High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Erich Fritz Emil Mielke (December 28, 1907 – May 21, 2000) was a German communist politician and Minister of State Security—and as such head of the Stasi of the German Democratic Republic between 1957 and 1989. Mielke spent more than a decade as an operative of the NKVD during the rule of Joseph Stalin. 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.