page_title: Erich Mielke
section_title: Plan X
hierarchical_section_title: Erich Mielke / The Peaceful Revolution / Plan X
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Burg Ranis
context_page_description: Erich Fritz Emil Mielke was a German communist official who served as head of the East German Ministry for State Security, better known as the Stasi, from 1957 until shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
  A native of Berlin and a second-generation member of the Communist Party of Germany, Mielke was one of two triggermen in the 1931 murders of Berlin Police Captains Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck. After learning that a witness had survived, Mielke escaped arrest by fleeing to the Soviet Union, where the NKVD recruited him. He was one of the key figures in the decimation of Moscow's German Communists during the Great Purge as well as in the savage persecution of suspected anti-Stalinists in the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.
  Following the end of World War II in 1945, Mielke returned to the Soviet Zone of Occupied Germany, which he helped organize into a Marxist-Leninist satellite state under the Socialist Unity Party, later becoming head of the Stasi; according to John Koehler, he was "the longest serving secret police chief in the Soviet Bloc".
  The Stasi under Mielke has been called by historian Edward N.
context_section_description: On 8 October 1989, Mielke and Honecker ordered the Stasi to implement "Plan X"—the SED's plan to arrest and indefinitely detain 85,939 East Germans during a state of emergency. According to John Koehler, Plan X had been in preparation since 1979 and was, "a carbon copy of how the Nazi concentration camps got their start after Hitler came to power in 1933."
  By 1984, 23 sites had been selected for "isolation and internment camps." Those who were to be imprisoned in them ran into six categories; including anyone who had ever been under surveillance for anti-state activities, including all members of peace movements which were not under Stasi control.
  According to Anna Funder, "The plans contained exact provisions for the use of all available prisons and camps, and when those were full for the conversion of other buildings: Nazi detention centers, schools, hospitals, and factory holiday hostels. Every detail was foreseen, from where the doorbell was located on the house of each person to be arrested to the adequate supply of barbed wire and the rules of dress and etiquette in the camps..."
  However, when Mielke sent the orders, codenamed "Shield" (German: Schild), to each local Stasi precinct to begin the planned arrests, he was not obeyed. Terrified of an East German version of the mass lynchings of Hungarian secret police agents during the 1956 Revolution, Stasi agents throughout the GDR fortified their office-buildings and barricaded themselves inside.
caption: Ranis Castle in Thuringia was among the locations selected for an internment camp under Plan X. In Stasi documents, it was referred to as "Rosebush" (German: Rosenstock).[138]
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