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Ministry of State Security (MfS)
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The Ministry of State Security in Berlin, Normannenstraße.
View from Frankfurter Allee.
Source: BStU.
The Hohenschönhausen remand prison was one part of the extensive Ministry of State Security (MfS) apparatus. Founded in 1950, the Ministry saw itself as the 'shield and sword" of the SED Communist Party, with the remit of maintaining the Party's dictatorship in East Germany. Consequently, its main tasks were to break any resistance to SED Party rule and take the appropriate steps to protect that rule from all possible dangers. In the initial years after the GDR was founded in October 1949, the MfS set about achieving these aims with brutal and comparatively primitive means. The methods they used became more sophisticated later, especially after the Berlin Wall was built in August 1961 and the policy of détente was initiated in the early 1970s.
The policy of moving early to recognize and destroy potential resistance to the SED Party dictatorship became more urgent after the June 17 uprising in 1953. As a result, the MfS control and monitoring apparatus was repeatedly extended over the years, with additional tasks such as providing border control personnel or personal bodyguards. In this way, the MfS expanded into a kind of general agency for all security issues with, in 1989, a staff of more than 91,000 full-time employees and around 180,000 informers (IM). To put these figures in perspective: at that time, West Germany had more than three times as many people living in it and around 15,000 secret service employees, while under the National Socialists, the Gestapo had 7000 employees for the entire German Reich. The MfS Department M alone, responsible for monitoring post, checked around 90,000 letters everyday. In the end, the MfS received more than four billion marks of the GDR national budget, with more than two billion of that needed to cover personnel costs.
A member of the MfS Main Investigation Department III listening to a recorded phone call. Source: BSTU.
The range of MfS powers was only possible in a totalitarian state. Not only did it combine domestic and foreign intelligence services, it also enjoyed police powers and prosecuting jurisdiction, and was able to issue arrest warrants and open pre-trial investigations at will. As a rule, the centrally controlled GDR justice system implemented any MfS instructions it was given. The MfS was also responsible for some of the prison system as well, where it used additional secret officers on special deployment (OibE) to monitor events. The State Security Service was not under parliamentary control, nor was there any higher authority, i.e., an administrative court to appeal to against their decisions.
Thanks to its access to nearly all state institutions and the extensive network of informers, who were also present in most factories and firms, the MfS exercised near total control in the GDR. The Stasi informers (IM -Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter) were not people simply offering spontaneous information, but were systematically recruited and controlled. The MfS regarded them as a "chief weapon" in their arsenal, providing blanket monitoring throughout the population. However, only around one per cent of GDR citizens were prepared to work for the MfS in this way; around a third of the people selected by the MfS as informers were never used. Whenever the MfS identified misdemeanours or inappropriate behaviour, GDR law nearly always allowed the Ministry to take measures against the person concerned, including prosecuting them under criminal law. Estimates put the number of political prisoners in the GDR since 1949 are between 200,000 to 250,000. From the mid-1960s on, West Germany pursued a policy of buying out political prisoners and paid a total of DM 2.5 billion for 35,000 prisoners to be released to the West. Since the end of the Second World War, nearly four million people left eastern Germany and fled to the West.
 From 1957 on, the MfS was headed by Erich Mielke, who had previously been State Secretary for the State Security Service. In 1976, he became a SED Party Politburo member, placing him at the very innermost circle of power in the GDR. He was given the rank of General in 1980. When the Wall fell in November 1989, he was removed from all official positions and taken into custody, spending a part of it in the Hohenschönhausen prison hospital. In 1993, Mielke was sentenced to six years in prison for the murder of two policemen at Berlin's Bülowplatz. Two years later he was released early on parole. Erich Mielke died on May 21, 2000.
You can find further information (in English) on the Ministry of State Security (MfS) and the people who worked for it on the homepage of the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the National Security Service of the Former German Democratic Republic: homepage BSTU.
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