Tam Eastley on Erich Mielke–“the most feared man in the GDR”…
In the middle of January 2012, Berlin history buffs and GDR junkies were suddenly abuzz with curious excitement about the reopening of Erich Mielke’s office. Smack dab in the middle of a complex of grey and scary buildings so large they make your neck ache and your head spin, lies the desk, shredder, tape recorder and office chair of a man whom Anna Funder, in her (brilliant) book Stasiland, described as “the most feared man in the GDR”.
He’s also, for many, the most hated and it’s not hard to see why. Mielke was the head of the Secret Police in East Germany (the Stasi) for over thirty years. He oversaw approximately 92,000 spies and 170,000 normal civilians who secretly watched and reported on their fellow countrymen. It’s estimated that in the GDR, there was one informer for every seven people, and every one of them answered to Mielke, the man at the top. He ran the Stasi using fear as a primary weapon and routinely executed informers and traitors to the government without court processes.
In 1989, right before the wall fell, he was considered one of the most important men of the entire Eastern Communist Bloc, a man whose future would no doubt have continued along a path of power, intimidation and so-called “success” if fate hadn’t decided otherwise. But like so many of the higher-ups of the SED, Mielke’s history and associations betrayed him in the end, and not without cause.
In Berlin, where it all happened, it’s possible to follow a posthumous Mielke trail through the city, imagining where it all happened—and where it all went horribly wrong.
Rosa-Luxemburg Platz
Mielke was born in Wedding, a district in the northern part of Berlin, on December 29th 1907. His parents helped found the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), and Mielke was very active in the party from his teens onwards. His involvement often put him in the middle of clashes with the police and the Nazi Party. It was a rough and tumble time in Berlin, between the two wars, when politicians were fighting for power, and citizens fighting for something to believe in.
