Erich Wichert

Erich Wichert (born January 26, 1909 in Leipzig , †  August 5, 1985 in East Berlin ) was a high-ranking officer of the Ministry for State Security and served from 1964 in the rank of major general of the MfS.

Life

As the son of a locksmith, he attended elementary school, worked from 1923 to 1929 as a milling cutter, co-driver, house servant, construction and unskilled worker. In 1929 he joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). There he was a member of the party self-protection , a militarily organized group in the KPD. On August 9, 1931, he was involved in the murder of the two police officers Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck, known as the murders on Bülowplatz . In July 1933 he was arrested and sentenced to 15 years in prison alongside Albert Kuntz in a "high treason" trial . Until 1945 he was in the prison Moabit , the Plötzensee prison , the prison Luckau , the Sonnenburg concentration camp , the prison Brandenburg-Gorden , the KZ Börgermoor and the penitentiary Untermaßfeld detained.

After his liberation from Untermaßfeld in 1945, he was one of the first communists to work for the Soviet secret service in the Soviet occupation zone . Until he joined the German Administration of the Interior (DVdI) as VP inspector and manager in 1947, he worked as an agent in West Berlin . Wichert was the third man who, after Erich Mielke and his deputy Otto Walter, was employed in the main administration in 1949 to protect the national economy . There he was also head of the personnel department and remained so after the formation of the Ministry for State Security of the GDR on February 8, 1950. From 1953 he was head of the "Headquarters Management and Training" and was responsible for training all new employees of the MfS.

After Ernst Wollweber resigned as Head of State Security on October 31, 1957 , Wichert was appointed head of the MfS administration for Greater Berlin by the new minister, his childhood friend Erich Mielke, and succeeded Martin Weikert . He ran this district administration until his retirement in January 1974. In 1964 he was appointed major general. From 1958 to 1974 he was a member of the SED district leadership in Berlin. Most recently he worked from 1974 to 1985 as a member of the management of the Berlin district committee of the GDR's anti-fascist resistance fighters .

Awards and honors

• May 6, 1955 Patriotic Order of Merit in silver and 1969 in gold
• 1973 Gold medal for the Patriotic Order of Merit
• 1979 Karl Marx Order
• The 43rd Polytechnic High School (POS) in Berlin-Lichtenberg was named after him.
• Today's Adele-Sandrock-Strasse in Berlin-Hellersdorf was called Erich-Wichert-Strasse from 1987 to 1992.

literature

• Wilhelm Ritter von Schramm : Secret Services in the Second World War. With documents, tables and overview maps. Herbig, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-7766-2241-5 .
• Silke Schumann: Party education in the secret police. On the role of the SED in the MfS in the fifties . Christoph Links, 1998, ISBN 3-86153-146-1 .
• Helmut Roewer , Stefan Schäfer, Matthias Uhl : Lexicon of the secret services in the 20th century . Herbig, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-7766-2317-9 .
• Jens Gieseke :  Wichert, Erich . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 2. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
• Jens Gieseke : Erich Wichert. In: Roger Engelmann , Bernd Florath , Helge Heidemeyer , Daniela Münkel , Arno Polzin, Walter Süß (eds.): Das MfS-Lexikon. 3rd updated edition, Ch. Links, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-86153-900-1 , p. 375, online version .

Web links

• The "Greater Berlin Administration" 1950 - 1976 ( Memento from April 14, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
• The heads of the " Greater Berlin Administration "

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.wichert.de/haben/erich_wichert/erich_wichert.html
2. ↑ Jens Gieseke, The full-time employees of the State Security, Links Verlag, 2000, p. 92
3. ^ New Germany of August 10, 1985
4. ↑ Renaming of Berlin streets, squares, train stations