story'', a 1966 novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer
* '' Enem ...
of the S.U."
Among the German communists executed as a result of these "discussions" were Mielke's former mentors
Heinz Neumann
Heinz Neumann (6 July 1902 – 26 November 1937) was a German politician from the Communist Party (KPD) and a journalist. He was a member of the Communist International, editor in chief of the party newspaper ''Die Rote Fahne'' and a member of the ...
and
Hans Kippenberger
Hans Kippenberger (15 January 1898 – 3 October 1937) was a German politician ( KPD). Between 1928 and 1933 he sat as a member of the National Parliament (''Reichstag'').
Like many Communist Party members at the time, he also operated under " ...
.
Mielke further recalled, "I was a guest on the honor
grandstand of
Red Square
Red Square ( rus, Красная площадь, Krasnaya ploshchad', ˈkrasnəjə ˈploɕːətʲ) is one of the oldest and largest squares in Moscow, the capital of Russia. Owing to its historical significance and the adjacent historical build ...
during the
May Day
May Day is a European festival of ancient origins marking the beginning of summer, usually celebrated on 1 May, around halfway between the spring equinox and summer solstice. Festivities may also be held the night before, known as May Eve. T ...
and
October Revolution
The October Revolution,. officially known as the Great October Socialist Revolution. in the Soviet Union, also known as the Bolshevik Revolution, was a revolution in Russia led by the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin that was a key moment ...
parades. I became acquainted with many comrades of the Federation of World Communist Parties and the War Council of the Special Commission of the
Comintern. I will never forget my meeting with
Comrade Dimitrov, the Chairman of the Comintern, whom I served as an aide together with another comrade. I saw
Comrade Stalin during all demonstrations at Red Square, especially when I stood on the grandstand. I mention these meetings because all these comrades are our models and teachers for our work."
[Koehler (1999), page 52.]
During his time in the USSR, Mielke also developed a lifelong reverence for
Felix Dzerzhinsky
Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky ( pl, Feliks Dzierżyński ; russian: Фе́ликс Эдму́ндович Дзержи́нский; – 20 July 1926), nicknamed "Iron Felix", was a Bolshevik revolutionary and official, born into Poland, Polish n ...
, the
Polish aristocrat
The ''szlachta'' (Polish: endonym, Lithuanian: šlėkta) were the noble estate of the realm in the Kingdom of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth who, as a class, had the dominating position in th ...
who founded the
Soviet secret police
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
. Mielke also began an equally permanent habit of calling himself a
Chekist.
In a citation written decades later, Mielke described his philosophy of life, "The Chekist is the political combatant. He is the loyal son of... the
workers' class. He stands at the head of the battle to strengthen the power of our workers' and peasants' state."
Spanish Civil War
![Flag of the International Brigades](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Flag_of_the_International_Brigades.svg)
From 1936 to 1939, Mielke served in Spain as an operative of the
Servicio de Investigación Militar, the
political police
Secret police (or political police) are intelligence, security or police agencies that engage in covert operations against a government's political, religious, or social opponents and dissidents. Secret police organizations are characteristic of a ...
of the
Second Spanish Republic
The Spanish Republic (), commonly known as the Second Spanish Republic (), was the form of government in Spain from 1931 to 1939. The Republic was proclaimed on 14 April 1931, after the deposition of Alfonso XIII, King Alfonso XIII, and was di ...
.
[John Koehler, "The Stasi," p. 48.] While attached to the staff of, "veteran
GRU
The Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, rus, Гла́вное управле́ние Генера́льного шта́ба Вооружённых сил Росси́йской Федера́ци ...
agent,"
[ Koehler (1999), page 55.] and future Stasi minister
Wilhelm Zaisser
Wilhelm Zaisser (20 June 1893 – 3 March 1958) was a German communist politician and statesman who served as the founder and first Minister for State Security of the German Democratic Republic (1950–1953).
Early life
Born in Gelsenkirc ...
, Mielke used the alias Fritz Leissner.
Bernd Kaufmann, the director of the Stasi's espionage school later said, "The Soviets trusted Mielke implicitly. He earned his spurs in Spain."
At the time, the S.I.M. was heavily staffed by agents of the Soviet NKVD, whose Spanish
rezident A resident spy in the world of espionage is an agent operating within a foreign country for extended periods of time. A base of operations within a foreign country with which a resident spy may liaise is known as a "station" in English and a (, 're ...
was General
Aleksandr Mikhailovich Orlov
Alexander Mikhailovich Orlov ( be, Аляксандар Мікалаевіч Арлоў, born Leiba Lazarevich Feldbin, later Lev Lazarevich Nikolsky, and in the US assuming the name of Igor Konstantinovich Berg; 21 August 1895 – 25 March 1 ...
. According to author
Donald Rayfield
Patrick Donald Rayfield OBE (born 12 February 1942, Oxford) is an English academic and Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London. He is an author of books about Russian and Georgian literature, and about Jos ...
, "Stalin,
Yezhov Yezhov or Ezhov (russian: Ежов) is a Russian masculine surname derived from the word (russian: ёж), meaning ''hedgehog''; its feminine counterpart is Yezhova or Ezhova. It may refer to:
*Denis Ezhov (born 1985), Russian ice hockey player
*El ...
, and
Beria
Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (; rus, Лавре́нтий Па́влович Бе́рия, Lavréntiy Pávlovich Bériya, p=ˈbʲerʲiə; ka, ლავრენტი ბერია, tr, ; – 23 December 1953) was a Georgian Bolshevik ...
distrusted Soviet participants in the Spanish war. Military advisors like
Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko
Vladimir Alexandrovich Antonov-Ovseenko (russian: Влади́мир Алекса́ндрович Анто́нов-Овсе́енко; ua, Володимир Антонов-Овсєєнко; 9 March 1883 – 10 February 1938), real surna ...
, journalists like
Koltsov were open to infection by the heresies, especially
Trotsky
Lev Davidovich Bronstein. ( – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky; uk, link= no, Лев Давидович Троцький; also transliterated ''Lyev'', ''Trotski'', ''Trotskij'', ''Trockij'' and ''Trotzky''. (), was a Russian M ...
's, prevalent among the Republic's supporters. NKVD agents sent to Spain were therefore keener on
abducting and murdering anti-Stalinists among Republican leaders and
International Brigade
The International Brigades ( es, Brigadas Internacionales) were military units set up by the Communist International to assist the Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. The organization existe ...
commanders than on fighting
Franco
Franco may refer to:
Name
* Franco (name)
* Francisco Franco (1892–1975), Spanish general and dictator of Spain from 1939 to 1975
* Franco Luambo (1938–1989), Congolese musician, the "Grand Maître"
Prefix
* Franco, a prefix used when ref ...
. The defeat of the Republic, in Stalin's eyes, was caused not by the NKVD's diversionary efforts, but by the treachery of the heretics."
In a 1991 interview,
Walter Janka
Walter Janka (29 April 1914 – 17 March 1994) was a German communist, political activist and writer who became a publisher.
Janka is notable for having spent time incarcerated as a political prisoner under the rule of the Nazis and later impri ...
, a fellow German communist exile and company commander in the
International Brigade
The International Brigades ( es, Brigadas Internacionales) were military units set up by the Communist International to assist the Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. The organization existe ...
, recalled his encounters with Mielke. During the winter of 1936, Janka was summoned by the SIM and interrogated by Mielke. Mielke demanded to know why Janka had voluntarily traveled to Spain rather than being assigned there by the Party. When he told Mielke to get lost, the SIM demoted Janka to the ranks and then expelled him from the International Brigade. Years later, Janka recalled, "While I was fighting at the front, shooting at the
Fascists, Mielke served in the rear, shooting
Trotskyites
Trotskyism is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Ukrainian-Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and some other members of the Left Opposition and Fourth International. Trotsky self-identified as an orthodox Marxist, a ...
and
Anarchists
Anarchism is a political philosophy and movement that is skeptical of all justifications for authority and seeks to abolish the institutions it claims maintain unnecessary coercion and hierarchy, typically including, though not necessari ...
."
Upon the defeat of the Spanish Republic, Mielke fled across the Pyrenees Mountains to the
Third French Republic
The French Third Republic (french: Troisième République, sometimes written as ) was the system of government adopted in France from 4 September 1870, when the Second French Empire collapsed during the Franco-Prussian War, until 10 July 1940 ...
, which
interned
Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simpl ...
him at
Camp de Rivesaltes
The Camp de Rivesaltes, also known as Camp Joffre, was an internment and transit camp in the commune of Rivesaltes in the department of Pyrénées-Orientales of the French Southern Zone during World War Two. Between August 11 and October 20, 1 ...
,
Pyrénées-Orientales. Mielke, however, managed to send a message to exiled KPD members and, in May 1939, he escaped to
Belgium
Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to th ...
. Although the
Public Prosecutor
A prosecutor is a legal representative of the prosecution in states with either the common law adversarial system or the civil law inquisitorial system. The prosecution is the legal party responsible for presenting the case in a criminal tria ...
of Berlin learned of Mielke's presence and filed for his
extradition
Extradition is an action wherein one jurisdiction delivers a person accused or convicted of committing a crime in another jurisdiction, over to the other's law enforcement. It is a cooperative law enforcement procedure between the two jurisdi ...
, the Belgian Government refused to comply, regarding the assassinations of Captains Anlauf and Lenck as "a political crime."
Both the
Spanish Red Terror and the NKVD and the SIM's
witch hunt
A witch-hunt, or a witch purge, is a search for people who have been labeled witches or a search for evidence of witchcraft. The classical period of witch-hunts in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America took place in the Early Modern perio ...
for both real and imagined anti-Stalinists, however, had deadly serious political consequences. They horrified numerous formerly pro-Soviet Westerners who had been witnesses, including
John Dos Passos
John Roderigo Dos Passos (; January 14, 1896 – September 28, 1970) was an American novelist, most notable for his ''U.S.A.'' trilogy.
Born in Chicago, Dos Passos graduated from Harvard College in 1916. He traveled widely as a young man, visit ...
,
Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler, (, ; ; hu, Kösztler Artúr; 5 September 1905 – 1 March 1983) was a Hungarian-born author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. In 1931, Koestler join ...
and
George Orwell, and caused them to permanently turn against the U.S.S.R.
Mielke's belief in Stalin's official explanation for the defeat, that anti-Stalinists had stabbed the Spanish Republic in the back, continued to shape his attitudes for the rest of his life. In a 1982 speech before a group of senior Stasi officers, Mielke said, "We are not immune from villains among us. If I knew of any already, they wouldn't live past tomorrow. Short shrift. It's because I'm a
Humanist
Humanism is a philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential and agency of human beings. It considers human beings the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry.
The meaning of the term "human ...
, that I'm of this view."
[Funder (2003), page 57.]
In the same speech, Mielke also said, "All this blithering over to execute or not to execute, for the
death penalty
Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the state-sanctioned practice of deliberately killing a person as a punishment for an actual or supposed crime, usually following an authorized, rule-governed process to conclude that t ...
or against—all rot, Comrades. Execute! And, when necessary,
without a court judgment."
World War II
During
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
, Mielke's movements remain mysterious. In a biography written after the war, he claimed to have infiltrated
Organisation Todt
Organisation Todt (OT; ) was a civil and military engineering organisation in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, named for its founder, Fritz Todt, an engineer and senior Nazi. The organisation was responsible for a huge range of engineering pr ...
under the alias Richard Hebel, but historian John O. Koehler considers this unlikely.
Koehler admits, however, "Mielke's exploits must have been substantial. By war's end, he had been decorated with the
Order of the Red Banner
The Order of the Red Banner (russian: Орден Красного Знамени, Orden Krasnogo Znameni) was the first Soviet military decoration. The Order was established on 16 September 1918, during the Russian Civil War by decree of t ...
, the
Order of the Great Patriotic War First Class, and twice with the
Order of Lenin
The Order of Lenin (russian: Орден Ленина, Orden Lenina, ), named after the leader of the Russian October Revolution, was established by the Central Executive Committee on April 6, 1930. The order was the highest civilian decoration b ...
. It is likely that he served as an NKVD agent, at least part of the time with
guerrilla units behind German lines, for he knew all the
partisan songs by heart and sang them in faultless Russian."
Occupied Germany
''Komissariat-5''
![Karlshorst GER-RUS museum](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/Karlshorst_GER-RUS_museum.jpg)
On April 25, 1945, Mielke returned to the
Soviet Zone of
Occupied Germany
Germany was already de facto occupied by the Allies from the real fall of Nazi Germany in World War II on 8 May 1945 to the establishment of the East Germany on 7 October 1949. The Allies (United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and Franc ...
aboard a
special Soviet aircraft that also carried fellow German Communists
Walter Ulbricht
Walter Ernst Paul Ulbricht (; 30 June 18931 August 1973) was a German communist politician. Ulbricht played a leading role in the creation of the Weimar-era Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and later (after spending the years of Nazi rule in ...
,
Wilhelm Zaisser
Wilhelm Zaisser (20 June 1893 – 3 March 1958) was a German communist politician and statesman who served as the founder and first Minister for State Security of the German Democratic Republic (1950–1953).
Early life
Born in Gelsenkirc ...
,
Ernst Wollweber
Ernst Friedrich Wollweber (29 October 1898 – 3 May 1967) was a German politician who was State Secretary of State Security from 1953 to 1955 and Minister of State Security of East Germany from 1955 to 1957.
Biography
Born in Hann. Mün ...
, and many of the future leaders of the
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 ...
.
That same month, Mielke's future handler,
NKGB
The People's Commissariat for State Security (russian: Народный комиссариат государственной безопасности) or NKGB, was the name of the Soviet secret police, intelligence and counter-intelligence fo ...
General
Ivan Serov
Ivan Alexandrovich Serov (russian: Ива́н Алекса́ндрович Серóв; 13 August 1905 – 1 July 1990) was a Russian Soviet intelligence officer who served as the head of the KGB between March 1954 and December 1958, as well as ...
, travelled to Germany from Warsaw and, from his headquarters in the
Berlin
Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...
suburb
A suburb (more broadly suburban area) is an area within a metropolitan area, which may include commercial and mixed-use, that is primarily a residential area. A suburb can exist either as part of a larger city/urban area or as a separate ...
of
Karlshorst
Karlshorst (, ; ; literally meaning ''Karl's nest'') is a locality in the borough of Lichtenberg in Berlin. Located there are a harness racing track and the Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin (''HTW''), the largest University of Appli ...
, divided the Soviet Zone into "Operative Sectors."
On 10 July 1945, Marshal
Georgy Zhukov
Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov ( rus, Георгий Константинович Жуков, p=ɡʲɪˈorɡʲɪj kənstɐnʲˈtʲinəvʲɪtɕ ˈʐukəf, a=Ru-Георгий_Константинович_Жуков.ogg; 1 December 1896 – ...
signed SMA Order No. 2, which legalized the re-establishment of "
anti-fascist" political parties like the
Communist Party of Germany (KPD).
[Koehler (1999), page 51.] On 15 July 1945, Mielke walked into the KPD's headquarters and volunteered his services.
In an autobiography written for the KPD, Mielke disclosed—truthfully—his involvement in the 1931 murders of
Berlin Police Captains Anlauf and Lenck, and—mistakenly or misleadingly—that for this he had been tried ''
in absentia
is Latin for absence. , a legal term, is Latin for "in the absence" or "while absent".
may also refer to:
* Award in absentia
* Declared death in absentia, or simply, death in absentia, legally declared death without a body
* Election in ab ...
'', found guilty, and
sentenced to death
Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the state-sanctioned practice of deliberately killing a person as a punishment for an actual or supposed crime, usually following an authorized, rule-governed process to conclude that t ...
. In actuality, Mielke's "name was mentioned in the 1934 trials but he was never tried".
He admitted—truthfully—fighting on the Republican side during the
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War ( es, Guerra Civil Española)) or The Revolution ( es, La Revolución, link=no) among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War ( es, Cuarta Guerra Carlista, link=no) among Carlists, and The Rebellion ( es, La Rebelión, lin ...
, but claimed—falsely—that he had been released from the French internment camps and had worked in
Belgium
Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to th ...
for an underground Communist newspaper under the code name "Gaston". Furthermore, Mielke concealed his past and contemporaneous involvement with the
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (russian: Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел, Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, ), abbreviated NKVD ( ), was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union.
...
,
NKGB
The People's Commissariat for State Security (russian: Народный комиссариат государственной безопасности) or NKGB, was the name of the Soviet secret police, intelligence and counter-intelligence fo ...
, and the Nazi
Organisation Todt
Organisation Todt (OT; ) was a civil and military engineering organisation in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, named for its founder, Fritz Todt, an engineer and senior Nazi. The organisation was responsible for a huge range of engineering pr ...
(which he asserted he'd infiltrated).
According to Koehler, "As might be expected, Mielke's account of his past was approved by the Soviets. Had Serov not been part of the conspiracy, Mielke would have been instantly arrested or at least subjected to an intense internal investigation because of his membership in the Nazi
Organisation Todt
Organisation Todt (OT; ) was a civil and military engineering organisation in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, named for its founder, Fritz Todt, an engineer and senior Nazi. The organisation was responsible for a huge range of engineering pr ...
, which used thousands of slave laborers. But he was cleared in record time and by the end of June the Soviets had installed him as a station commander of the newly formed ''
Volkspolizei
The ''Deutsche Volkspolizei'' (DVP, German for "German People's Police"), commonly known as the ''Volkspolizei'' or VoPo, was the national police force of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) from 1945 to 1990. The Volkspolizei was a h ...
'' (Vopo), the People's Police."
On 16 August 1947, Serov ordered the creation of ''Kommissariat 5'', the first German
political police
Secret police (or political police) are intelligence, security or police agencies that engage in covert operations against a government's political, religious, or social opponents and dissidents. Secret police organizations are characteristic of a ...
since the defeat of
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...
.
According to
Anne Applebaum
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum (born July 25, 1964) is an American journalist and historian. She has written extensively about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe.
She has worked at ''The Econ ...
, however, not everyone approved of the plan. In Moscow, Soviet Interior Minister
Viktor Abakumov
Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov (russian: link=no, Виктор Семёнович Абакумов; 24 April 1908 – 19 December 1954) was a high-level Soviet Union, Soviet security official from 1943 to 1946, the head of SMERSH in the USSR People ...
argued that a new secret police force would be demonized by Western governments and the media, which would paint the K-5 as a "new
Gestapo
The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one organi ...
." Furthermore, Abakumov, like Stalin, intensely distrusted German Communists and alleged that there "were not enough German cadres who have been thoroughly checked." Notwithstanding Abakumov's objections, however, recruitment into the K-5 began almost immediately. It is possible, as
Norman Naimark
Norman M. Naimark (; born 1944, New York City) is an American historian. He is the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of Eastern European Studies at Stanford University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He writes on modern Easte ...
suspects, that the NKGB had realized that their officers' lack of fluency in the
German language
German ( ) is a West Germanic languages, West Germanic language mainly spoken in Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and Official language, official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Ita ...
was engendering massive popular resentment.
Wilhelm Zaisser
Wilhelm Zaisser (20 June 1893 – 3 March 1958) was a German communist politician and statesman who served as the founder and first Minister for State Security of the German Democratic Republic (1950–1953).
Early life
Born in Gelsenkirc ...
, who had been Mielke's
commanding officer
The commanding officer (CO) or sometimes, if the incumbent is a general officer, commanding general (CG), is the officer in command of a military unit. The commanding officer has ultimate authority over the unit, and is usually given wide latitu ...
in Republican Spain, was appointed the K-5's head. Mielke was installed as his deputy.
According to John Koehler, "The K-5 was essentially an arm of the Soviet secret police. Its agents were carefully selected veteran German communists who had survived the Nazi-era in Soviet exile or in concentration camps and prisons. Their task was to track down Nazis and anti-communists, including hundreds of members of the Social Democratic Party. Mielke and his fellow bloodhounds performed this task with ruthless precision. The number of arrests became so great that the regular prisons could not hold them. Thus, Serov ordered the establishment or re-opening of eleven
concentration camp
Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simply ...
s, including the former Nazi
death camps
Nazi Germany used six extermination camps (german: Vernichtungslager), also called death camps (), or killing centers (), in Central Europe during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million peoplemostly Jewsin the Holocaust. The v ...
of
Buchenwald
Buchenwald (; literally 'beech forest') was a Nazi concentration camp established on hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within Germany's 1937 borders. Many actual or sus ...
and
Sachsenhausen
Sachsenhausen () or Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg was a German Nazi concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, used from 1936 until April 1945, shortly before the defeat of Nazi Germany in May later that year. It mainly held political prisoners ...
."
According to Anne Applebaum, "One of the few documents from that era to survive (most were removed by the KGB or perhaps destroyed, in 1989 or before) mentions a departmental training meeting and included a list of attendees. Topping the list is a group of Soviet advisers. In this sense, K-5 did resemble the political police in the rest of Eastern Europe: as in Hungary, Poland, and the USSR itself, this new political police force was initially extra-governmental, operating outside the ordinary rule of law."
According to Edward N. Peterson, "Not surprisingly, K-5 acquired a reputation as bad as that of Stalin's secret police and worse than that of the Gestapo. At least with the Nazis, albeit fanatically
racist, their victims did not suddenly disappear into the
GULAG
The Gulag, an acronym for , , "chief administration of the camps". The original name given to the system of camps controlled by the GPU was the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps (, )., name=, group= was the government agency in ...
."
The Amalgamation
![Flagge der SED](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Flagge_der_SED.svg)
Despite the K-5's mass arrests of members of the
Social Democratic Party of Germany
The Social Democratic Party of Germany (german: Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, ; SPD, ) is a centre-left social democratic political party in Germany. It is one of the major parties of contemporary Germany.
Saskia Esken has been the ...
(SPD) in the
Soviet Zone, the number of SPD members continued to grow. By March 1946, SPD members outnumbered KPD members by more than 100,000. Fearing that they would lose the elections scheduled for the autumn, the leadership of the KPD asked for and received Stalin's permission to merge the two parties. When the SPD's leadership agreed only to schedule a vote for the rank and file to decide, permission was denied by the Soviet occupation authorities. The K-5 then began mass arrests of SPD members who refused to support the merger.
On 22 April 1946, the remaining leaders of the SPD in the Soviet Zone announced that
they had united with the KPD to form the
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 German ...
(SED). The SPD in the western zones of
Occupied Germany
Germany was already de facto occupied by the Allies from the real fall of Nazi Germany in World War II on 8 May 1945 to the establishment of the East Germany on 7 October 1949. The Allies (United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and Franc ...
responded by forming the SPD East Bureau in order to support and finance those Social Democrats who refused to accept the merger. Those who joined or worked with the East Bureau were, however, in serious danger of arrest by the K-5 and trial by Soviet
military tribunal
Military justice (also military law) is the legal system (bodies of law and procedure) that governs the conduct of the active-duty personnel of the armed forces of a country. In some nation-states, civil law and military law are distinct bod ...
s. By 1950, more than 5,000 SPD members and sympathisers had been imprisoned in the Soviet Zone or transferred to the
GULAG
The Gulag, an acronym for , , "chief administration of the camps". The original name given to the system of camps controlled by the GPU was the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps (, )., name=, group= was the government agency in ...
. More than 400 were either executed or died during their imprisonments.
John Koehler has written that, prior to the spring of 1946, many Germans in the Soviet Zone, "merely shrugged at the wave of arrests, believing that the victims were former Nazi officials and war criminals." But then came the mass arrests of Social Democrats who opposed the merger, who, "were joined by people who had been denounced for making
anti-communist
Anti-communism is Political movement, political and Ideology, ideological opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed after the 1917 October Revolution in the Russian Empire, and it reached global dimensions during the Cold War, w ...
or
anti-Soviet
Anti-Sovietism, anti-Soviet sentiment, called by Soviet authorities ''antisovetchina'' (russian: антисоветчина), refers to persons and activities actually or allegedly aimed against the Soviet Union or government power within the ...
remarks, among their number hundreds who were as young as fourteen years. Although these arrests were made by Germans purporting to be officials of the criminal police, the existence of the K-5
political police
Secret police (or political police) are intelligence, security or police agencies that engage in covert operations against a government's political, religious, or social opponents and dissidents. Secret police organizations are characteristic of a ...
eventually was exposed. Mielke, meanwhile, had risen to the post of vice-president of the German Administration for Interior Affairs – the equivalent of the
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (russian: Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел, Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, ), abbreviated NKVD ( ), was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union.
...
– and continued his manipulations from behind the scenes."
Investigation
![Berlin Kollegienhaus](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/Berlin_Kollegienhaus.jpg)
In January 1947, two retired
Berlin policemen recognized Mielke at an official function. Informing the head of the
criminal police in
West Berlin
West Berlin (german: Berlin (West) or , ) was a political enclave which comprised the western part of Berlin during the years of the Cold War. Although West Berlin was de jure not part of West Germany, lacked any sovereignty, and was under mi ...
, the policemen demanded that Mielke be arrested and prosecuted for the murders of Captains Anlauf and Lenck.
[Koehler, ''The Stasi'', page 53.] Wilhelm Kühnast, the
Public Prosecutor
A prosecutor is a legal representative of the prosecution in states with either the common law adversarial system or the civil law inquisitorial system. The prosecution is the legal party responsible for presenting the case in a criminal tria ...
of Berlin, was immediately informed and ordered a search of the Kammergericht archives. To his astonishment, the files of the 1931 murders had survived the wartime bombing of Germany. Finding ample evidence of Mielke's involvement, Kühnast ordered the arrest of the communist policeman.
According to John Koehler, "At that time, the city administration, including the police, was under the control of the Allied Control Commission, which consisted of U.S., British, French, and Soviet military officers. All actions by city officials, including the judiciary, were to be reported to the Commission. The Soviet representative alerted the Ministry for State Security (Soviet Union), MGB. Action was swift. Marshal of the Soviet Union, Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky, who had replaced Zhukov, protested, and his representatives at the Commission launched a vicious campaign to discredit Kühnast."
The Soviet representatives falsely claimed that Kühnast, a jurist with an impeccable German resistance to Nazism, anti-Nazi record, had been an official of Roland Freisler's People's Court (Germany), People's Court. Taking the Soviets at their word, the Western Allies removed Kühnast from his position and placed him under house arrest. During the Berlin airlift, Kühnast fled from his home in East Berlin and was granted political asylum in the American Zone.
Meanwhile, the Soviet authorities confiscated all documents relating to the murders of Captains Anlauf and Lenck. According to Koehler, "The Soviets handed the court records to Mielke. Instead of destroying the incriminating papers, he locked them in his private safe, where they were found when his home was searched in 1990. They were used against him in his trial for murder."
[Koehler (1999), page 417.]
''Deutsche Wirtschaftskommission''
In 1948, Mielke was appointed as security chief of the German Economic Commission (german: Deutsche Wirtschaftskommission), the precursor to the future East German government.
Mielke's task was to investigate the theft and sale of state property on the black market. He was also charged with intercepting the growing number of refugees fleeing to the French Zone, French, British Zone, British, and American Zones.
Those his security forces caught while attempting to defect were used as slave labor in the uranium mines that were providing raw material for the Soviet atomic bomb project.
German Democratic Republic
Independence
In 1949, the Soviet Military Administration ceded its legal functions to the newly created German Democratic Republic.
On 14 January 1950, Marshal Vasili Chuikov announced that all Soviet "internment camps" on German soil had been closed. Soon after, the DWK was absorbed into the newly created Ministry for State Security. In keeping with earlier syllabic abbreviations along the same lines (see Ordnungspolizei, OrPo, Kriminalpolizei, KriPo, and Geheime Staatspolizei, GeStaPo) East Germans immediately dubbed it the "
Stasi" (from Staatssicherheit). With the approval of the Soviets, Mielke's commanding officer from Spain and in the K5,
Wilhelm Zaisser
Wilhelm Zaisser (20 June 1893 – 3 March 1958) was a German communist politician and statesman who served as the founder and first Minister for State Security of the German Democratic Republic (1950–1953).
Early life
Born in Gelsenkirc ...
, was appointed as the Stasi's head. Mielke was appointed to his staff with the rank of State Secretary. Mielke was also granted a seat in the SED's ruling Politburo.
According to John Koehler, "In the five years since the end of World War II, the Soviets and their vassals had arrested between 170,000 and 180,000 Germans. Some 160,000 had passed through the concentration camps, and of these about 65,000 had died, 36,000 had been shipped to the Soviet Gulag, and another 46,000 had been freed."
In 1949, as a response to the remilitarization of East Germany and the Soviet blockade of
West Berlin
West Berlin (german: Berlin (West) or , ) was a political enclave which comprised the western part of Berlin during the years of the Cold War. Although West Berlin was de jure not part of West Germany, lacked any sovereignty, and was under mi ...
, the United States, Great Britain, France,
Belgium
Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to th ...
, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Portugal formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. In 1950, as a response to the outbreak of the Korean War,
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 O ...
was also permitted to join NATO, which was then upgraded into a military alliance.
According to Koehler, however, "As the Cold War intensified, living conditions in Soviet-occupied East Germany showed little improvement beyond the postwar level of bare subsistence. The new government of the DDR – a mere puppet of the Kremlin – relied more and more on the Stasi to quell discontent among factory workers and farmers. Ulbricht, claiming that the social unrest was fomented by capitalist agents, once ordered Mielke to personally visit one large plant and 'arrest four or five such agents' as an example to the others. The Stasi deputy 'discovered' the agents in record time."
[Koehler (1999), page 58.]
Field show trials
Also in 1949, Noel Field, an American people, American citizen who had spied for the
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (russian: Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел, Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, ), abbreviated NKVD ( ), was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union.
...
from inside the U.S. State Department, the Office of Strategic Services, and the CIA, fled from his posting in Switzerland to Communist Czechoslovakia after his cover was blown by fellow mole (espionage), mole Whittaker Chambers. On 11 May 1949, the Czechoslovakian secret police, or StB, in obedience to a direct order from KGB chief Lavrenti Beria, arrested Field in Prague. Field was then handed over to the Hungarian People's Republic, Hungarian State Protection Authority, ÁVO. After his interrogation in Budapest, Fields was used as a witness at show trials of senior Soviet Bloc Communists who, like László Rajk and Rudolf Slánský, stood accused of having spied for the United States. The real reason for the trials was to replace homegrown Communists in Eastern Europe with those who would be blindly loyal to
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretar ...
and to blame the division of Germany on the intrigues of U.S. intelligence.
At the Rajk show trial, the prosecutor declared, "Noel Field, one of the leaders of American espionage, specialized in recruiting spies from among left-wing elements."
In August 1950, six senior Socialist Unity Party of Germany, SED members, including Willi Kreikemeyer, the director of Deutsche Reichsbahn (East Germany), Deutsche Reichsbahn and head of Berliner Rundfunk, were accused of "special connections with Noel Field, the American spy." All were either imprisoned or shot.
John Koehler writes, "Similar purges were conducted in Communist Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovakia, Hungarian People's Republic, Hungary, and Communist Bulgaria, Bulgaria, where Field appeared as a witness in show trials that resulted in some death sentences. The Soviets simply distrusted all Communists who had sought exile in the West. All the while, Mielke remained untouched and continued to serve as the deputy secret police chief. His survival reinforced the belief that he had spent the war years in the
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
instead of France and
Belgium
Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to th ...
as he had claimed in the 1945 questionnaire."
In June 1950, Erica Wallach, Noel Field's adopted daughter, decided to search for him. From Paris, she telephoned Leo Bauer, the editor-in-chief of Berliner Rundfunk. The call was monitored by agents of the Soviet MVD, Ministry for Internal Affairs, and Bauer's handler instructed him to invite Mrs. Wallach to East Berlin, where she was immediately arrested. Mielke personally interrogated her and, at one point, offered Mrs. Wallach immediate release if she named the members of her fictitious spy network.
She was condemned to death by a Soviet
military tribunal
Military justice (also military law) is the legal system (bodies of law and procedure) that governs the conduct of the active-duty personnel of the armed forces of a country. In some nation-states, civil law and military law are distinct bod ...
in East Berlin and shipped to the Lubyanka (KGB), Lubianka prison in
Moscow
Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...
for her execution. After
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretar ...
's death in on 5 March 1953, Erica Wallach's sentence was reduced to hard labor in Vorkuta, a region of the Gulag located above the Arctic Circle. She was released during the Khrushchev thaw in October 1955. At first, she was unable to join her husband and daughters in the U.S. because of the U.S. State Department's concern over her former membership in the
Communist Party of Germany. It took the personal intervention of CIA Director of Central Intelligence, Director Allen Dulles to reunite Erica Wallach with her family in 1957.
Wallach's memoir of her experiences, ''Light at Midnight'', was published in 1967.
Death of Stalin
![Stalin's casket on howitzer carriage draught by horses](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Stalin%27s_casket_on_howitzer_carriage_draught_by_horses.jpg)
After Soviet Premier
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretar ...
Death and state funeral of Joseph Stalin, died inside his Kuntsevo Dacha on 5 March 1953, the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, East German Socialist Unity Party met in a special session and eulogized the dictator as the "great friend of Germany who was always an advisor of and help to our people."
Two months later, on 5 May 1953, the SED's General Secretary,
Walter Ulbricht
Walter Ernst Paul Ulbricht (; 30 June 18931 August 1973) was a German communist politician. Ulbricht played a leading role in the creation of the Weimar-era Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and later (after spending the years of Nazi rule in ...
, and the rest of the leadership increased work quotas by 10%. They also decided to rename Chemnitz Karl-Marx-Stadt and to institute the Order of Karl Marx as the GDR's highest award.
[Koehler (1999), pages 58–59.]
Two weeks later, Mielke accused "a group of Party officials" of "plotting against the leadership", which "resulted in more expulsions from the Politburo and the Central Committee."
East German uprising of 1953
![Bundesarchiv B 145 Bild-F005191-0040, Berlin, Aufstand, sowjetischer Panzer](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/Bundesarchiv_B_145_Bild-F005191-0040%2C_Berlin%2C_Aufstand%2C_sowjetischer_Panzer.jpg)
Discontent among factory workers about a 10% increase of work quotas without a corresponding wage hike boiled over. On 16 June 1953, nearly one hundred construction workers gathered before work for a protest meeting at Stalinallee, in East Berlin. Words spread rapidly to other construction sites and hundreds of men and women joined the rally, which marched to the Detlev-Rohwedder-Haus, House of Ministries. The protesters chanted slogans for five hours, demanding to speak to
Walter Ulbricht
Walter Ernst Paul Ulbricht (; 30 June 18931 August 1973) was a German communist politician. Ulbricht played a leading role in the creation of the Weimar-era Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and later (after spending the years of Nazi rule in ...
and Otto Grotewohl. Only Heavy Industry Minister Fritz Selbmann and Professor Robert Havemann, president of the GDR Peace Council, emerged. Their speech, however, was answered with jeers and the Ministers retreated into the heavily armed building. The regular and the Kasernierte Volkspolizei were summoned from their barracks, but made no move to attack the protesters, who returned to Stalinallee, where a general strike was called.
[Koehler (1999), page 59.]
Following
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 O ...
's Federal Minister for All-German Questions Jakob Kaiser's admonition in a late night broadcast to East Germans to shy away from provocations, Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor, RIAS, starting with its 11 pm news broadcast, and from then on in hourly intermissions, repeated the workers' demand to continue the strike the next day, calling specifically for all East Berliners to participate in a demo at 7am on the 17th at Strausberger Platz.
East German uprising of 1953, The following day, 17 June 1953, more that 100,000 protesters took to the streets of East Berlin. More than 400,000 protesters also took to the streets in other cities and towns throughout the German Democratic Republic. Everywhere, the demands were the same: free elections by secret ballot.
Outside of Berlin, the main centres of the protests included the industrial region around Halle (Saale), Halle, Merseburg, and Bitterfeld, as well as middle-size towns like Jena, Görlitz, and Brandenburg. No more than 25,000 people participated in strikes and demonstrations in Leipzig, but there were 32,000 in Magdeburg, 43,000 in Dresden, 53,000 in Potsdam – and in Halle (Saale), Halle, a figure close to 100,000.
In
West Berlin
West Berlin (german: Berlin (West) or , ) was a political enclave which comprised the western part of Berlin during the years of the Cold War. Although West Berlin was de jure not part of West Germany, lacked any sovereignty, and was under mi ...
, the American radio station Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor, RIAS and several other West German stations reported on the protests and on plans for a general strike. As East Germans listened to the broadcasts, 267,000 workers at State-owned plants in 304 cities and towns joined the general strike. In 24 towns, outraged East Germans stormed the Stasi's prisons and freed between 2,000 and 3,000 political prisoners.
In response to orders, the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, Soviet Occupation Forces, the
Stasi and the Kasernierte Volkspolizei went on the attack. Bloody street battles ensued and hundreds of policemen defected to the side of the protesters. Both police and Stasi stations were overrun and some government offices were sacked. The Party leadership retreated into a fortified compound in the Pankow district of East Berlin.
At noon, the Soviet authorities terminated all tram and metro traffic into the Eastern sector and all but closed the sector borders to
West Berlin
West Berlin (german: Berlin (West) or , ) was a political enclave which comprised the western part of Berlin during the years of the Cold War. Although West Berlin was de jure not part of West Germany, lacked any sovereignty, and was under mi ...
to prevent more demonstrators from reaching the city centre. An hour later, they declared martial law in East Berlin.
The repression took place outside East Berlin police HQ – where Soviet tanks opened fire on "the insurgents".
According to John Koehler, "... by late afternoon, Soviet tanks accompanied by Infantry and MVD troops had rolled into East Berlin and other cities in the
Soviet Zone. This made the people even angrier. At Berlin's Potsdamer Platz, which bordered on the American Sector, irate protesters ignored machine gun fire and the menacing barrels of tank guns. They ripped cobblestones from the streets and hurled them at the tanks."
Fighting between the Red Army (and later GDR police) and the demonstrators persisted into the afternoon and night. In some cases, the tanks and the soldiers fired directly into the crowds.
Overnight, the Soviets (and the Stasi) started to arrest hundreds of people. Ultimately, up to 10,000 people were detained and at least 20, probably as many as 40, people were executed, including Red Army soldiers who refused to obey orders. With the SED leadership effectively paralysed at the Soviet headquarters in
Karlshorst
Karlshorst (, ; ; literally meaning ''Karl's nest'') is a locality in the borough of Lichtenberg in Berlin. Located there are a harness racing track and the Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin (''HTW''), the largest University of Appli ...
, control of the city passed to the Soviets.
![DBPB 1953 110 17](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/DBPB_1953_110_17.Juni.jpg)
In honor of the uprising,
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 O ...
established 17 June as a national day, national holiday, called Day of German Unity. The extension of the ''Unter den Linden'' boulevard to the west of the Brandenburg Gate, formerly called ''Charlottenburger Chaussee'', was also renamed ''Straße des 17. Juni'' ("17 June Street") in honor of the uprising.
According to John Koehler, "Provisional prison camps were set up to hold the thousands of Stasi victims. Nearly 1,500 persons were sentenced in secret trials to long prison terms. On 24 June, Mielke issued a terse announcement that one Stasi officer, nineteen demonstrators, and two bystanders had been killed during the uprising. He did not say how many were victims of official lynching. The numbers of the wounded were given as 191 policemen, 126 demonstrators, and 61 bystanders."
[Koehler (1999), page 60.]
Also according to Koehler, "Calm returned to the streets of the Soviet Zone, yet escapes to the West continued at a high rate. Of the 331,390 who fled in 1953, 8,000 were members of the Kasernierte Volkspolizei, the barracked people's police units, which were actually the secret cadre of the future East German Army. Also among the escapees were 2,718 members and candidates of the SED, the ruling Party."
The Khrushchev thaw
Purges
![Lavrenti Beria Stalins family](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/Lavrenti_Beria_Stalins_family.jpg)
Alarmed by the uprising, Lavrenty Beria, the First Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union and head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (Soviet Union), Ministry of Internal Affairs, personally travelled from
Moscow
Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...
to East Berlin. He conferred with Stasi Minister
Wilhelm Zaisser
Wilhelm Zaisser (20 June 1893 – 3 March 1958) was a German communist politician and statesman who served as the founder and first Minister for State Security of the German Democratic Republic (1950–1953).
Early life
Born in Gelsenkirc ...
and with Mielke, his deputy, both of whom he had known since the early 1930s. During both conversations, Beria demanded to know why the Stasi had failed to recognize the extreme discontent of the population and inform the Party leadership, which could then have prevented the uprising by taking extremely repressive measures in advance. Both Zaisser and Mielke answered Beria's questions circumspectly, and were accordingly left in their posts.
In response to the uprising, Beria decided to replace several hundred MVD officers, including Major General Ivan Fadeykin, the MVD resident spy, resident of East Germany. The Stasi, according to John Koehler, "generally remained untouched except for the arrests and dismissals, for dereliction of duty, of a handful of officers in the provinces. One high-ranking Stasi officer shot himself."
Following Beria's return to Moscow, however, he was arrested on 26 June 1953, in a coup d'état led by Nikita Khrushchev and Marshal of the Soviet Union, Marshal
Georgy Zhukov
Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov ( rus, Георгий Константинович Жуков, p=ɡʲɪˈorɡʲɪj kənstɐnʲˈtʲinəvʲɪtɕ ˈʐukəf, a=Ru-Георгий_Константинович_Жуков.ogg; 1 December 1896 – ...
. Beria was tried on charges of 357 counts of rape and high treason. He was
sentenced to death
Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the state-sanctioned practice of deliberately killing a person as a punishment for an actual or supposed crime, usually following an authorized, rule-governed process to conclude that t ...
and execution by shooting, shot by Red Army Colonel-General Pavel Batitsky on 23 December 1953.
In an interview to ''Neues Deutschland'', the official party newspaper of East Germany, on 30 June 1953, the Party's Minister of Justice, Max Fechner, declared that, "illegal arrests," had been made and that being a member of a strike committee or suspicion of being a ringleader was not in itself grounds for arrest and conviction.
Meanwhile, when the East German Politburo met on 8 July, it seemed that Ulbricht would be deposed as Party General Secretary. Zaisser conceded that the whole Politburo was responsible for the "accelerated construction of socialism" and of the subsequent fallout. But he also added that to leave Ulbricht as Premier, "would be opposed catastrophic for the New Course".
[Ostermann, 168]
By the end of the meeting, only two Politburo members still supported Ulbricht's leadership: Free German Youth League chief Erich Honecker and Party Control Commission Chairman Hermann Matern. Ulbricht only managed to forestall a decision then and there with a promise to make a statement at the forthcoming 15th SED CC Plenum, scheduled for later that month.
Meanwhile, Mielke informed a Party commission looking for scapegoats that his boss, Stasi Minister
Wilhelm Zaisser
Wilhelm Zaisser (20 June 1893 – 3 March 1958) was a German communist politician and statesman who served as the founder and first Minister for State Security of the German Democratic Republic (1950–1953).
Early life
Born in Gelsenkirc ...
, was calling for secret negotiations with
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 O ...
and that, "he believed the Soviet Union would abandon the DDR."
[Koehler (1999), page 61.]
By late July, Ulbricht was completely certain that he had the support of the new General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Soviet First Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev. Therefore, he expelled his main opponents, Zaisser, Hernstadt and Ackermann, from the Politburo, and thus strengthened his position further.
SED Minister of Justice Max Fechner was personally arrested by Mielke and replaced by Hilde Benjamin, who was known to East German citizens as "Red Hilde", "The Red Roland Freisler, Freisler," and as, "The Red Guillotine," for her role as a judge in the SED's show trials.
Fechner was convicted of being, "an enemy of the Party and the State," and served three years in Bautzen Prison.
Wilhelm Zaisser
Wilhelm Zaisser (20 June 1893 – 3 March 1958) was a German communist politician and statesman who served as the founder and first Minister for State Security of the German Democratic Republic (1950–1953).
Early life
Born in Gelsenkirc ...
was replaced as head of the Stasi by
Ernst Wollweber
Ernst Friedrich Wollweber (29 October 1898 – 3 May 1967) was a German politician who was State Secretary of State Security from 1953 to 1955 and Minister of State Security of East Germany from 1955 to 1957.
Biography
Born in Hann. Mün ...
and Mielke remained on staff as his deputy.
Tenure as Stasi head
![Milkes](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Milkes.office.radio.JPG)
Mielke headed the
Stasi from 1957 until the fall of the
Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall (german: Berliner Mauer, ) was a guarded concrete barrier that encircled West Berlin from 1961 to 1989, separating it from East Berlin and East Germany (GDR). Construction of the Berlin Wall was commenced by the government ...
in 1989. There was, under the East German system, no provision for parliamentary oversight.
[ However, starting in 1971 Mielke was required to provide a detailed intelligence briefing to Leadership of East Germany, party secretary Erich Honecker each Tuesday, directly following the weekly Politburo meeting.] (Before 1971, under Walter Ulbricht
Walter Ernst Paul Ulbricht (; 30 June 18931 August 1973) was a German communist politician. Ulbricht played a leading role in the creation of the Weimar-era Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and later (after spending the years of Nazi rule in ...
, Mielke was not involved in routine intelligence briefings to the leadership which, instead, were provided directly to Ulbricht by Intelligence Chief Markus Wolf.[)
]
Internal discipline
During his tenure, Mielke enforced "political and personal discipline reminiscent of the early French Foreign Legion". New recruits were required to take a solemn oath pledging "to fight alongside the state security organs of all socialist countries against all enemies of socialism" on pain of "the severest punishment under the Republic's laws and the contempt of the workers."[Koehler (1999), page 147.] Recruits were also required to sign a security pledge vowing never to make unauthorized visits to any "capitalist countries" and to report on any members of their families who did so.
Violations of the oath resulted in expulsion from the Stasi and blacklisting from all but the most menial jobs. Serious violations were tried before secret tribunals and led an estimated 200 Stasi agents to be shot. Another 100 were hanged. Colonel Rainer Wiegand once said, "There was only one way to leave the MfS without being haunted for the rest of your life. You either retired or you died."
Domestic activities
Under Erich Mielke's leadership, the Stasi employed 85,000 full-time domestic spies and 170,000 civilian informants (german: Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter) (IMs). East Germans coined a term to describe the Stasi's pervasive surveillance of the population: "All-Covered" (german: Flächendeckend). For this reason, Anna Funder has referred to East Germany as, "the most perfected surveillance state of all time."
According to John Koehler, "...the Stasi's tentacles probed every aspect of life. Full-time officers were posted to all major industrial plants. Without exception, one wikt:tenant, tenant in every building was designated as a watchdog reporting to an area representative of the ''Volkspolizei
The ''Deutsche Volkspolizei'' (DVP, German for "German People's Police"), commonly known as the ''Volkspolizei'' or VoPo, was the national police force of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) from 1945 to 1990. The Volkspolizei was a h ...
''...In turn, the police officer was the Stasi's man. If a relative or friend came to stay overnight, it was reported. Schools, universities and hospitals were infiltrated from top to bottom. German academe was shocked to learn that Heinrich Fink, professor of theology and vice-chancellor of East Berlin's Humboldt University, had been a Stasi informer since 1968. After Fink's Stasi connections came to light, he was summarily fired. Doctors, lawyers, journalists, writers, actors, and sports figures were co-opted by Stasi officers, as were waiters and hotel personnel. Phone tapping, Tapping about 100,000 telephone lines in East Germany and West Berlin
West Berlin (german: Berlin (West) or , ) was a political enclave which comprised the western part of Berlin during the years of the Cold War. Although West Berlin was de jure not part of West Germany, lacked any sovereignty, and was under mi ...
around the clock was the job of 2,000 officers... Christianity in East Germany, Churchmen, including high officials of both Evangelical Church of Germany, Protestant and Roman Catholic Church in Germany, Catholic denominations, were recruited en masse as secret informants. Their offices and confessionals were infested with eavesdropping devices. Even the Thomaskantor, director of Leipzig's famous Thomanerchor, Thomas Church choir, Hans-Joachim Rotzsch, was forced to resign when he was unmasked as a ''Spitzel'', the people's pejorative for a Stasi informant."
In an interview with journalist Anna Funder, an ex-Stasi officer recalled, "Most often, people we approached would inform for us. It was very rare that they would not. And even if they didn’t, we’d beat them so hard with sticks that they would think twice before not informing. However, sometimes we felt that we might need to know where their weak points were, just in case. For example, if we wanted a pastor, we'd find out if he'd had an adultery, affair, or had a alcoholism, drinking problem—things that we could use as leverage. Mostly though, people said yes."
On Mielke's orders, and with his full knowledge, Stasi officers also engaged in arbitrary arrest and detention, arbitrary arrest, kidnapping, brutal harassment of political dissidents, torture, and the imprisonment of tens of thousands of citizens.
In a 1991 interview, Jewish people, Jewish Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal
Simon Wiesenthal (31 December 190820 September 2005) was a history of the Jews in Austria, Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer. He studied architecture and was living in Lwów at the outbreak of World War II. He surviv ...
said, "The Stasi was much, much worse than the Gestapo
The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one organi ...
, if you consider only the oppression of German people, its own people. The Gestapo had 40,000 officials watching a country of 80 million, while the Stasi employed 102,000 to control only 17 million."
Activities abroad
During Mielke's tenure, the Stasi's operations beyond East Germany were overseen by Markus Wolf and the ''Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung'' (MfS-HVA).
Mielke and Wolf provided money, training, and surveillance equipment to help build pro-Soviet secret police forces in Fidel Castro's Cuba, Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party – Syria Region, Baathist Syria, Sandinista National Liberation Front, Sandinista-ruled Nicaragua, Mengistu Haile Mariam's People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, Ethiopia,[THE FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE-GATHERING OF THE MfS' HAUPTVERWALTUNG AUFKLÄRUNG](_blank)
Jérôme Mellon. 16 October 2001. Idi Amin's Second Republic of Uganda, Uganda,[Gareth M. Winrow. ''The Foreign Policy of the GDR in Africa'', p. 141] Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana, South Yemen. and the Ministry of Public Security (Vietnam), Ministry of Public Security (MPS) in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
After the opening of Stasi archives, it was further revealed that West Germany was riddled with MfS-HVA mole (espionage), moles. In what John Koehler has dubbed, "The Invisible Invasion", some West German citizens collaborated out of Marxist beliefs, but others were recruited through blackmail, bribery, career frustrations, or straight sex, straight or gay sex, gay sexual favors provided by Stasi operatives.
Another tactic was for Stasi military advisers assigned to African and Middle Eastern countries to request the arrest of West German tourists. Local police would then turn the prisoner over to the Stasi agent, who would offer the West German a choice between espionage or incarceration.
Senior politicians from the Social Democratic Party of Germany
The Social Democratic Party of Germany (german: Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, ; SPD, ) is a centre-left social democratic political party in Germany. It is one of the major parties of contemporary Germany.
Saskia Esken has been the ...
, the Free Democratic Party of Germany, and the Christian Democratic Union (Germany), Christian Democratic Union were exposed and, when still alive, prosecuted.
Mielke and Wolf also seriously compromised West Germany's police departments, Bundesnachrichtendienst, foreign and BfV, domestic intelligence services, diplomatic corps, military-industrial complex, and journalistic profession.
The Stasi compromised the United States military and diplomatic presence in 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 O ...
.
The most damaging American people, American to spy for the Stasi was United States Army Sergeant James Hall III, who volunteered his services to Soviet and East German intelligence in November 1981.
Sergeant Hall sold the Stasi 13,088 pages of classified documents,[Spurenvernichtung im Amt](_blank)
Der Spiegel, 26 June 1999 including detailed information about Project Trojan, a worldwide electronic network with the ability to pinpoint armored vehicles, missiles and aircraft by recording their signal emissions during wartime and the complete National SIGINT Requirements List (NSRL), a 4258-page document about NSA operations at home and abroad.
In 1988, Sergeant Hall was tricked into confessing his espionage career to an undercover FBI Special Agent named Dmitri Droujinsky, a Russian-American, who was posing as Hall's new KGB handler (espionage), handler. When news of Sergeant Hall's arrest became public, one Washington, D.C., Washington intelligence official called the breach, "the Army's John Anthony Walker, Walker Case."
Collusion with Nazism
Beginning in 1960, Mielke and Wolf used false flag recruitment to secretly organize and finance Neo-Nazi organizations, which they then instructed to vandalize Judaism, Jewish religious and cultural sites throughout West Germany. During the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann, Stasi agents sent letters to West German Neo-Nazis and Waffen-SS veterans, urging them to speak out and to raise money for Eichmann's defense attorney. This was done in order to lend credibility to Communist propaganda
Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded ...
about the allegedly Fascist and neo-Nazi orientation of the Federal Republic of Germany.
According to German historian Michael Wolffsohn, "There is no doubt that in the 1960s as now, there were Nazis who were unreconstructed, unchangeable and evil, but without the help of East Germany, these Nazis were incapable of a national, coordinated campaign. That was true of right-wing extremist criminals in the 1980s as well. The East German Communists used anything they could against West Germany, including the... fears by Western countries and Jews that a new Nazism could be growing in West Germany. There is... evidence that the East Germans continued to use Anti-Semitism as a tool against West Germany in the 1970s and perhaps right up until 1989."["E. Germany Ran Antisemitic Campaign in West in '60s."](_blank)
''The Washington Post'', 28 February 1993.
In a 1991 interview with John Koehler, Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal
Simon Wiesenthal (31 December 190820 September 2005) was a history of the Jews in Austria, Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer. He studied architecture and was living in Lwów at the outbreak of World War II. He surviv ...
said of the Stasi, "They not only terrorized their own people worse than the Gestapo
The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one organi ...
, but the government was the most Anti-Semitic and Anti-Israeli in the entire Eastern Bloc. They did nothing to help the West in tracking down Nazi war criminal, criminals; they ignored all requests from West German judicial authorities for assistance. We have just discovered shelves of files on Nazis stretching over four miles. Now we also know how the Stasi used those files. They blackmailed Nazi criminals who fled abroad after the war into spying for them. What's more, the Stasi trained terrorists from all over the world."
Support for paramilitary and terrorist groups
During a 1979 visit to the GDR by senior PLO member Salah Khalaf, Mielke said, "We are paying great attention to the Palestinian political violence, Palestine resistance and the other revolutionary forces fighting against the policies of the United States and against the provocations of the State of Israel, Israeli aggressor. Together with the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, we will do everything to support this just battle."
With this in mind, Mielke ordered the Stasi to finance, arm, and train, "urban guerrillas," from numerous countries. According to former Stasi Colonel Rainer Wiegand, Mielke's ties to violent paramilitary groups were overseen by Markus Wolf and Department Three of the MfS-HVA. Members of the West German ''Rote Armee Fraktion, Baader-Meinhoff Group'', the Chilean ''Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front'', and ''Umkhonto we Sizwe'', the paramilitary wing of the African National Congress, were brought to East Germany for training in the use of military hardware, insurgent tactics, and, "the leadership role of the Party." Similar treatment was meted out to Palestinians from the ''Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine'', ''Abu Nidal'', and ''Black September (group), Black September''.
Other Stasi agents worked as military advisers to Soviet-backed African guerrilla organizations and the governments they later formed. They included the Namibian ''SWAPO'' and the Angolan ''MPLA'' during the South African Border War, the ''FRELIMO'' during the Mozambican War of Independence and Mozambican Civil War, civil war, and Robert Mugabe's ''ZANLA'' during the Rhodesian Bush War.
Colonel Wiegand revealed that Mielke and Wolf provided bodyguards from the Stasi's counter-terrorism division for Venezuelan-born PLO terrorist Carlos the Jackal and ''Black September'' leader Abu Daoud during their visits to the GDR. Col. Wiegand had been sickened by the 1972 Munich massacre and was horrified that the GDR would treat the man who ordered it as an honored guest. When he protested, Wiegand was told that Abu Daoud was, "a friend of our country, a high-ranking political functionary," and that there was no proof that he was a terrorist.
During the 1980s, Wiegand secretly blackmailed a Libyan diplomat into spying on his colleagues. Wiegand's informant told him that the La Belle bombing and other terrorist attacks against American and West German citizens were being planned at the Libyan Embassy in East Berlin. When Wiegand showed him a detailed report, Mielke informed the SED's Politburo, which ordered the Colonel to continue surveillance but not interfere with the plans of the Libyans.
According to John Koehler, "Murder, kidnapping, extortion, bank robbery, and arson were felonies under the East German criminal code. However, if these offenses were committed under the banner of the 'anti-imperialist struggle,' the communist system would look the other way. Moreover, it had assigned the Stasi to make sure that terrorists were properly trained for murder and sowing mayhem. There was no limits to the East German regime's involvement with terrorism, so long as it could be ideologically justified."
The Peaceful Revolution
According to John Koehler, "Increasingly concerned over the growing popular opposition, Stasi Minister Mielke early in 1989 ordered the creation of a special elite unit for crushing disturbances. Its personnel were carefully selected members of the counterespionage and counterterrorism directorate. They were equipped with special batons similar to electric cattle prods but much more powerful. In a secret speech to top-ranking Stasi officers on 29 June, Mielke warned that, 'hostile opposing forces and groups have already achieved a measure of power and are using all methods to achieve a change in the balance of power. Former Stasi Colonel Rainer Wiegand told me he was horrified when Mielke compared the situation with that of China two months earlier. Chinese students in Beijing had begun massive protests in April and in May, during a Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, student demonstration in Tiananmen Square, security troops had opened fire on them killing hundreds. 'Mielke said our situation was comparable and we had to be ready to counter it with all means and methods,' Wiegand recalled. 'Mielke said that the Chinese leadership had succeeded in smothering the protests before the situation got out of hand.'"
Despite Mielke's attempts to suppress them, East Germany's protesters grew more emboldened with every arrest.
40th anniversary of the GDR
As the fortieth anniversary of the GDR approached, Mielke ordered, "We must stop the internal enemy. At the least hint of a disturbance of the celebration, isolate and arrest them."
One former Stasi Major recalled, "We mixed inconspicuously with the demonstrators, accompanied by our IMs. Hundreds of us stood at the sides of the street in order to stop any activity before it got started. We barely got any sleep toward the end. Never did I sense that the people were afraid of the MfS. The Stasi was more afraid of the people than the people were of them."
According to Koehler, "Despite the unrest, the regime celebrated its fortieth with a huge, pompous ceremony in Berlin
Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...
on 7 October, while tens of thousands of outside the ornate building of the State Council. The Volkspolizei, People's Police cordons were utterly ineffectual. As Stasi Minister Erich Mielke drove up and was greeted by General Günter Kratsch, the counterintelligence chief, Mielke screamed at police: "Club those pigs into submission!" (german: "Hau sie doch zusammen, die Schweine!") The police ignored Mielke's ranting.
As more and more East Germans were arrested for protesting the 40th anniversary celebrations, many of them sang ''The Internationale'' in Vopo and Stasi custody to imply that they, rather than their captors, were the real working class and the real revolutionaries.
According to Anna Funder, "There was a sea of red flags, a torchlight procession, and tanks. The old men on the podium wore light-grey suits studded with medals. Mikhail Gorbachev stood next to Honecker, but he looked uncomfortable among the much older Germans. He had come to tell them that it was over, to convince the leadership to adopt his reformist policies. He had spoken openly about the danger of not 'responding to reality.' He pointedly told the Politburo that, 'life punishes those who come too late.' Honecker and Mielke ignored him, just as they ignored the crowds when they chanted, "Gorby, help us! Gorby, help us!"
Plan X
On 8 October 1989, Mielke and Honecker ordered the Stasi to implement "Plan X"—the SED's plan to arrest and indefinitely detain 85,939 East Germans during a state of emergency. According to John Koehler, Plan X had been in preparation since 1979 and was, "a carbon copy of how the Nazi concentration camps got their start after Adolf Hitler, Hitler Nazi seizure of power, came to power in 1933."[Koehler (1999), page 143.]
By 1984, 23 sites had been selected for "isolation and internment camps." Those who were to be imprisoned in them ran into six categories; including anyone who had ever been under surveillance for anti-state activities, including all members of peace movements which were not under Stasi control.
According to Anna Funder, "The plans contained exact provisions for the use of all available prisons and camps, and when those were full for the conversion of other buildings: Nazi detention centers, schools, hospitals, and factory holiday hostels. Every detail was foreseen, from where the doorbell was located on the house of each person to be arrested to the adequate supply of barbed wire and the rules of dress and etiquette in the camps..."
However, when Mielke sent the orders, codenamed "Shield" (german: Schild), to each local Stasi precinct to begin the planned arrests, he was not obeyed. Terrified of an East German version of the mass lynchings of State Protection Authority, Hungarian secret police agents during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, 1956 Revolution, Stasi agents throughout the GDR fortified their office-buildings and barricaded themselves inside.
Toppling Honecker
Even as orders were going out to implement ''Plan X'', Mielke had already thrown his support behind the anti-Honecker faction in the SED's Politburo. Although he was of the same generation as Honecker and had matured in an environment where following orders was the rule, he was sober enough and politically savvy enough to realize this approach no longer worked. During a session on 10 October 1989, Mielke delivered a report attacking Honecker's desire to violently suppress the demonstrations rather than offer concessions.
In what Edward N. Peterson has called "a remarkable disclaimer of responsibility for the violence," Mielke declared that Honecker's orders to him "were built on false situation judgments." He added that Honecker's commands on 7 and 8 October "were false and undifferentiated condemnations of those who think differently. Despite this evaluation, there was never any instructions to use violence against persons. There is nothing in our basic principles to consider a demonstration as part of a possible counterrevolutionary coup d'etat, coup."
Mielke also claimed that "the Party judged the situation falsely. We tried to tell them the true situation, but enough was not done." Mielke argued in favor of solving the demonstrations politically and giving "every DDR citizen the right to travel."
On 17 October 1989, Mielke and the rest of the GDR's Politburo met to follow Gorbachev's demand, voiced in August, for Honecker be removed as General Secretary of the SED and State Council chairman. Suspecting that Honecker's personal bodyguards might try to arrest the members of the Central Committee when they met to vote Honecker out in favour of Egon Krenz, Mielke saw to it that Stasi agents who were loyal to him were stationed near the meeting room. While deliberations were underway, Mielke told Honecker that "we simply cannot start shooting with tanks," and tried to impress upon Honecker that it was "the end".
After the vote to oust Honecker passed, Mielke "got nasty," and accused Honecker of political corruption, corruption. Honecker responded that Mielke should not open his mouth so much.[Peterson (2002), page 209.] Mielke responded by putting the last nail into Honecker's coffin. He announced that the MfS had a file on the now-ousted leader. It contained proof of Honecker's corrupt business practices, sexual activities, and how, as a member of the underground Communist Party of Germany during the Nazi years, he had been arrested by the Gestapo
The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one organi ...
and had named names.
To the shock of both the Politburo and the Stasi, Krenz's first televised addresses failed to win popular support. Despite his assurances that the SED was at last ready to embrace Gorbachev's policies of Glasnost and Perestroika, Krenz's approval ratings remained extremely low.[Buckley (2004), page 175.]
Former Politburo member Günter Schabowski later recalled, "We made a palace revolution without offering a real alternative... We had not quickly and thoroughly enough whittled away from Stalinism, Stalin's methods."
Defeat
On 7 November 1989, Mielke resigned, along with eleven out of eighteen members of the SED's Council of Ministers of the GDR, Council of Ministers, in response to the increasing disintegration of the GDR.
Two days later, Schabowski announced on television that the east–west border was open without restriction.
According to Anna Funder, there was panic at Stasi Headquarters in Berlin-Lichtenberg, "Stasi officers were instructed to destroy files, starting with the most incriminating–those naming westerners who spied for them, and those that concerned deaths. They shredded the files until the paper shredders overheated and shorted out. Among other shortages in the East, there was a shredder shortage, so they had to send agents out under cover to West Berlin
West Berlin (german: Berlin (West) or , ) was a political enclave which comprised the western part of Berlin during the years of the Cold War. Although West Berlin was de jure not part of West Germany, lacked any sovereignty, and was under mi ...
to buy more. In Building 8 alone, the citizens' movement found over a hundred burnt out shredders. When they ran out of working shredders from the West and could not procure more they began using scissors to cut the documents by hand.
According to William F. Buckley, Jr., "In the weeks after 9 November, Stasi offices were stormed in various cities around East Germany. Stasi commissars in three of those cities committed suicide. Others were thrown out of office windows by protesters. But not one was lynched or executed."
Televised humiliation
On 13 November 1989, Mielke was summoned to deliver a briefing about the protests to the GDR parliament, or ''Volkskammer''. Formerly a "rubber stamp parliament," the disintegration of the SED's power had allowed the ''Volkskammer'' to begin exercising real authority over the GDR. Therefore, Mielke, as the head of the Stasi (known as the "shield and sword of the [SED] party"), was summoned before the newly empowered parliament to justify his position in government.
As his speech was broadcast live, Mielke began by using overly bombastic, flag-waving language, saying "We have, comrades, dear assembly members, an extraordinarily high amount of contact with all working people" (german: "Wir haben, Genossen, liebe Abgeordnete, einen außerordentlich hohen Kontakt zu allen werktätigen Menschen.").[.] To his shock, the ''Volkskammer'' responded with boos, whistles, catcalls and chants of “Go to prison, murderer!” (german: "Geh ins Gefängnis, Mörder!")
His face grief-stricken and pale, Mielke then tried to defuse the situation, "Yes, we have such contact, let me tell you-let me tell you why. I am not afraid to stand here and to give you an unbiased answer" (german: "Ja, wir haben den Kontakt, ihr werdet gleich hören – ihr werdet gleich hören, warum. Ich fürchte mich nicht, ohne Rededisposition hier Antwort zu stehen."). Mielke continued, speaking of the "triumph" of the socialist economy, continuing all the while to address the members of the Volkskammer as "Comrades" (german: "Genossen"). In response, Volkskammer member Dietmar Czok of the Christian Democratic Union (East Germany), Christian Democratic Union, rose from his seat and raised his hand. The Volkskammer's president, Günther Maleuda, interrupted and shouted at Mielke telling him to “Shut your mouth!” (german: ”Den Mund halten!”). Maleuda then allowed Czok to speak.
With his voice dripping with contempt, Czok told Mielke, "As a point of order, I will not tell you this again. There are more people sitting in this Chamber than just your Comrades!" (german: "Zur Geschäftsordnung: Ich bitte doch endlich dafür zu sorgen. In dieser Kammer sitzen nicht nur Genossen!"). In response, many in the Volkskammer burst into applause, cheers, and shouts of "We are not your Comrades!" (german: "Wir sind nicht deine Genossen!") and Go to prison, murderer! (german: "Geh ins Gefängnis, Mörder!")
Trying to appear magnanimous, Mielke responded, "This is a natural, Humanistic question! This is just a question of formality." (german: Das ist doch nur 'ne natürliche, menschliche Frage! Das ist doch nur eine formale Frage!"), leading to further shouts of displeasure from the members of the Volkskammer. In a last ditch effort, Mielke "raised his arms like an evangelist,"[Koehler (1999), page 407.] and cried, "I love all – all Humanity! I really do! I set myself before you!" (german: "Ich liebe – Ich liebe doch alle – alle Menschen! Na liebe doch! Ich setze mich doch dafür ein!")
Everyone in the room, including staunch SED members such as Egon Krenz and Günter Schabowski, burst out laughing, with some also pointing at him or making obscene gestures. Mielke then stormed off the podium, angrily throwing his speech to the floor and stomping on the papers while swearing at everyone in German. John Koehler later wrote, "Mielke was finished." Mielke shortly thereafter hyperventilated and was rushed to Charité, Charity Hospital located next to the Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall (german: Berliner Mauer, ) was a guarded concrete barrier that encircled West Berlin from 1961 to 1989, separating it from East Berlin and East Germany (GDR). Construction of the Berlin Wall was commenced by the government ...
. He was later transferred to the Soviet military hospital at Zossen, Wunsdorf, where he was sedated and treated under guard.
Mielke's address to the ''Volkskammer'' remains the most famous broadcast in the history of German television. Anna Funder has written, "When they think of Mielke, East Germans like to think of this."[Funder (2003), page 68.]
The Fall
On 17 November 1989, the ''Volkskammer'' renamed the MfS the ''Amt für Nationale Sicherheit'' (AfNS – Office for National Security). The following day, Mielke's tenure in office ended when the ''Volkskammer'' appointed ''Generalleutnant'' Wolfgang Schwanitz as the new director of the AfNS.
On 1 December 1989 the ''Volkskammer'' revoked the clause of the GDR constitution that declared the GDR to be a socialist state under the leadership of the SED, formally ending Communist rule in East Germany. Two days later, the SED announced that Mielke's party membership had been permanently revoked. Years later, he lamented, "Millions have died for nothing. Everything we fought for – it has all amounted to nothing." He also said, "If the party had given me the task, then there would perhaps still be a GDR today. On that you can rely."
Prosecution
Indictments
On 7 December 1989, Erich Mielke was brutally beaten, arrested and thrown into solitary confinement for embezzlement of public funds in order to improve his hunting estate. He was charged with "Damaging the People's Economy" ''(Schädigung der Volkswirtschaft''). On 7 January 1990, he was further charged with high treason and conspiring with Erich Honecker to phone tapping, bug the telephones and open the mail of every one of East Germany's citizens.[Ex-E. German Official Charged With Fraud and Embezzlement](_blank)
''Los Angeles Times'', 28 April 1991.
Meanwhile, the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany, Federal Constitutional Court announced that Mielke had also been indicted for having ordered two terrorist attacks by the Red Army Faction, Baader-Meinhoff Group against United States military personnel who were stationed on West German soil. The first was the car bomb attack against the United States Air Force at Ramstein Air Base on 31 August 1981. The second was the attempted murder with an RPG-7 anti-tank rocket of United States Army General Frederick Kroesen, his wife, and the Federal Criminal Police Office (Germany), West German Federal Police (BKA) officer who was driving their armored Mercedes at Heidelberg on 15 September 1981.
After German reunification
German reunification (german: link=no, Deutsche Wiedervereinigung) was the process of re-establishing Germany as a united and fully sovereign state, which took place between 2 May 1989 and 15 March 1991. The day of 3 October 1990 when the Ge ...
in October 1990, Mielke was also indicted for ordering the shootings of defectors at the Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall (german: Berliner Mauer, ) was a guarded concrete barrier that encircled West Berlin from 1961 to 1989, separating it from East Berlin and East Germany (GDR). Construction of the Berlin Wall was commenced by the government ...
. He was also charged with misuse of office, breach of trust, and incitement to Perverting the course of justice, pervert the course of justice.
Bülowplatz trial
In February 1992, Mielke was put on trial for the 1931 first degree murder
Murder is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse, especially the unlawful killing of another human with malice aforethought. ("The killing of another person without justification or excuse, especially the ...
s of Berlin Police Captains Anlauf and Lenck as well as the attempted murder of Senior Sergeant Willig. The evidence for Mielke's guilt was drawn from the original police files, the transcripts from the 1934 trial of his co-conspirators, and a handwritten memoir in which Mielke revealed that his role in, "Murder of Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck, the Bülowplatz Affair," had been his reason for fleeing to Moscow
Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...
from the Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic (german: link=no, Weimarer Republik ), officially named the German Reich, was the government of Germany from 1918 to 1933, during which it was a constitutional federal republic for the first time in history; hence it is al ...
in 1931. All had been found in Mielke's house safe during a police search in 1990. Mielke was believed to have kept the documents for the purpose of "blackmailing Honecker and other East German leaders." Former Associated Press reporter and White House Press Secretary Jack Koehler, John Koehler also testified that Mielke had boasted of his involvement in the Bülowplatz murders during a confrontation at Leipzig in 1965.
During his trial, Mielke appeared increasingly senile, admitting his identity but otherwise remaining silent, taking naps, and showing little interest in the proceedings. In a widely publicized incident, Mielke appeared to mistake the presiding judge for a prison barber.["Ex-Chief of E. German Secret Police Freed : Europe: Court releases Erich Mielke. He served time for 1931 killings—but not for any crime from Communist era."](_blank)
''Los Angeles Times'', 2 August 1995. When a journalist for ''Der Spiegel'' attempted to interview him in Plötzensee Prison, Mielke responded, "I want to go back to my bed" (german: "Ich möchte in mein Bett zurück."). Opinion was divided whether Mielke was suffering from senile dementia or was pretending in order to evade prosecution.
After twenty months of one-and-a-half-hour daily sessions, Erich Mielke was convicted on two counts of murder and one of attempted murder. On 26 October 1993, a panel of three judges and two jurors sentenced him to six years' imprisonment. At his sentencing, Mielke started to cry. In pronouncing sentence, Judge Theodor Seidel, told Mielke that he "will go down in history as one of the most fearsome dictators and police ministers of the 20th century."["Erich Mielke, Powerful Head of Stasi, East Germany's Vast Spy Network, Dies at 92."](_blank)
''The New York Times'', 26 May 2000.
Imprisonment
Mielke was then put on trial for Schießbefehl, ordering the shootings of East Germans who were Republikflucht, trying to defect to the West. In November 1994, the presiding judge adjourned the proceedings, ruling that Mielke was not mentally competent to stand trial.
During his incarceration, at JVA Moabit corrections officers supplied Mielke with a red telephone like the one in his office at Stasi Headquarters. Although it was not connected to the outside world, Mielke enjoyed having imaginary conversations with non-existent Stasi agents. His other favorite pastime was watching game shows on television.
In 1995, parole officers and Mielke's attorneys argued that he was "totally confused" and obtained his release. At 87 years of age, Erich Mielke was Germany's oldest prison inmate and had been incarcerated for 1,904 days.[Koehler (1999), page 410.] Days before his release, the Public Prosecutor of Berlin announced that he was "not interested in chasing an 87-year-old man anymore" and that all further prosecution of Mielke had been indefinitely suspended.
According to Koehler, "[Mielke's] bank account, which held more than 300,000 Deutschmark, Marks (about US$187,500), was confiscated. Before his arrest in 1989, the most feared man in East Germany had lived in a luxurious home with access to an indoor pool. In addition, he owned a palatial hunting villa, complete with a movie theater, trophy room, 60 servants, and a 60 square kilometers hunting preserve. After he was released from prison Mielke was obliged to move into a two-room, 55-square-meter flat. Like all Stasi pensioners, he would henceforth have to live on 802 marks (about US$512) a month."
Death
Erich Mielke died on 21 May 2000, aged 92, in a Berlin nursing home. After being cremated at the crematorium in Meissen, an urn containing Mielke's ashes was buried in an unmarked grave at the Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde in Berlin. An estimated 100 people reportedly attended the funeral. Erich Mielke's grave is outside the memorial section established at the entrance in 1951 by East German leaders for communist heroes. Within hours of his funeral, the flowers and wreaths left at Mielke's grave were ripped to shreds by persons unknown.
Legacy
Writing in 2003, Australian people, Australian journalist Anna Funder declared, "The name Mielke has now come to mean 'Stasi.' Victims are dubiously honored to find his signature in their files: on plans for someone to be observed 'with all possible methods', on commands for arrest, for kidnapping, instructions to judges for sentencing, orders for 'liquidation'. The honor is dubious because... he signed so many."
In 2012, the museum at the former Stasi headquarters opened Mielke's office as a permanent exhibit. Soon after, ''The Guardian'' correspondent Tam Eastley visited the exhibit and numerous sites in Berlin connected to Mielke's life, times, and legacy. When she visited Mielke's grave, Eastley found that it had become a shrine for adherents of ''Ostalgie''.
Personal life
Erich Mielke was a fitness enthusiast, a non-smoker, and drank very little. He was a keen hunter and owned a large area of ground where he would hunt animals with other East German and visiting Soviet officials.
During the late 1940s, when Mielke was working as security chief of the DWK, he began a relationship with Gertrud Mueller, a seamstress. On 18 December 1948, shortly after the birth of their son Frank Mielke, Erich and Gertrud married in a civil ceremony.
According to the newspaper ''Bild'', the Mielkes adopted an orphaned girl named Ingrid, who was born in 1950. Like her adopted brother Frank, Ingrid Mielke attended the Wilhelm Pieck School. She ultimately became a captain in the Stasi and married a Stasi Lieutenant named Norbert Knappe. As of 1999, the Knappes had both refused to grant an interview to ''Bild'' reporters.
In popular culture
Erich Mielke has appeared as a character in both films and novels set in the GDR.
* Volker Schlöndorff's ''The Legend of Rita'' (2000), which focuses on Stasi collusion with the West German far-left terrorist organization ''Rote Armee Fraktion''. In conversation with fictional Stasi officer Erwin Hull (Martin Wuttke), Mielke (Dietrich Körner) expresses admiration for the RAF's campaign against the United States, 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 O ...
, and the State of Israel, which he compares with his own activities against the Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic (german: link=no, Weimarer Republik ), officially named the German Reich, was the government of Germany from 1918 to 1933, during which it was a constitutional federal republic for the first time in history; hence it is al ...
and the Nazis. The RAF members are then brought to a training camp, where Stasi agents instruct them in the use of grenade launchers and other kinds of military hardware. Mielke's name is never disclosed and Agent Hull addresses him only as, "Comrade General." (german: "Genosse General.")
* Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's ''The Lives of Others'' (2006), which focuses on the Stasi's surveillance and repression of the East German population. In the film, a previously loyal GDR playwright named Georg Dreymann (Sebastian Koch) publishes an anonymous article in the West German magazine ''Der Spiegel'' which accuses East Germany's Minister of Culture of having persecuted a blacklisted stage director until he hanged himself. Soon after the article goes to press, Mielke's voice is heard over the telephone giving a dressing down to fictional Stasi Lieutenant Colonel Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur). Addressed only as "Genosse Armeegeneral" (Mielke was the only person to ever hold that rank in the Stasi), Mielke threatens to throw Grubitz in front of a firing squad if he fails to identify and arrest the article's author.
* In Philip Kerr's novel ''Field Gray, Field Grey'' (2010), Mielke first appears in 1931 Berlin
Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...
, when protagonist Bernie Gunther saves him from being murdered by Nazi Brownshirts. The novel then flashes forward to 1954, when Gunther is recruited into a CIA plot to abduct Mielke from East Berlin.Book Review: Philip Kerr's 'Field Gray'
''The Washington Post'', 24 April 2011.
* Mielke has a role along with other Stasi officers in German TVSeries Kleo (2022)
Honours and awards
Mielke received a large number of awards and commemorative medals from organisations within the German Democratic Republic and from allied states. A more complete list is available (in German) at :de:Liste der Orden und Ehrenzeichen des Erich Mielke, Liste der Orden und Ehrenzeichen des Erich Mielke.
;Awards of the German Democratic Republic
* Patriotic Order of Merit in gold (7 October 1954)
* Six Order of Karl Marx, Orders of Karl Marx (28 December 1957, 20 November 1973, 1 December 1975, 28 December 1977, 28 June 1982, 28 December 1982)
* Twice Hero of Labour (GDR), Hero of Labour of the GDR (5 October 1964, 24 February 1968)
* Twice Hero of the GDR (1 December 1975, 28 December 1982)
* Banner of Labor, Banner of Labour (8 May 1960)
* Medal for Exemplary Border Service (26 April 1956)
* Medal for Faithful Service in the National People's Army;
**Bronze (7 October 1957)
**Silver (8 February 1959)
**Gold (1 July 1960)
**Gold for 20 years service (8 February 1965)
* Medal for Fighters Against Fascism (6 September 1958)
* Gold Medal of Merit of the National People's Army (1 March 1957)
* Scharnhorst Order, twice (25 September 1979, 7 October 1984)
;Awards of the Soviet Union
* Hero of the Soviet Union (25 December 1987)
* Four Orders of Lenin (12 June 1973, 28 December 1982, 1 April 1985, 28 December 1987)
* Order of the Patriotic War, 1st class (6 May 1970)
* Four Order of the Red Banner, Orders of the Red Banner (23 October 1958, 5 February 1968, 28 December 1977, February 1980)
* Jubilee Medal "50 Years of the Soviet Militia" (20 December 1967)
*Jubilee Medal "In Commemoration of the 100th Anniversary since the Birth of Vladimir Il'ich Lenin" (1970)
* Medal "For Distinction in Guarding the State Border of the USSR" (6 January 1970)
* Order of the October Revolution (February 1975)
;Other states
* Order of Georgi Dimitrov (Bulgaria, 28 December 1982)
* Order of Friendship (Czechoslovakia) (28 December 1982)
* Order of the Red Star (Czechoslovakia) (16 November 1970)
References
Further reading
*Buckley, Jr., William F. (2004), ''The Fall of the Berlin Wall'', John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
*Funder, Anna (2003), ''Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall'', Granta Books, London.
*
*
*
* Kuchel, Dany (2011) ''"Le Glaive et le Bouclier", une histoire de la Stasi en France''.
* Otto, Wilfriede, ''Erich Mielke, Biographie: Aufstieg und Fall eines Tschekisten''. Dietz-Verlag, Berlin 2000, .
* Peterson, Edward N. (2002). ''The Secret Police and the Revolution: The Fall of the German Democratic Republic'', Praeger Publications, Westport, Connecticut. London.
*Pickard, Ralph (2007). ''Stasi Decorations and Memorabilia, STASI Decorations and Memorabilia, A Collector's Guide''. Frontline Historical Publishing.
*Pickard, Ralph (2012). ''STASI Decorations and Memorabilia Volume II''. Frontline Historical Publication.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mielke, Erich
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