People of the Revolution and the USSR

East Germany state institutions Communism 1893–1958 ○ Natural death

First East German Minister for State Security, purged in 1953 after trying to replace Ulbricht

Born in Gelsenkirchen to a gendarmerie sergeant’s family, he trained as a teacher and was a military leader of the Red Ruhr Army during the Kapp Putsch of 1920. As a GRU agent and Comintern military adviser he co-organised the Guangzhou Uprising in China, and in the Spanish Civil War, as “Gomez”, he led the International Brigades. He returned to Germany in 1947, joined the SED, and in 1950 became the first Minister for State Security and a Politburo member, building up the Stasi. After the uprising of June 1953 he moved to replace Ulbricht with Herrnstadt, but once Ulbricht had Khrushchev’s backing he lost his ministry and all his posts in July and was expelled from the party. He worked as a translator, died in East Berlin in 1958 and was rehabilitated after 1990.

East Germany state institutions Communism 1907–2000 ○ Natural causes

East Germany's 'Master of Fear': the Stasi chief who ruled state security for 32 years

“All this blithering over to execute or not to execute, for the death penalty or against — all rot, Comrades. Execute! And, when necessary, without a court judgment.” — to senior Stasi officers, 1982

A communist militant from Berlin's Wedding district, Mielke fled to the USSR after the 1931 killing of two Berlin policemen and was trained by the NKVD. After the Spanish Civil War he returned in 1945 to help build the GDR's state security apparatus, leading the Stasi from 1957 to 1989 and expanding it into a 90,000-strong surveillance network. The Stasi controlled all of East German society while training armed groups across the Third World and Western Europe, extending socialist-bloc security architecture. He fell with the regime in 1989 and was convicted after reunification for the 1931 murders.

East Germany state institutions Communism 1923–2006 ○ Natural causes

A long-serving architect of Cold War intelligence

At the August 1984 RYaN meeting, he stressed the need to establish the “actual situation” rather than mistake indicators for a Western nuclear attack.

Markus Wolf was a communist official and intelligence chief who, after fleeing Nazi persecution to the Soviet Union, led the foreign intelligence service of East Germany. From 1952 to 1986 he directed the Stasi’s Main Directorate for Reconnaissance, organizing espionage and active measures aimed at West German political, military, and economic institutions. When Soviet leaders expanded Operation RYaN amid fears of a pre-emptive nuclear attack in the early 1980s, Wolf maintained cooperation while exposing a tension between alarmist indicators and the need to establish the actual situation. After German reunification he passed through exile and trial, and used memoirs and public interventions to address responsibility for state security work and the possibility of reforming socialism.