State Secretariat for State Security
State Secretariat for State Security (SfS) was the name of the State Security Service of the GDR , subordinate to the Interior Ministry , after the temporary dissolution of the Ministry for State Security (MfS). The tasks of domestic and international espionage as well as those of a secret police were integrated in the SfS . It was formed on July 23, 1953 from the previously independent MfS.
Contemporaries as well as many historians saw it primarily as a reaction to the failure of the Stasi in the run-up to the popular uprising of June 17, 1953 . More recent research from the Stasi records authority, however, suggests that the decision of the SED Politburo of June 30, 1953 was initiated by Lavrenti Berija . The structural change was therefore conceived as a signal of détente to the West and was at the same time an adjustment to Soviet conditions.
Walter Ulbricht , the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the SED, nourished the contemporary perception of a “downgrading” of the MfS when he discredited his inner-party rival Wilhelm Zaisser and had him removed from all offices in the power struggle that flared up shortly afterwards .
The SfS was headed by Ernst Wollweber until it was converted back into a ministry on November 24, 1955 . The November 1954 show trials also took place during this period ; some of the 547 alleged agents arrested in August 1954 ( Actions Blitz, Pfeil, etc.) were sentenced to death or long prison terms.
literature
- Karl Wilhelm Fricke / Roger Engelmann : The "Day X" and the State Security, Bremen 2003, p. 177f.
- Dieter Krüger, Armin Wagner (ed.): Conspiracy as a profession. German intelligence chiefs in the Cold War. Christoph Links Verlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-86153-287-5 .
- Helmut Roewer , Stefan Schäfer, Matthias Uhl : Lexicon of the secret services in the 20th century . Herbig, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-7766-2317-9 .
- Roger Engelmann , Bernd Florath , Helge Heidemeyer, Daniela Münkel , Arno Polzin, Walter Süß : The MfS Lexicon. 3rd updated edition, Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-86153-900-1 , p. 316, online version .
Web links
- Stasi media library, collection of documents: State Secretariat for State Security (SfS)
Individual evidence
- ↑ MfS Lexicon: State Secretariat for State Security (SfS)