May 26, 2000

Erich Mielke, Former Chief of Stasi, Dead at 92

By DAVID BINDER

rich Mielke, the former head of the dreaded East German security agency known as the Stasi, has died at age 92, officials in the German capital said. The Kurier daily said that Mielke died four days ago in a home for the elderly in his native Berlin.

From 1957 until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Stasi wielded enormous power, making Mielke the most influential person in East Germany after the Communist Party leader, Erich Honecker.

Born into poverty in pre-World War I Berlin, Mielke joined the Communist youth movement at age 15 and still praised Stalin long after his massive crimes were exposed. Mielke's career epitomized the grimness of Communist rule in East Germany, where assassination, kidnapping, execution, denunciation and intimidation were instruments used to achieve and maintain power under the long, menacing shadow of the Soviet Union.

Mielke's Ministry for State Security kept the 16.5 million people of East Germany obedient to Communism and repressed dissent for more than 30 years. Not only did it pursue an effective campaign against those it regarded as enemies of the state, but its army of 90,000 agents and 260,000 informers also turned East Germany into a country that spied on itself.

The Stasi system of informants, many of them coerced, spread suspicion and betrayal throughout the society -- between spouses, between schoolmates, between office colleagues -- that outlasted the East German state, which effectively collapsed when the Berlin Wall fell, and formally ceased to exist when Germany reunified in October 1990.

Mielke's creed, expressed to subordinates in 1982 and recorded for Stasi archives, was, "All this twaddle about no executions and no death sentences, it's all junk, comrades. Execute, if need be without a court sentence."

The authorities of reunited Germany arrested Mielke, but poor health and alleged senility saved him from going on trial on several charges linked to his Stasi activities, including human rights abuses, fraud and embezzlement, and culpability in the killing of Germans trying to escape west across East Germany's heavily-guarded borders.

But when he did go to jail in 1992, it was not for the orders he gave his Stasi agents, but for the part he played in the killing of two policemen in Berlin 61 years earlier, in August 1931.

Although only 5 feet 4 inches tall, Mielke, was then a muscular 23-year-old member of a Communist unit trained in firearms and street fighting. More than 20 Communists were eventually brought to trial in connection with the killings, but Mielke escaped to the Soviet Union before he could be arrested.

The Berlin prosecutors brought Mielke to trial for the 1931 killings shortly after German unification, relying in part on evidence gathered years earlier by the Gestapo.,

At his trial, the 84-year-old Mielke was carried in and out of the courtroom, but independent physicians said he was simulating illness.

He was convicted of the 1931 murders and sentenced to six years in prison. He never testified and never admitted to a role in the police killings.

The judge who presided over his murder trial, Theodor Seidel, said in pronouncing sentence that Mielke "will go down in history as one of the most fearsome dictators and police ministers of the 20th century."

Mielke reportedly was morose in his cell at the old Moabit prison, where warders supplied him with a red telephone, the kind he had enjoyed as a member of the East German Communist Politburo, but not connected outside. "He began dialing and conducting imaginary conversations," a police official said, "and soon he brightened up." His other pastime was watching television game shows.

Erich Mielke was born on Dec. 28, 1907 in a tenement in western Berlin. His father was a woodworker from West Prussia. His mother died after the birth of another son.

He was a good student, permitted to attend a privileged high school. But he left voluntarily at aged 16 after joining the Communist Youth Association, and began work at a transport firm.

At 19 he was an active street agitator and member of the Communist party, which then got one-third of the vote in Berlin elections, compared to one-sixth for the Nazis.

After escaping to Moscow in 1931, he took the name Paul Bach, and attended the International Lenin School for two years to prepare for a career in the security services. The Soviets sent him to Spain at the beginning of the civil war in 1936. In 1939, Mielke made his way to France, where he was interned following the German invasion. He escaped and, with false papers, worked as a woodcutter until he was picked up again by German authorities in late 1943 and placed in a forced labor unit. A month after the end of the war, he got to the Soviet Zone of Occupation -- East Germany -- and was immediately employed as a People's Police Inspector.

With the approval of the Soviets, who fostered his career from the outset, he was assigned to help build the East German political police, and rose steadily over the next decade, becoming Minister for State Security in 1957.

During his years of power, he expected to be addressed as "Comrade Minister Army General." He lived in a heavily guarded settlement for party leaders at Wandlitz, north of Berlin, and shot game at a special preserve nearby. He was devoted to Stalin and was recorded toasting the Soviet leader in 1970, long after his crimes were exposed.

Along the way he personally conducted interrogations of errant party comrades, some of whom were executed. "I'll chop your head off!" he said during one such session, according to a 1995 profile of him in Der Spiegel magazine.

He had an uneasy, cautious relationship, with Markus Wolf, the legendary head of Stasi's foreign intelligence operations. Mielke said he forced Wolf to resign; Wolf said in his 1997 autobiography, "Man Without a Face," that he left the service in 1986 of his own free will, and that was the official version.

In the fall of 1989, Mielke was said to have played a role in the ouster by the ruling Communist Party's Politburo of Erich Honecker, the head of the party and the state.At a critical moment at a meeting of the Politburo, of which Mielke was a full member for 13 years, he took out an old , Stasi dossier that said Honecker collaborated with the Gestapo when he was a political prisoner of the Nazis in the Brandenburg penitentiary during World War II. He put the file on the table and that, said participants, helped to sway the vote against Honecker, who was replaced by Egon Krenz.

Just weeks later, the leadership opened the Berlin Wall, and the German Democratic Republic swiftly became history.

Years later in a prison visitors' room, Mielke said, "If the party had given me the task, then there would perhaps still be a GDR today. On that you can rely."

He is survived by his wife, Gertrude, and a son, Frank.