> GERMANY: COMMUNIST POLICE CHIEF DIES
>
> Reported by news.bbc.co.uk
>
>
> Ex-Stasi chief dies
>
> Mielke ran the Stasi for over 30 years
> Erich Mielke, who headed the former East
> Germany's secret police, the Stasi, for three
> decades, has died in Berlin at the age of 92.
>
> Berlin officials confirmed a report in Friday's
> Kurier newspaper that Mielke had died in a
> nursing home earlier in the week.
>
> Mielke ran the feared Stasi from 1957 until the
> fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
>
> A lifelong communist who fled the Nazis in the
> 1930s, Mielke was jailed shortly after the
> collapse of East Germany and reunification in
> 1990.
>
> Murder charges
>
> He was sentenced in
> Berlin to six years in
> prison in 1993 for the
> murder of two
> policemen in 1931.
> However he was freed
> after two years when
> he was diagnosed as
> senile.
>
> But Mielke escaped
> prosecution for his
> leadership of the Stasi,
> including charges
> related to shooting deaths at the Berlin Wall,
> because of poor health and senility.
>
> In 1997, another Berlin court refused to give
> him back DM380,000 ($180,000) blocked in a
> bank account since 1990.
>
> The court ruled that he had misused his
> privilege and power to amass the money while
> running the Stasi.
>
> At its height, the Stasi employed 85,000
> agents and over 100,000 informers to oversee
> almost every aspect of life in communist East
> Germany.
>
> Wanted
>
> Born in Berlin in 1907, Mielke became a full
> member of the Communist Party in 1925 and
> worked as a reporter for the party's
> newspaper, Red Flag.
>
> He became a member of the party's
> paramilitary force, leading to his participation
> in the August 1931 demonstration in Berlin
> during which the two policemen were shot and
> killed.
>
> Wanted for the killings, Mielke escaped to
> Belgium. He went on to the Soviet Union where
> he attended the elite International Lenin
> School in Moscow in the mid-1930s.
>
>
> Mielke served in 1936
> in the International
> Brigade that fought in
> the Spanish Civil War
> against General Franco,
> whose forces
> triumphed and set up a
> fascist dictatorship.
>
> In 1940, Mielke
> returned to the Soviet
> Union and then to
> Soviet-occupied
> eastern Germany in
> 1945. He helped
> organise police in the
> Soviet-occupied zone and became deputy
> chief of state security when East Germany was
> founded in 1950.
>
> He took over as minister in 1957, a post he
> held until the Stalinist regime collapsed with
> the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.
>
> He went on trial for shootings at the Wall along
> with East Germany's last Communist leader,
> Erich Honecker, in 1992. But the case against
> Mielke was dropped because he was also on
> trial for the 1931 police killings, and was later
> declared too senile to follow the proceedings.
>
> The case against Honecker was also dropped
> for health reasons, and he died in exile in Chile
> in 1994.
>
> Mielke lived with his wife in eastern Berlin until
> March, when he was admitted to a home for
> the elderly.
>
> The former Stasi chief's funeral is expected to
> take place on 10 June at Berlin's socialist
> cemetery.
>
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