Erich Mielke

Erich Fritz Emil Mielke (German: [ˈeːʁɪç ˈmiːlkə]; 28 December 1907 – 21 May 2000) was a German communist official who served as head of the East German Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatsicherheit – MfS), better known as the Stasi, from 1957 until shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Dubbed "The Master of Fear" (German: der Meister der Angst) by the West German press, Mielke was one of the most powerful, feared, and hated men in East Germany.

A working-class native of the Wedding slum district of Berlin and a second-generation member of the Communist Party of Germany, Mielke was one of two gunmen in the 1931 murders of Berlin Police captains Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck. After learning that a witness had survived, Mielke escaped arrest by fleeing to the Soviet Union, where the NKVD recruited him. He was one of the key figures in the decimation of Moscow's many German Communist refugees during the Great Purge as well as in the Red Terror; the witch-hunt by the Servicio de Información Militar for both real and imagined members of the anti-Stalinist Left within the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.