Erich Mielke

Erich Fritz Emil Mielke (28 December 1907 – 21 May 2000) was a German communist official who served as head of the East German Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatsicherheit – MfS), better known as the Stasi, from 1957 until shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Erich Mielke was born in a tenement in Berlin-Wedding, Brandenburg, on 28 December 1907.

During the First World War, the neighborhood was known as "Red Wedding" due to many residents' Marxist militancy.

In a handwritten biography written for the Soviet secret police, 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 (SPD).

After his remarriage to "a seamstress," the elder Mielke and his new wife joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany 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 in the prestigious Köllnisches Gymnasium, but had to leave it a year later, for being "unable to meet the great demands of this school."

Until the end of the Republic, the KPD viewed the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which dominated German politics between 1918 and 1931, as their mortal enemy.

In keeping with Stalin's policy towards social democracy, the KPD considered all SPD members to be "social fascists".

The KPD also believed that all other political parties were "fascist" and regarded itself as "the only anti-fascist Party" in Germany.

While attending the Gymnasium, Mielke joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1925, and worked as a reporter for the communist newspaper Rote Fahne from 1928 to 1931.

Under the Weimar Republic, the KPD was the largest communist party in Europe and was seen as the "leading party" of the communist movement outside the Soviet Union.

Under Ernst Thälmann's leadership, the KPD was completely obedient to Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin, and from 1928 the Party was both funded and controlled by the Comintern in Moscow.

Nevertheless, the KPD closely collaborated with the Nazi Party during the early 1930s and both Parties intended to replace the democratically elected government of the Weimar Republic with a totalitarian 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 and Heinz Neumann.

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. World War I veterans taught the novices how to handle pistols, rifles, machine guns, 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, taught by comrades who had studied at the secret M-school of the GRU in Moscow."

According to John Koehler, members of the Parteiselbstschutz "served as bouncers 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 German National People's Party (DVNP), Trotskyites, and "radical nationalist parties."

A native of Berlin and a second-generation member of the Communist Party of Germany, Mielke was one of two triggermen in the 1931 murders of Berlin Police captains Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck.

After learning that a witness had survived, Mielke escaped arrest by fleeing to the Soviet Union, where the NKVD recruited him.

He was one of the key figures in the decimation of Moscow's many German Communist refugees during the Great Purge as well as in the Red Terror; the witch-hunt by the Servicio de Información Militar for both real and imagined members of the anti-Stalinist Left within the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.

Following the end of World War II in 1945, Mielke returned to the Soviet Zone of Occupied Germany, which he helped organize into a Marxist–Leninist satellite state 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".

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.

In response, Mielke oversaw the 1961 construction of the Berlin Wall and co-signed standing orders for the Border Guards to use lethal force against all East Germans who attempted to commit "desertion of the Republic."

Simon Wiesenthal also called East Germany the most antisemitic and anti-Israel regime in the whole Soviet Bloc.

Wiesenthal further accused the Stasi under Mielke of refusing to assist Nazi hunters and instead routinely using blackmail to force unprosecuted Nazi war criminals to become spies for the GDR.

Throughout the Cold War, Mielke also oversaw the establishment of other pro-Soviet police states throughout the Third World.

Mielke covertly trained and armed far-left guerrillas and militant organisations aimed at committing terrorist attacks and violent regime change in Western Europe, Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.

Due to his close ties to former dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, John Koehler has accused Mielke and the Stasi military advisors he assigned to Ethiopia under the Derg of complicity in the Red Terror, genocide, and many other crimes against humanity.

In addition to his role as head of the Stasi, Mielke was also an Army General in the National People's Army (Nationale Volksarmee), and a member of the SED's ruling Politburo.

Dubbed "The Master of Fear" (der Meister der Angst) by the West German press, Mielke was one of the most powerful and most hated men in East Germany.

Mielke was also charged, but never tried, with ordering two 1981 terrorist attacks by the Baader-Meinhof Group against United States military personnel in West Germany.

After German reunification in 1990, Mielke was prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned for the 1931 policemen's murders.

A second murder trial for the 260 killings of defectors at the Inner German border was adjourned after Mielke was ruled not mentally competent to stand trial.

In a 1991 interview, International Brigade veteran Walter Janka recalled, "While I was fighting at the front, shooting at the Fascists, Mielke served in the rear, shooting Trotskyites and Anarchists."

In a 1993 interview with John Koehler, Holocaust survivor and Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal said that, if one considers only the oppression of their own people, the Stasi under Mielke was "much, much worse than the Gestapo".

Released from incarceration early due to ill health and senile dementia in 1995, Mielke died in a Berlin nursing home in 2000.