Erich Mielke - Building East Germany

Building East Germany

In 1945 Mielke was returned to Germany by the Soviet authorities as a police inspector, with a mandate to build up a security force which would ensure the dominance of the Communist Party in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. Mielke was a protege of NKGB General Ivan Serov, who was headquartered at the Berlin suburb of Karlshorst. On August 16, 1947, Serov ordered the creation of Kommissariat 5, the first German political police since the defeat of Nazi Germany. Wilhelm Zaisser was appointed the organization's head and Mielke as installed as his deputy.

According to John Koehler,

"The K-5 was essentially an arm of the Soviet secret police. Its agents were carefully selected veteran German communists who had survived the Nazi era in Soviet exile or in concentration camps and prisons. Their task was to track down Nazis and anti-communists, including hundreds of members of the Social Democratic Party. Mielke and his fellow bloodhounds performed this task with ruthless precision. The number of arrests became so great that the regular prisons could not hold them. Thus, Serov ordered the establishment or re-opening eleven concentration camps, including the former Nazi death camps of Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen."