Erich Mielke

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

A native of Berlin and a second-generation member of the Communist Party of Germany, Mielke was one of two triggermen in the 1931 murders of Berlin Police captains Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck. After learning that a witness had survived, Mielke escaped arrest by fleeing to the Soviet Union, where the NKVD recruited him. He was one of the key figures in the decimation of Moscow's 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. 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."

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