Erich Mielke

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Erich Mielke

Erich Fritz Emil Mielke (December 28, 1907 - May 21, 2000 in Berlin) was a German Communist and convicted murderer. He was the head of the intelligence and secret police force in East Germany from 1957 to 1989.

Early life

Mielke became a member of the German Communist Party during the 1920s and worked as a reporter for a communist newspaper from 1928-1931. He took part in street battles against the Nazis and the officials of the Weimar Republic.

The Murders

On August 9, 1931 (according to his later trial) he and Erich Ziemer, at the urging of Walter Ulbricht, and directly supervised by Communist Members of Parliament Heinz Neumann and Hans Kippenberger, ambushed two Berlin police officers, Captains Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck. After the two officers were lured to Buelowplatz by a violent Communist rally, Mielke and Ziemer opened fire on them as they were walking in front of the Babylon movie theater, which was located at the corner of Buelowplatz and Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse. Captain Lenck was shot in the chest and died before the theater entrance. Captain Anlauf took two bullets in the neck and bled to death with his head cradeled in the arms of police Sergeant Max Willig. Captain Anlauf, a widower survived by three daughters, was especially despised by Berlin's Communists as he frequently interfered with their attempts to hold political rallies without a permit and was known among them as "Pig Face."

After it was revealed that Sergeant Willig had survived the attack and could identify him, Mielke was smuggled to the Soviet Union where he joined numerous other German Communist exiles in Moscow. He was convicted of the murders in absentia in a German court. Three other German communists were arrested for these murders, convicted and sentenced to death, among them Max Matern.

Career in Soviet Intelligence

In 1932 Mielke attended the Comintern's Military Political school and later the Lenin School. Due to his record as a reliable Stalinist who blindly served the system, Mielke survived Stalin's purges, which decimated the exiled German community.

From 1936 to 1939 he was sent by Stalin to fight in the Spanish Civil War as a political officer assigned to the Republican side. One veteran of the Republican forces who remembered him described him contemptuously as a someone who was stabbing him and his comrades in the back while they were trying to fight against Fascism. During World War II Mielke found himself caught in France and was interned as an enemy alien by the Vichy regime. However Mielke's activities during World War II are disputed, for he was often heard singing Soviet Partisan songs with fellow Stasi officials and hence it is possible that Mielke fought as a partisan behind German lines on the Eastern Front.

Building East Germany

In 1945 Mielke was returned to Germany by the Soviet authorities as a police inspector, with a mandate to build up a security force which would ensure the dominance of the Communist Party in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany, where he was a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) Central committee from 1950 until his forced retirement in 1989. From July of 1946 to October 1949 he served as vice-president of the Administration of the Interior. From October 1949 to February 1950, Mielke served as head of the Main Administration for the Protection of the People's Economy, the forerunner of the Stasi. From 1950-1953 he was state secretary in the Stasi, later serving as full State Secretary from 1953-1955. From 1955-1957 he was deputy minister of state security.

Erich Mielke was also 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 top GDR and Soviet officials.

Tenure as Stasi head

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Mielke with Honecker and Ulbricht

Mielke headed the Stasi from 1957 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. His network of 85,000 full-time domestic spies and 170,000 voluntary informers kept tabs on millions of people. So many people collaborated with the Stasi that when the records were opened, it was discovered that in every public building, at least one of its members kept the Stasi informed about everything that happened within it. On his orders, and with his full knowledge, Stasi officers also engaged in arbitrary arrest, kidnapping, brutal harassment of political dissidents, and the inhumane imprisonment of tens of thousands of citizens. On his personal responsibilty the MfS launched the counter attacks by the Stasi against the dissident Rudolf Bahro and his book "Die Alternative. Zur Kritik des 'real existierenden Sozialismus'" and those who supported, discussed and published his work. Mielke was one of the most powerful – and most hated – men in East Germany, feared even by members of his own ministry.

In 1989 Mielke was at the center of one of the most famous TV incidents in German history: when he addressed the members of the Volkskammer as "comrades", as he was accustomed to doing, some angry non-SED members asked him to refrain from calling them that. The shattered Mielke first tried to justify his wording, "That is a question of formality" and then apologized, declaring: "But I love you, I love all people..." (German: „Ich liebe euch doch alle...“} which was met with laughter from within the crowd.

After the Wall

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mielke was arrested by the new German authorities and charged with the murder of police officers Anlauf and Lenck. Coincidentally, this trial took place in the same courtroom as the Nazi one. Much of the evidence used in the trial was taken from the files of the original investigation, which were found in Mielke's personal safe after the collapse of East Germany. Despite attempts by his lawyers to get the charges dropped by claiming the evidence had been extracted under torture, he was convicted of both murders and in October 1993 he was sentenced to six years imprisonment. He was paroled after less than two, and in 1998 all further legal action against him was ended on the grounds of his poor health.

Mielke died on May 21, 2000 aged 92 in a Berlin nursing home. About 100 people reportedly attended the funeral. His remains are buried in the Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde in Berlin. Mielke's unmarked grave is outside the memorial section established at the entrance in 1951 by East German leaders for communist heroes.

Mielke the football fan

Mielke was the powerful patron of football club Berliner FC Dynamo who helped his favorite side by manipulating the outcome of the team's games through various means to ensure its dominance of the first division DDR-Oberliga. The team won ten consecutive titles from 1979 to 1988 assisted by crooked referees, unfair player transfers from other teams and assorted other unsportmanlike practices. Dynamo was reviled by many of the citizens of Berlin and the cheating was so blatant that it incurred the unofficially expressed displeasure of the country's ruling Politburo.

References

• Template:En icon John O. Koehler Stasi, West View Press, 1999, ISBN 0-8133-3409-8
• Template:De icon Wolfgang Kießling Leistner ist Mielke. Schatten einer gefälschten Biographie Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-7466-8036-0

(It's actually a book on Mielke's unknown victim Willi Kreikemeyer but also a thorough investigation of truth and myth in Mielke's biography)

External links

• Mielke's office and picture