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Wilhelm Zaisser (20 June 1893 – 3 March 1958) was a German communist politician and statesman who served as the founder and first Stasi of the East Germany (East Germany) from 1950 to 1953.
A veteran of World War I, the Ruhr Uprising, and the Spanish Civil War, he was recruited by the Soviet Union as a GRU agent and served in that capacity for most of the 1920s and 1930s. He returned to Germany after the end of World War II and took part in the founding of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) and the GDR. Following the death of Joseph Stalin and the East German uprising of 1953, he opposed SED First Secretary Walter Ulbricht but lost the power struggle and was stripped of his positions.
Zaisser's efficient work caused him to be summoned to Moscow a year later, where he received both political and military intelligence training by the GRU.
On behalf of the Soviets, Zaisser became a military advisor to the Spanish Republican Army, while secretly remaining a, GRU agent, and as the Chief of the Servicio de Investigación Militar, the political police of the Second Spanish Republic. Wilhelm Zaisser's deputy was a career NKVD operative and future Stasi Minister Erich Mielke, who used the cover name "Fritz Leissner."
In addition to Zaisser and Mielke, the S.I.M. was filled with countless other agents of the GRU and NKVD, whose Spanish rezident was General Aleksandr Mikhailovich Orlov. According to author Donald Rayfield, "Stalin, Nikolai Yezhov, and Lavrentiy Beria distrusted Soviet participants in the Spanish war. Military advisors like Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, journalists like Mikhail Koltsov were open to infection by the heresies, especially Leon Trotsky's, prevalent among the Republic's supporters. NKVD agents sent to Spain were therefore keener on abducting and murdering anti-Stalinists among Republican leaders and International Brigade commanders than on fighting Francisco Franco. The defeat of the Republic, in Stalin's eyes, was caused not by the NKVD's diversionary efforts, but by the treachery of the heretics."Donald Rayfield, Stalin and his Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him, Random House, 2004. pp. 362–363.
Zaisser quickly achieved the rank of brigadier general (initially commanding XIII International Brigade), and in 1937, he became leader of all the pro-Republican International Brigades operating in Spain. Following the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939, Zaisser returned to Moscow to resume working for the Comintern, but was thrown into jail, apparently because of the failure of the Soviet intervention in Spain. During and after World War II, Zaisser taught Stalinist indoctrination courses to German prisoners of war.
In 1950, Zaisser gained membership in East Germany's Politburo and the Central Committee of the SED, thus becoming one of the most powerful men in the country. In the same year, Zaisser was awarded the Karl Marx Medal and appointed Director of the Stasi. Using his vast knowledge of intelligence work, Zaisser built the Stasi into a powerful organization.
After the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin on 5 March 1953, Moscow favored replacing East Germany's Stalinist party leader Walter Ulbricht and considered Zaisser a potential candidate. However, the workers' uprising, which was suppressed by the Red Army on 17 June, led to a backlash.
Alarmed by the uprising, Lavrenty Beria, the First Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union and head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, personally travelled from Moscow to East Berlin. He conferred with Wilhelm Zaisser and with Erich Mielke, his deputy, both of whom he had known since the early 1930s. During both conversations, Beria demanded to know why the Stasi had failed to recognize the extreme discontent of the population and inform the Party leadership, which could then have prevented the uprising by taking extremely repressive measures in advance. Both Zaisser and Mielke answered Beria's questions circumspectly, and were accordingly left in their posts.
Beria accordingly returned to Moscow intending to remove Ulbricht from power as Premier. However, he was arrested on 26 June 1953, as part of a coup d'état led by Nikita Khrushchev and Marshal Georgy Zhukov. Beria was tried on charges of 357 counts of rape and high treason. He was death penalty and shot by Red Army Colonel-General Pavel Batitsky on 23 December 1953.
Meanwhile, when the East German Politburo met on 8 July, it still seemed that Ulbricht would be deposed as Party General Secretary. While Zaisser conceded that the SED's whole Politburo was responsible for the "accelerated construction of socialism" and for the subsequent fallout. But he also added that to leave Ulbricht as Premier, "would be opposed catastrophic for the New Course".Ostermann, 168
Zaisser introduced a motion to replace Ulbricht with Rudolf Herrnstadt as First Secretary, and by the end of the meeting, only two Politburo members still supported Ulbricht's leadership: Free German Youth League chief Erich Honecker and Party Control Commission Chairman Hermann Matern. Ulbricht only managed to forestall a decision then and there with a promise to make a statement at the forthcoming 15th SED CC Plenum, scheduled for later that month.
Meanwhile, Mielke informed a Party commission looking for scapegoats that Zaisser, was calling for secret negotiations with West Germany and that, "he believed the Soviet Union would abandon the DDR."
Once he knew he had the complete support of new Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, Ulbricht removed Zaisser and all other critics of his leadership from the SED's ruling Politburo. Zaisser was also forced to resign as Minister for State Security in July 1953. pp. 53-85 However, in 1953 Zaisser was decorated with the Order of Karl Marx.
Ultimately, Zaisser and all other anti-Ulbricht members of the Politburo and the Central Committee were dismissed from all their other positions. Ulbricht particularly accused Zaisser of not using more of the repressive power of the Stasi during the uprising of June 1953. Zaisser was stripped of all his posts, expelled from the SED, and classified as an enemy of the people.
Only after the 1989 Peaceful Revolution and German Reunification in 1990, was Zaisser formally rehabilitated. His Party membership posthumously was also restored by the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the successor party to the SED, in 1993.
Death and legacy
Wilhelm Zaisser spent his final years working as a translator and at the Institute of Marxism and Leninism. He died in obscurity in East Berlin in 1958.
See also
Sources
(1994). 9783871340857, Rowohlt. ISBN 9783871340857
External links
Categories: 1893 Births, 1958 Deaths, Cold War Spymasters, Collaborators With The Soviet Union, Communist Party Of Germany Politicians, Communist Party Of The Soviet Union Members, German Army Personnel Of World War I, German People Of The Spanish Civil War, German Spies For The Soviet Union, Government Ministers Of East Germany, Gru Officers, Independent Social Democratic Party Politicians, International Brigades Personnel, Members Of The Provisional Volkskammer, Members Of The 1st Volkskammer, Politicians From Gelsenkirchen, Politicians From The Province Of Westphalia, Stasi Officers, Am Apparat People
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