MIELKE, ERICH (1907–2000). The long-serving head of the Min-
isterium für Staatssicherheit (MfS) whose name became nearly
synonymous with the organization itself, Erich Mielke was born in
Berlin on 28 December 1907, the son of working-class communists.
Leaving school at age 16, he became a dispatcher clerk. His career as
a committed communist began first as a member of the party’s youth
organization, and then in 1927 as a member of the Kommunistische
Partei Deutschlands. In addition to working as a reporter for the party
newspaper Die Rote Fahne, he was known as a street militant and
belonged to a so-called self-defense group. On 9 August 1931, at the
Bülowplatz near the party’s main headquarters, he and a comrade,
Erich Ziemer, shot two policemen in the back to avenge the death of
a worker the previous day. Mielke then fled to the Soviet Union.
In Moscow, under the alias Paul Bach, his cadre training com-
menced. A brief period of study under Wilhelm Zaisser at the GRU’s
military-political institute was followed by several years at the Inter-
national Lenin School. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in
1936, Mielke, under the alias Fritz Leistner, was dispatched to Spain
to serve in the International Brigades as an aide-de-camp to Zaisser.
The victory of Francisco Franco in 1939 forced Mielke to Belgium,
where his journalistic career, under the name Gaston, was briefly re-
vived. A year later, as Richard Heller, he moved to southern France
and worked as a woodcutter. In December 1943, posing as a Lithu-
anian named Richard Hebel and unsuccessfully applying for a visa
to Mexico or the United States, he was arrested by the Gestapo and
placed in a hard labor unit of the Todt Organization. Contrary to the
subsequent myth that expunged the war years spent in Belgium and
France and depicted his return to Germany alongside the triumphant
Red Army, Mielke was in the French and American zones in 1945
and reentered Berlin as one of the “western emigrants”—many of
whom he then ordered arrested as alleged American or Zionist spies
between 1950 and 1953.
During the Soviet occupation period, Mielke assumed a key role in
building the new police force after being named second vice president
of the German Administration of the Interior in September 1946. The
following year, a new subdivision—Nachrichten und Informationen
(Intelligence and Information)—was established under his direction
to keep the public abreast of fresh government initiatives and collect
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