He then joined the KPD's paramilitary wing, or Parteiselbstschutz ("Party Self Defense Unit").
His son Erich claimed "My younger brother Kurt and two sisters were Communist sympathisers." ĭespite his family's poverty, Erich Mielke was academically gifted enough to be awarded a free scholarship in the prestigious Köllnisches Gymnasium, but was expelled on 19 February 1929, 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 newspaper Rote Fahne from 1928 to 1931. 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). Both were, he said, members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). 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. During the First World War, the neighborhood was known as "Red Wedding" due to many residents' Marxist militancy. He was released early due to ill health, and died in a Berlin nursing home in 2000.Įrich Mielke was born in a tenement in Berlin-Wedding, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire, on 28 December 1907. After German reunification, Mielke was prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated for the 1931 murders of Captains Anlauf and Lenck.
Dubbed "The Master of Fear" (German language: der Meister der Angst) by the West German press, Mielke was one of the most powerful and most hated men in East Germany. In addition to his role as head of the Stasi, Mielke was also a General in the East German Army and member of the SED's ruling Politburo. He also oversaw the creation of pro-Soviet secret police and terrorist insurgencies in Western Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. In response, Mielke oversaw the construction of the Berlin Wall and co-signed orders to shoot all East Germans who were attempting to defect.
The Stasi under Mielke has been called the "most pervasive police state apparatus ever to exist on German soil." In a 1993 interview, Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal has said that, if one considers only the oppression of their own people, the Stasi under Mielke "was much, much worse than the Gestapo." ĭuring the 1950s and '60s, Mielke masterminded the forced collectivization of East Germany's family-owned farms, which sent a flood of refugees to West Germany. He was one of the perpetrators of the Great Purge as well as the Stalinist decimation of the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.įollowing the end of World War II, Mielke returned to the Soviet Zone of Occupied Germany, which he helped organize into a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship under the Socialist Unity Party (SED), later becoming head of the Stasi according to John Koehler, he was "the longest serving secret police chief in the Soviet Bloc". After learning that a witness had survived, Mielke escaped prosecution by fleeing to the Soviet Union, where he was recruited into the NKVD. Berlin, Kingdom of Prussia, German EmpireĮxecutioner, Government Minister, Armeegeneral, Chairman of SV Dynamo.Įrich Fritz Emil Mielke ( German: 28 December 1907 – ) was a German communist official who served as head of the East German Ministry for State Security ( Ministerium für Staatsicherheit), better known as the Stasi, from 1957 until shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.Ī 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.