Mielke's red suitcase

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Mielke's red suitcase

Erich Mielke's red suitcase contained explosive documents about the GDR head of state Erich Honecker . Erich Mielke was a long-time Minister for State Security (MfS) and kept the files in a small red synthetic leather case at his office in Berlin-Lichtenberg . In December 1989, the military prosecutor's office searched Mielke's rooms as part of the turnaround and peaceful revolution in the GDR . Since then, legends have grown up around the red suitcase found during the search , starting with the exact location.

History after the end of the GDR

The military prosecutors handed the suitcase to the public prosecutor general of the GDR, who, however, did not pass it on to the Berlin Justice Senator Jutta Limbach , who was responsible for these matters after reunification . The suitcase was thought to be gone. Various newspaper editors, however, received anonymous tips that the suitcase existed and that it would be sold. It was not until the journalist Peter Przybylski did research for the television program Kennzeichen D that the suitcase was brought to the Justice Senator's office overnight by a messenger. On the occasion of the broadcast of the program on November 14, 1990 on ZDF, there was a press conference on the return of the red suitcase. Several senators and ministers did not feel responsible for this, so that in 1995 the red suitcase reached the Federal Archives in Koblenz . The red suitcase had been in the BStU archive since 2004 , until it was shown in the permanent exhibition of the Normannenstrasse research and memorial in 2015, "State Security in the SED Dictatorship", where it can be seen in the rooms left by Mielke.

content

In the red suitcase there were files from the high treason trial against Bruno Baum , also the corresponding procedural files of the senior Reich lawyer at the People's Court , the enforcement files of the Reich lawyer and files from the Ministry of Justice . Like Honecker, Baum was a KPD functionary and resistance fighter against the Hitler regime . He and others, including Erich Honecker, were arrested by the Gestapo on December 4, 1935 . In view of the overwhelming burden of proof, Baum and then Honecker, who had made conspiratorial errors, confessed to investigator Heinrich Müller to an extent that enabled him to close the case within six days. The MfS provided Honecker's statements about other resistance fighters in an enclosed, undated analysis with critical notes on their extent. The preliminary judicial investigation was conducted by Hans-Joachim Rehse . In the hearing before the People's Court on June 7th and 8th, 1937, the People's Judge Robert Hartmann sentenced the main defendant Baum to 13 years in prison. Among the other defendants, Honecker received the highest sentence at ten years. The aggravating penalty for Baum was that he was Jewish and had underlined his commitment to resistance more sharply than Honecker at the trial. Until his liberation in 1945, Baum served his sentence in the Brandenburg-Görden prison , the main camp of the Auschwitz concentration camp and in the Mauthausen concentration camp . Later he was promoted to the Central Committee of the SED .

In the suitcase there were also two requests for clemency from Erich Honecker's father Wilhelm, in which he wrote that his son had renounced communism and saw “his youthful ideals have been realized in the current state,” that is, that of the Nazis. It also contains several letters from Honecker's second wife Edith Baumann and from Margot Feist to the SED leader Walter Ulbricht . In these letters the women blacken one another. Finally, the suitcase also contained a file from the Stasi about the state-funded renovation of the bungalow of a secret lover of Honecker.

background

Mielke seemed to have collected documents in the suitcase that could incriminate Honecker. In one of the last meetings of the SED Politburo on October 17, 1989, Erich Mielke Honecker is said to have threatened, if he did not resign, “then I'll unpack and then some will be surprised”. Those present reported that Honecker obviously did not understand what Mielke meant exactly, and replied: "Then do it."

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ A matter for the boss: Mielke's “Red Suitcase”. The Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the Former German Democratic Republic (BStU), accessed on January 15, 2020 .
  2. ↑ On the Gestapo investigations and the judicial proceedings (below) see Martin Sabrow : Erich Honecker. The life before. 1912-1945 . CH Beck, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-406-69809-5 , pp. 299-312.