Erich Fritz Emil Mielke was a German communist official who served as head of the East German Ministry for State Security, better known as the Stasi, from 1957 until shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. A native of Berlin and second generation member of the Communist Party of Germany, Mielke was one of two triggermen in the 1931 murders of Berlin Police Captains Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck. After learning that a witness had survived, Mielke escaped prosecution by fleeing to the Soviet Union, where he was recruited into the NKVD. He was one of the perpetrators of the Great Purge as well as the Stalinist decimation of the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. Following the end of World War II, Mielke returned to the Soviet Zone of Occupied Germany, which he helped organize into a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship under the Socialist Unity Party, later becoming head of the Stasi; according to John Koehler, he was "the longest serving secret police chief in the Soviet Bloc". The Stasi under Mielke has been called the "most pervasive police state apparatus ever to exist on German soil." In a 1993 interview, Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal has said that, if one considers only the oppression of their own people, the Stasi under Mielke "was much, much worse than the Gestapo." During the 1950s and '60s, Mielke masterminded the forced collectivization of East Germany's family-owned farms, which sent a flood of refugees to West Germany. In response, Mielke oversaw the construction of the Berlin Wall and co-signed orders to shoot all East Germans who were attempting to defect. He also oversaw the creation of pro-Soviet secret police and terrorist insurgencies in Western Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. In addition to his role as head of the Stasi, Mielke was also a General in the East German Army and member of the SED's ruling Politburo. Dubbed "The Master of Fear" by the West German press, Mielke was one of the most powerful and most hated men in East Germany. After German reunification, Mielke was prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated for the 1931 murders of Captains Anlauf and Lenck. He was released early due to ill health, and died in a Berlin nursing home in 2000. Australian journalist Anna Funder has written of Mielke, "It is said that psychopaths, people utterly untroubled by conscience, make supremely effective generals and politicians, and perhaps he was one."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Mielke