Erich Mielke

Erich Fritz Emil Mielke was a German communist official who served as head of the East German Ministry of State Security, better known as the Stasi, from 1957 until shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Erich Mielke was born in a tenement in BerlinWedding, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire, onDecember 1907. During the First World War, the neighborhood was known as Red Wedding due to many residents Marxist militancy. In a handwritten biography written for the Soviet secret police, Mielke described his father as a poor, uneducated woodworker, and said that his mother died in 1911. Both were, he said, members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany . After his remarriage to a seamstress, the elder Mielke and his new wife joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany and remained members when it was renamed the Communist Party of Germany . His son Erich claimed My younger brother Kurt and two sisters were Communist sympathisers.

Source: Wikipedia