title: Camille O'Sullivan

text: O'Sullivan took a year off from her studies and moved to Berlin, Germany, where she worked at an architect's office. During her time in Berlin, she regularly attended local cabaret clubs and began listening to the narrative music of Hanns Eisler, Kurt Weill and Friedrich Hollaender. Upon returning to Ireland, she met Agnes Bernelle, a mentor who encouraged her to sing, saying "to do this right, you have to be a better actress than a singer, it's all about the story." She graduated from University College Dublin with first class honours and the highest marks at the university in a decade. O'Sullivan then continued to work as an architect, winning an Architectural Association of Ireland award in the process, while continuing to perform in local clubs at night.


title: Camille O'Sullivan

text: In 1999, O'Sullivan was involved in a near-fatal car crash, in which she suffered a head fracture, her pelvis was fractured in six places, her hips displaced and the tendons in her hand were shredded. It was months before she could walk again, and she was hospitalised for a year; she still has a metal plate in her pelvis . The accident encouraged her to follow her dream of singing and she performed her first show after the accident while still in crutches.


title: Camille O'Sullivan

text: O'Sullivan is not a classically trained singer or musician, although she plays piano, and has stated that this stopped her from having the confidence to begin a singing career for many years. In her early career she got around this lack of experience by working with musicians who were able to adapt to her singing style, which focuses more on acting, emotion and 'light and shade', than technique or strict tempo.


title: Camille O'Sullivan

text: O'Sullivan has performed in sell-out seasons in Ireland, New York, the UK, Australia (including the Sydney Opera House) with her award-winning shows and also with the ensemble off Broadway hit show and Olivier Award-winning La Clique. She has performed her 'Dark Angel' show for a six-week West End run at the Apollo Theatre, the Roundhouse, and Royal Festival Hall and appeared in Hal Willner's Rogues Gallery with Tim Robbins, Marianne Faithfull, Sarah Blasko and Todd Rundgren at the Sydney Festival 2010. In December 2009 she supported Jools Holland on tour including the Royal Albert Hall.


title: Camille O'Sullivan

text: After being spotted by Ewen Bremner (Spud from "Trainspotting") in La Clique in The Famous Spiegeltent, O'Sullivan co-starred as the vaudeville star Jane in the film "Mrs Henderson Presents", directed by Stephen Frears, opposite Dame Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins. She and Will Young are also on the soundtrack to the movie. She has appeared on stage with Damien Rice, Jack L, Duke Special, Tim Robbins and Shane MacGowan.


title: Camille O'Sullivan

text: As much storyteller as singer, Camille has received acclaim for her dark dramatic interpretations of the songs of Jacques Brel, Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Dillie Keane, Kurt Weill, David Bowie, and Radiohead. The productions 'La Fille Du Cirque','The Dark Angel' and 'Chameleon" were self-directed with the emphasis on inhabiting the character of each story, revealing different aspects emotionally dark and light, lending to her chameleon like quality on stage. In her early days Camille concentrated on more traditional 'narrative storytelling' with Eisler, Weill and chanteuse fayre Edith Piaf and says that she may have alienated some by making the switch to interpreting darker contemporary songs which originated, in the most part, from male artists:


title: Camille O'Sullivan

text: "I feel it’s necessary to not just do things to please", she says. "I sometimes worried about that in the past. I thought, 'If I don’t want to alienate people, I shouldn’t perform difficult provocative dark songs'. But I would have given up if I’d stayed doing Dietrich and Piaf in a studied way, that cafe-cabaret version, where you’re making it easy instead of pushing yourself".


title: Camille O'Sullivan

text: In 1994, she performed in 'Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris' at University College, Dublin which increased her passion for Brel's work, in particular the songs Amsterdam and Next, the latter being one of the climactic moments of her Spiegletent 2007 performance at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and both appearing on her 'Fille Du Cirque' album.


title: Camille O'Sullivan

text: Both of these songs are told from a male perspective, with Next ('Au Suivant') telling the story of a young soldier who loses his virginity in a 'mobile army whorehouse, gift from the army, free of cost' and is haunted for the remainder of his life both by the horrors of war and by his disgust for the sexual experiences. However, O'Sullivan is not deterred from performing them, commenting that she sings them in the lowest key possible for her voice to retain the drama and tone of the originals, while finding a character within the song that she can inhabit, such as the prostitute and sailor in 'Amsterdam'.


title: Camille O'Sullivan

text: In 2007 Camille played 'Beggar Woman' in the 'Best Opera Production' of 2007 (Irish Times Irish Theatre Award), Sondheim's 'Sweeney Todd' at The Gate Theatre, Dublin ("This production is a miracle…gripping and musically brilliant" Guardian). In 2011 she starred in, and co-created (with director Elizabeth Freestone and long term musical collaborator Feargal Murray), a one-woman adaptation of Shakespeare's narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece, which was performed at the Swan Theatre, Stratford upon Avon. Commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the poem is a harrowing account, in which Camille portrays both protagonist and victim. Original music was written by O'Sullivan and Murray. In Autumn 2011 she starred opposite Lorcan Crannitch in The Lulu House for the Dublin Theatre Festival, directed by Selina Cartmell.


title: Camille O'Sullivan

text: Festival appearances include the Acoustic Tent at Glastonbury Festival 2008, Latitude Festival 2009 and 2011, and the Tent Stage (as headline) at the London Feis 2011. She has performed on Later With Jools 2008 and was interviewed by David Frost 2010. Tribute performances include Barbican's Nick Drake tribute, Way to Blue 2009 with Martha Wainwright, Vashti Bunyan, Harper Simon, Stuart Murdoch and Blur's Graham Coxon, Barbican's Brel evening with Marc Almond, Momus, Arno and Arthur H. She is regularly one of the biggest sellers at the Edinburgh Fringe with 4-week runs in some of the biggest venues.


title: Camille O'Sullivan

text: Camille's performance style is intensely dramatic, drawing the audience into the stories and characters of the songs. Sometimes playful, sometimes with a 5 or 6 piece band, sometimes a cappella – as in her version of Brel's Amsterdam – or accompanied just by piano and taking everything down to a whisper for an emotional song like Dillie Keane's Look Mummy or Nick Cave's Little Water Song or Ship Song. Camille famously sips red wine throughout her performances, attributing this characteristic to her Irish roots.


title: Camille O'Sullivan

text: O'Sullivan has become a popular commodity in advertising and the media, particularly in Ireland, where she advertised Hennessy Cognac under the 'Pure Character' campaign, with the tagline 'Singing in English, French and sometimes German, I like to become different characters, showing each part of myself whether vulnerable, angry, harsh or fun' and titling her 'Camille O'Sullivan – Performer'. She has appeared on the cover of Time Out London,the Sunday Independent's 'Life' Magazine twice, once for an article named 'My Fall into Decadence', and the other time,'Dublin's Dens of Desire'


title: Camille O'Sullivan

text: She suffers from stage fright before every performance, saying "if you can use pure nerves as a fuse you can really take off like a rocket."


title: Camille O'Sullivan

text: Irish Tatler Woman of the Year Award (November 2011); nominated for Best Irish Female Music Artist Award in the Irish Music Meteor Awards (February 2009); Olivier Award for Best Entertainment (as ensemble in la Clique)(2009); Best Show Dublin Fringe Festival (2007, 2009); Spirit of the Edinburgh Fringe (2007); Best Music Brighton Festival (2005,2006); Best Artist Melbourne Theatre Awards (2005)


title: Camille O'Sullivan

text: O'Sullivan was in a relationship with The Waterboys' lead singer Mike Scott, with whom she has a daughter, Lila-Elodie. Since 2014 she has been in a relationship with actor Aidan Gillen.


title: Daniel Wozniak (murderer)

text: Daniel Patrick Wozniak (born March 23, 1984) is a former American community theatre actor who was convicted of two counts of murder in September 2016. In May 2010, Wozniak killed his neighbor and friend, Private First Class Samuel Eliezer "Sam" Herr, and Herr's friend, Juri "Julie" Kibuishi, as part of a plan to frame Herr for Kibuishi's murder and steal his combat pay. Wozniak was deeply in debt and wanted money to finance his upcoming wedding and honeymoon. Wozniak and his then-fiancée, Rachel Mae Buffett, lived in the same apartment complex as Herr in Costa Mesa, California.


title: Daniel Wozniak (murderer)

text: After more than five years of court proceedings, Wozniak went to trial and was convicted on two counts of first-degree murder. He was found guilty and sentenced to death in September 2016. He was incarcerated at California's San Quentin State Prison until July 2021, when he was moved to Salinas Valley State Prison as part of the Condemned Inmate Transfer Pilot Program.


title: Daniel Wozniak (murderer)

text: On May 21, 2010, Wozniak shot and killed his neighbor, Private First Class Samuel "Sam" Herr, a 26-year-old Afghanistan War veteran, at a Los Alamitos theater. At the time of the murders, Wozniak was deeply in debt and unemployed but planning a lavish wedding and honeymoon. After Herr told him that he had savings of about $62,000 from combat pay, Wozniak decided to kill him in order to acquire


title: Daniel Wozniak (murderer)

text: In an effort to misdirect police and cast blame upon Herr, Wozniak then used Herr's cell phone to text Juri "Julie" Kibuishi, a 23-year-old college student who had been tutoring Herr at Orange Coast College. Wozniak lured Kibuishi to Herr's apartment, where he shot and killed her. Wozniak then staged the crime scene to make it appear as though Kibuishi had been sexually assaulted, suggesting that Herr had committed her assault and subsequent murder and then gone on the run. The same evening, Wozniak went on to perform in his local theatre production of the musical "Nine". Afterwards, Wozniak dismembered Herr’s body by removing his limbs and head.


title: Daniel Wozniak (murderer)

text: An extensive manhunt for Herr was launched by authorities who at that point still believed Herr was responsible for Kibuishi's murder and was on the run. Wozniak came under suspicion after he instructed a sixteen-year-old, Wesley Freilich, to withdraw money from Herr's accounts. When the police confronted the boy, they were told by the boy that Wozniak had asked him to withdraw the money for him.


title: Daniel Wozniak (murderer)

text: Soon after, Wozniak was apprehended by US Marshals while at his bachelor party two days before his wedding.


title: Daniel Wozniak (murderer)

text: After repeatedly lying to police, Wozniak finally confessed. Wozniak led authorities to the area where almost all of Herr's dismembered body was found discarded at El Dorado Nature Center in Long Beach. After more than five years of court proceedings, Wozniak went to trial and was convicted on two counts of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to death in September 2016 before California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a moratorium on capital punishment in the state.


title: Daniel Wozniak (murderer)

text: In November 2012, Wozniak's then-fiancée, Rachel Mae Buffett, was arrested and charged with three felony counts of accessory-after-the-fact based on allegations that she had lied multiple times to police investigators.


title: Daniel Wozniak (murderer)

text: On September 12, 2018, Buffett was convicted on two of those counts with a maximum possible sentence of 44 months and, on November 8, 2018, was sentenced to 32 months minus time served and good behavior. She was released from jail sometime in 2019.


title: Calpis

text: The beverage has a light, somewhat milky, and slightly acidic flavour, similar to plain or vanilla flavoured yogurt or Yakult. Its ingredients include water, nonfat dry milk and lactic acid, and is produced by lactic acid fermentation.


title: Calpis

text: The drink is sold as a concentrate which is mixed with water or sometimes milk just before consumption. A pre-diluted version known as , or its carbonated variety, known as , are also available. It is also used to flavour "kakigōri" (shaved ice) and as a mixer for cocktails and "chūhai".


title: Calpis

text: Mishima's first two attempts, Daigomi and Daigoso, were named after the word . Inspiration was taken from the Sanskrit word "sarpir-maṇḍa" (Sanskrit: ), which is regarded as the greatest of all flavours in Buddhism. He wanted to do the same for Calpis and initially named it "Calpir", constructing a portmanteau by combining "cal" from "calcium" and "pir" from "sarpir-maṇḍa". However, after consulting musician and Buddhist priest , Mishima chose "pis" from "sarpiṣ" (Sanskrit: ) instead.


title: Calpis

text: Primarily in North America, the name "Calpis" is changed to Calpico with カルピス in katakana either below or on the reverse side of the packaging—this alteration to the name ensures that any unintended associations with the English slang word for urine ("piss") are avoided.


title: Calpis

text: The polka dot packaging used to be white dots against a blue background until the colours were inverted in 1953. The design was intended to represent the Milky Way, in reference to the Japanese festival, "Tanabata" on 7 July, a tradition seen as the start of the summer.


title: Calpis

text: In 1919, Calpis held an international poster exhibition in collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The contest was held to provide aid to struggling European painters due to the inflation caused by World War I. After German painter Otto Dünkelsbühler won 3rd place, Calpis began using a logo a new logo in 1923. It featured an illustration of a black man with large lips and a Panama hat drinking from a glass using a straw. As the logo came to be considered offensive, the black/white was first reversed, and then the logo was subsequently dropped altogether in January 1990. The complaint was initially filed by 12-year-old Futoshi Arita, a member of The Association to Stop Racism Against Blacks ().


title: Calpis

text: The founder of Calpis, Kaiun Mishima, travelled to the Mongolian region of northern China (Inner Mongolia) in 1902, encountering a traditional cultured milk product known as airag (called kumis throughout most of Central Asia). The active ingredient in airag, responsible for its unique flavour, is lactic acid produced by lactobacilli bacteria. Mishima was inspired to develop his own version after the airag helped return his digestion to normal.


title: Calpis

text: His first attempt was Daigomi, launched in 1916. It was made by culturing cream with lactic acid bacteria. However, Daigomi was discontinued because of two major flaws: the amount of cream extracted from milk was inadequate for mass production, and there was a surplus of skim milk created as a by-product. Afterwards, Mishima created Daigoso by culturing skimmed milk with lactic acid bacteria. However, the product was also discontinued because of poor sales. His last unsuccessful attempt was Lacto Caramel, a product that contained live lactic acid bacteria. It was discontinued because the product melted during the summer.


title: Calpis

text: Mishima went back to further developing Daigoso and created Calpis by chance. One day, he decided to add sugar to Daigoso and left it overnight. After being satisfied with the taste, Calpis was officially released on July 7, 1919, at the price of ¥1.60 per bottle. Diluting Calpis with water proved to be economical, quickly garnering popularity with the people, along with the catchphrase "the taste of first love".


title: Calpis

text: For some time, Calpis had the image of being a special drink. Until the 1950s, it was often served to guests on special occasions or used as a gift.


title: Calpis

text: Apart from the original flavour, orange-flavoured Calpis was released in 1958. Two years later, pineapple-flavoured and grape-flavoured Calpis were released. A carbonated version called Calpis Soda was also released in 1974.


title: Calpis

text: In 1973, sales plummeted after the price was raised. However, the prediluted version released in 1991 became a huge success. Within the first year of its release, 20.5 million cases of Calpis Water had been sold. It was also around this time that the company moved towards the use of paper and plastic containers.


title: Calpis

text: In 2009, marketers aimed to change the image of Calpis once more. They billed it as a healthy beverage in an attempt to shy away from the idea that Calpis was only for children. Following that change, Calpis shipments in the last 10 years have grown by 1.5 times the previous amount.


title: FK Austria Wien

text: Fußballklub Austria Wien AG (; known in English as Austria Vienna, and usually shortened to Austria (German: Österreich) in German-speaking countries, is an Austrian association football club from the capital city of Vienna. It has won the most trophies of any Austrian club from the top flight, with 24 Austrian Bundesliga titles and 27 cup titles, although its rival SK Rapid Wien holds the record for most national championships with 32. Alongside Rapid, Austria is one of only two teams that have never been relegated from the Austrian top flight. With 27 victories in the Austrian Cup and six in the Austrian Supercup, Austria Wien is also the most successful club in each of those tournaments. The club reached the UEFA Cup Winners' Cup final in 1978, and the semi-finals of the European Cup the season after. The club plays at the Franz Horr Stadium, known as the Generali Arena since a 2010 naming rights deal with an Italian insurance company.


title: FK Austria Wien

text: FK Austria Wien has its roots in Wiener Cricketer, established on 20 October 1910 in Vienna. The club was renamed Wiener Amateur-SV in December of that year and adopted the name Fußballklub Austria Wien on 28 November 1926.


title: FK Austria Wien

text: The team claimed its first championship title in 1924. Wiener Amateur changed its name to Austria Wien in 1926 as the amateurs became professionals. The club won its second league title that year.


title: FK Austria Wien

text: The 1930s, one of Austria Wien's most successful eras, brought two titles (1933 and 1936) in the Mitropa Cup, a tournament for champions in Central Europe. The star of that side was forward Matthias Sindelar, who was voted in 1998 as the greatest Austrian footballer.


title: FK Austria Wien

text: The club's success was interrupted by the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, with Austria taunted as ""Judenklub"". While Jewish players and staff at the club were killed or fled the country, Sindelar died under unresolved circumstances on 23 January 1939 of carbon monoxide poisoning in his apartment. He had refused to play for the combined Germany–Austria national team, citing injury (bad knees) and retirement from international matches. The club was part of the top-flight regional Gauliga Ostmark in German competition from 1938–45, but never finished higher than fourth. They participated in the Tschammerpokal (the predecessor to the modern-day DFB-Pokal) in 1938 and 1941. Nazi sports authorities directed that the team change its name to Sportclub Ostmark Wien in an attempt to Germanize it on 12 April 1938, but the club re-adopted its historical identity almost immediately on 14 July 1938.


title: FK Austria Wien

text: Austria Wien won its first league title for 23 years in 1949, and retained it the following year. It later won a fifth title in 1953. The club won 16 titles in 33 seasons between 1960 and 1993, starting with three-straight titles in 1961, 1962 and 1963. Forward Ernst Ocwirk, who played in five league title-winning sides in two separate spells at the club, managed the side to 1969 and 1970 Bundesliga titles. Other players of this era included Horst Nemec.


title: FK Austria Wien

text: From 1973–74 season, Wiener AC formed a joint team with FK Austria Wien, which was called FK Austria WAC Wien until 1976–77, when Austria Wien opted to revert to their own club's traditional name. The results of the joint team are part of the Austria Wien football history.


title: FK Austria Wien

text: The 1970s saw the beginning of another successful era, despite no league title between 1970 and 1976 as an aging squad was rebuilt. Eight league titles in the 11 seasons from 1975–76 to 1985–86 reasserted its dominance. After winning the 1977 Austrian Cup national Cup, Austria Wien reached the 1978 European Cup Winners' Cup final, which they lost 4–0 to Belgian club Anderlecht. The following season, the club reached the semi-finals of the European Cup, losing 1–0 on aggregate to Swedish team Malmö FF. In 1982–83, Austria Wien reached the semi-finals of the Cup Winners' Cup, losing 5–3 on aggregate to Real Madrid.


title: FK Austria Wien

text: Players at Austria Wien in this era included Herbert ""Schneckerl"" Prohaska, Felix Gasselich, Thomas Parits, Walter Schachner, Gerhard Steinkogler, Toni Polster, Peter Stöger, Ivica Vastić and Tibor Nyilasi.


title: FK Austria Wien

text: At the start of the 1990s, Austria Wien enjoyed its most recent period of sustained success: three-straight Bundesliga titles from 1991 to 1993; three Austrian Cup titles in 1990, 1992 and 1994; and four Austrian Supercup titles in 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994. However, the club declined in the late 1990s due to financial problems which forced key players to be sold.


title: FK Austria Wien

text: Austria Wien was taken over by Austro–Canadian billionaire Frank Stronach's Magna auto-parts consortium in 1999. Following deals with the Memphis cigarette company, the club was renamed FK Austria Memphis Magna. Stronach's investment in players, with a budget three times larger than the average in the league, saw a first Bundesliga title for ten years in 2002–03. Despite this, head coach Walter Schachner was fired. Although his replacement Christoph Daum could not retain the league title, he won the Austrian Cup.


title: FK Austria Wien

text: In 2004, Memphis was dropped from the club's name. Austria Wien reached the UEFA Cup quarter-final in 2004–05, where they were eliminated by Parma. On 21 November 2005, Frank Stonach withdrew from the club. Consequently, several players (including top scorer Roland Linz, Vladimír Janočko, Joey Didulica, Libor Sionko, Filip Šebo and Sigurd Rushfeldt) were sold to other teams the following summer. The 2005–06 season nonetheless concluded with a Bundesliga and Cup double.


title: FK Austria Wien

text: The loss of key players and a much lower budget for the 2006–07 season saw the club suffer. Despite losing 4–1 on aggregate to Benfica in the preliminary round of the UEFA Champions League, the team managed to qualify (against Legia Warsaw winning 2–1 on aggregate) for the group phase of the UEFA Cup. Former player and coach Thomas Parits became general manager. After the side lost three days later 4–0 away to Red Bull Salzburg, Partis terminated coaches Peter Stöger and Frank Schinkels. Georg Zellhofer replaced them. The season saw a sixth-place finish in the Bundesliga despite being in last place at Christmas. However, the club also won the Cup that year. The side improved the following season, finishing in third in the league.


title: FK Austria Wien

text: The summer of 2008 brought notable changes. Twelve players left the club, including Sanel Kuljić and Yüksel Sariyar, who joined Frank Stronach's newly founded team FC Magna in Austria's second division. The "Betriebsführervertrag" ("operating contract") with Stronach's Magna company expired, letting the club reorganize. On 1 July 2008, the original name FK Austria Wien was reinstated, without a sponsor's name included for the first time in 30 years. The club also bought Chinese international Sun Xiang, the first Chinese player to play in the Bundesliga. In the 2012–13 season, Austria Wien won its 24th league title, ahead of holders Red Bull Salzburg, but lost the Austrian Cup final 1–0 to third-tier club FC Pasching.


title: FK Austria Wien

text: In August 2013, Austria Wien qualified for the group stages of the UEFA Champions League group stage for the first time after defeating Dinamo Zagreb in the play-offs round. They were drawn against Porto, Atlético Madrid and Zenit Saint Petersburg, all of which have won European trophies in the 21st century. Austria finished last in the group after a loss to Porto at home (0–1), a draw against Zenit in Saint Petersburg (0–0), two losses against Atlético and an away draw against Porto, which eventually put the Portuguese side to the third place in the group. A consolation came when Austria defeated Zenit 4–1 at Ernst-Happel-Stadion.


title: FK Austria Wien

text: Austria Wien plays its home games at the Franz Horr Stadium, which has had a capacity of 17,000 since 2008, when a new two-tiered East Stand opened and renovations were made to the West Stand. The stadium was renamed the Generali Arena in a naming-rights deal with Italian insurer Generali announced at the end of 2010.


title: FK Austria Wien

text: The stadium was originally built in 1925 for Slovan Vienna, a Czech immigrants' club, and was largely destroyed by the Allies in World War II. Austria Wien moved into the ground in 1973, playing its first match there on 26 August. The stadium was subsequently named for Franz Horr, chairman of the Viennese FA, following his death. The stadium was expanded with new or renovated stands in 1982, 1986, 1998 and, most recently, 2008.


title: FK Austria Wien

text: Austria Wien contests the Wien derby with Rapid Wien. The two clubs are two of the most supported and successful in the country, and are the only Austrian clubs to have never been relegated. They are two of the most culturally and socially significant clubs, both historically representing wider divisions in Viennese society. Both teams originate from Hietzing, the 13th district in the west of the city, but have since moved into different districts. Austria Wien is seen as a middle-class club, and before World War II, as part of the coffeehouse culture associated with the capital's intelligentsia. Rapid traditionally holds the support of the city's working class. The two clubs first met in a league championship match on 8 September 1911, a 4–1 victory for Rapid. The fixture is the most-played derby in European football after the Old Firm match in Glasgow and the Edinburgh Derby in Edinburgh, both in Scotland.


title: Accessibility

text: Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services, vehicles, or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design and practice of accessible development ensures both "direct access" (i.e. unassisted) and "indirect access" meaning compatibility with a person's assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers).


title: Accessibility

text: Accessibility can be viewed as the "ability to access" and benefit from some system or entity. The concept focuses on enabling access for people with disabilities, or enabling access through the use of assistive technology; however, research and development in accessibility brings benefits to everyone.


title: Accessibility

text: Accessibility is not to be confused with usability, which is the extent to which a product (such as a device, service, or environment) can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, convenience, or satisfaction in a specified context of use.


title: Accessibility

text: Accessibility is also strongly related to universal design, the process of creating products that are usable by the widest possible range of people, operating within the widest possible range of situations. Universal design typically provides a single general solution that can accommodate people with disabilities as well as the rest of the population. By contrast, accessible design is focused on ensuring that there are no barriers to accessibility for all people, including those with disabilities.


title: Accessibility

text: The disability rights movement advocates equal access to social, political, and economic life which includes not only physical access but access to the same tools, services, organizations and facilities as non-disabled people (e.g., museums). Article 9 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities commits signatories to provide for full accessibility in their countries.


title: Accessibility

text: While it is often used to describe facilities or amenities to assist people with impaired mobility, through the provision of facilities like wheelchair ramps, the term can extend include other types of disability. Accessible facilities therefore extend to areas such as Braille signage, elevators, audio signals at pedestrian crossings, walkway contours, website accessibility and accessible publishing.


title: Accessibility

text: In the United States, government mandates including Section 508, WCAG, DDA are all enforcing practices to standardize accessibility testing engineering in product development.


title: Accessibility

text: Accessibility modifications may be required to enable persons with disabilities to gain access to education, employment, transportation, housing, recreation, or even simply to exercise their right to vote.


title: Accessibility

text: Various countries have legislation requiring physical accessibility which are (in order of enactment):


title: Accessibility

text: Legislation may also be enacted on a state, provincial or local level. In Ontario, Canada, the Ontarians with Disabilities Act of 2001 is meant to "improve the identification, removal and prevention of barriers faced by persons with disabilities."


title: Accessibility

text: The European Union (EU), which has signed the United Nations' Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, also has adopted a European Disability Strategy for 2010–20. The Strategy includes the following goals, among others:


title: Accessibility

text: A "European Accessibility Act" was proposed in late 2012. This Act would establish standards within member countries for accessible products, services, and public buildings. The harmonization of accessibility standards within the EU "would facilitate the social integration of persons with disabilities and the elderly and their mobility across member states, thereby also fostering the free movement principle".


title: Accessibility

text: Assistive technology is the creation of a new device that assists a person in completing a task that would otherwise be impossible. Some examples include new computer software programs like screen readers, and inventions such as assistive listening devices, including hearing aids, and traffic lights with a standard color code that enables colorblind individuals to understand the correct signal.


title: Accessibility

text: Adaptive technology is the modification, or adaptation, of existing devices, methods, or the creation of new uses for existing devices, to enable a person to complete a task. Examples include the use of remote controls, and the autocomplete (word completion) feature in computer word processing programs, which both help individuals with mobility impairments to complete tasks. Adaptations to wheelchair tires are another example; widening the tires enables wheelchair users to move over soft surfaces, such as deep snow on ski hills, and sandy beaches.


title: Accessibility

text: Assistive technology and adaptive technology have a key role in developing the means for people with disabilities to live more independently, and to more fully participate in mainstream society. In order to have access to assistive or adaptive technology, however, educating the public and even legislating requirements to incorporate this technology have been necessary.


title: Accessibility

text: The UN CRPD, and courts in the United States, Japan, UK, and elsewhere, have decided that when it is needed to assure secret ballot, authorities should provide voters with assistive technology.


title: Accessibility

text: The European Court of Human Rights, on the contrary, in case Toplak v. Slovenia ruled that due to high costs, the abandonment of the assistive equipment in elections did not violate human rights.


title: Accessibility

text: Accessibility of employment covers a wide range of issues, from skills training, to occupational therapy, finding employment, and retaining employment.


title: Accessibility

text: Employment rates for workers with disabilities are lower than for the general workforce. Workers in Western countries fare relatively well, having access to more services and training as well as legal protections against employment discrimination. Despite this, in the United States the 2012 unemployment rate for workers with disabilities was 12.9%, while it was 7.3% for workers without disabilities. More than half of workers with disabilities (52%) earned less than $25,000 in the previous year, compared with just 38% of workers with no disabilities. This translates into an earnings gap where individuals with disabilities earn about 25 percent less of what workers without disabilities earn. Among occupations with 100,000 or more people, dishwashers had the highest disability rate (14.3%), followed by refuse and recyclable material collectors (12.7%), personal care aides (11.9%), and janitors and building cleaners (11.8%). The rates for refuse and recyclable material collectors, personal care aides, and janitors and building cleaners were not statistically different from one another.


title: Accessibility

text: Surveys of non-Western countries are limited, but the available statistics also indicate fewer jobs being filled by workers with disabilities. In India, a large 1999 survey found that "of the 'top 100 multinational companies' in the country [...] the employment rate of persons with disabilities in the private sector was a mere 0.28%, 0.05% in multinational companies and only 0.58% in the top 100 IT companies in the country". India, like much of the world, has large sections of the economy that are without strong regulation or social protections, such as the informal economy. Other factors have been cited as contributing to the high unemployment rate, such as public service regulations. Although employment for workers with disabilities is higher in the public sector due to hiring programs targeting persons with disabilities, regulations currently restrict types of work available to persons with disabilities:


title: Accessibility

text: "Disability-specific employment reservations are limited to the public sector and a large number of the reserved positions continue to be vacant despite nearly two decades of enactment of the PWD Act".


title: Accessibility

text: Expenses related to adaptive or assistive technology required to participate in the workforce may be tax deductible expenses for individuals with a medical practitioner's prescription in some jurisdictions.


title: Accessibility

text: Disability management (DM) is a specialized area of human resources that supports efforts of employers to better integrate and retain workers with disabilities. Some workplaces have policies in place to provide "reasonable accommodation" for employees with disabilities, but many do not. In some jurisdictions, employers may have legal requirements to end discrimination against persons with disabilities.


title: Accessibility

text: It has been noted by researchers that where accommodations are in place for employees with disabilities, these frequently apply to individuals with "pre-determined or apparent disabilities as determined by national social protection or Equality Authorities", which include persons with pre-existing conditions who receive an official disability designation. One of the biggest challenges for employers is in developing policies and practises to manage employees who develop disabilities during the course of employment. Even where these exist, they tend to focus on workplace injuries, overlooking job retention challenges faced by employees who acquire a non-occupation injury or illness. Protecting employability is a factor that can help close the unemployment gap for persons with disabilities.


title: Accessibility

text: Providing mobility to people with disabilities includes changes for public facilities like gently sloping paths of travel for people with wheelchairs and difficulty walking up stairs, or audio announcements for the blind; dedicated services like paratransit; and adaptations to personal vehicles.


title: Accessibility

text: Automobile accessibility also refers to ease of use by disabled people. Automobiles, whether a car or a van, can be adapted for a range of physical disabilities. Foot pedals can be raised, or replaced with hand-controlled devices. Wheelchair hoists, lifts or ramps may be customized according to the needs of the driver. Ergonomic adaptations, such as a lumbar support cushion, may also be needed.


title: Accessibility

text: Generally, the more limiting the disability, the more expensive the adaptation needed for the vehicle. Financial assistance is available through some organizations, such as Motability in the United Kingdom, which requires a contribution by the prospective vehicle owner. Motability makes vehicles available for purchase or lease.


title: Accessibility

text: When an employee with a disability requires an adapted car for work use, the employee does not have to pay for a "reasonable adjustment" in the United Kingdom; if the employer is unable to pay the cost, assistance is offered by government programs.


title: Accessibility

text: A significant development in transportation, and public transport in particular, to achieve accessibility, is the move to "low-floor" vehicles. In a low-floor vehicle, access to part or all of the passenger cabin is unobstructed from one or more entrances by the presence of steps, enabling easier access for the infirm or people with push chairs. A further aspect may be that the entrance and corridors are wide enough to accommodate a wheelchair. Low-floor vehicles have been developed for buses, trolleybuses and trams.


title: Accessibility

text: A low floor in the vehicular sense is normally combined in a conceptual meaning with normal pedestrian access from a standard kerb (curb) height. However, the accessibility of a low-floor vehicle can also be utilised from slightly raising portions of kerb at bus stops, or through use of level boarding bus rapid transit stations or tram stops. The combination of access from a kerb was the technological development of the 1990s, as step-free interior layouts for buses had existed in some cases for decades, with entrance steps being introduced as chassis designs and overall height regulations changed.


title: Accessibility

text: Low-floor buses may also be designed with special height adjustment controls that permit a stationary bus to temporarily lower itself to ground level, permitting wheelchair access. This is referred to as a kneeling bus.


title: Accessibility

text: At rapid transit systems, vehicles generally have floors in the same height as the platforms but the stations are often underground or elevated, so accessibility there isn't a question of providing low-floor vehicles, but providing a step-free access from street level to the platforms (generally by elevators, which may be restricted to disabled passengers only, so that the step-free access isn't obstructed by non-disabled people people taking advantage).


title: Accessibility

text: In the United Kingdom, local transport authorities are responsible for checking that all people who live within their area can access essential opportunities and services, and where gaps in provision are identified the local authorities are responsible for organizing changes to make new connections. These requirements are defined in the UK Community Planning Acts legislation and more detailed guidance has been issued by the Department for Transport for each local authority. This includes the requirement to produce an Accessibility Plan under Community Planning legislation and to incorporate this within their Local Transport Plan. An Accessibility Plan sets out how each local authority plans to improve access to employment, learning, health care, food shops and other services of local importance, particularly for disadvantaged groups and areas. Accessibility targets are defined in the accessibility plans, these are often the distance or time to access services by different modes of transport including walking, cycling and public transport.


title: Accessibility

text: Accessibility Planning was introduced as a result of the report "Making the Connections: Final Report on Transport and Social Exclusion". This report was the result of research carried out by the Social Exclusion Unit. The United Kingdom also has a "code of practice" for making train and stations accessible: "Accessible Train and Station Design for Disabled People: A Code of Practice". This code of practice was first published in 2002 with the objective of compliance to Section 71B of the Railways Act 1993, and revised after a public consultation period in 2008.


title: Accessibility

text: Some transport companies have since improved the accessibility of their services, such as incorporating low-floor buses into their stock as standard. In August 2021, South Western Railway announced the streamlining of their accessibility services, allowing passengers requiring assistance to inform the company with as little as 10 minutes' notice at all 189 stations on its network, replacing an older scheme wherein assisted journeys had to be booked six hours to a day in advance. The system will utilise clear signage at stations and QR codes, allowing customers to send details of the assistance they require and their planned journey to staff remotely.


title: Accessibility

text: Making public services fully accessible to the public has led to some technological innovations. Public announcement systems using audio induction loop technology can broadcast announcements directly into the hearing aid of anyone with a hearing impairment, making them useful in such public places as auditoriums and train stations.


title: Accessibility

text: Accessibility modifications to conventional urban environments has become common in recent decades. The use of a curb cut, or kassel kerb, to enable wheelchair or walker movement between sidewalk and street level is found in most major cities of wealthy countries. The creation of priority parking spaces and of disabled parking permits has made them a standard feature of urban environments. Features that assist people with visual impairments include braille signs and tactile paving to allow a user with a cane to easily identify stairways, train platforms, and similar areas that could pose a physical danger to anyone who has a visual impairment.


title: Accessibility

text: Urban design features that may appear to be simple conveniences for persons without disabilities are often essential to anyone who has a disability. The loss of these features presents a significant barrier. For example, sometimes a lack of prompt snow-clearing on sidewalks of major Canadian city streets means that wheelchair and walker users cannot reach pedestrian crossing buttons on crosswalk posts, due to snow bank accumulation around the posts, making the crossing buttons inaccessible. Public services must take into account the need to maintain accessibility features in the urban environment.


title: Accessibility

text: Most existing and new housing, even in the wealthiest nations, lack basic accessibility features unless the designated, immediate occupant of a home currently has a disability. However, there are some initiatives to change typical residential practices so that new homes incorporate basic access features such as zero-step entries and door widths adequate for wheelchairs to pass through. Occupational Therapists are a professional group skilled in the assessment and making of recommendations to improve access to homes. They are involved in both the adaptation of existing housing to improve accessibility, and in the design of future housing.


title: Accessibility

text: The broad concept of Universal design is relevant to housing, as it is to all aspects of the built environment. Furthermore, a Visitability movement begun by grass roots disability advocates in the 1980s focuses specifically on changing construction practices in new housing. This movement, a network of interested people working in their locales, works on educating, passing laws, and spurring voluntary home access initiatives with the intention that basic access become a routine part of new home construction.


title: Accessibility

text: Accessibility in the design of housing and household devices has become more prominent in recent decades due to a rapidly ageing population in developed countries. Ageing seniors may wish to continue living independently, but the ageing process naturally increases the disabilities that a senior citizen will experience. A growing trend is the desire for many senior citizens to 'age in place', living as independently as possible for as long as possible. Accessibility modifications that allow ageing in place are becoming more common. Housing may even be designed to incorporate accessibility modifications that can be made throughout the life cycle of the residents.


title: Accessibility

text: The English Housing Survey for 2018/19 found only 9% of homes in England have key features, such as a toilet at entrance level and sufficiently wide doorways, to deem them accessible. This was an improvement from 5% in 2005. More than 400,000 wheelchair users in England were living in homes which are neither adapted nor accessible.


title: Accessibility

text: Under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, states parties are bound to assure accessible elections, voting, and voting procedures. In 2018, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities issued an opinion that all polling stations should be fully accessible. At the European Court of Human Rights, there are currently two ongoing cases about the accessibility of polling places and voting procedures. They were brought against Slovenia by two voters and the Slovenian Disability Rights Association. As of January 2020, the case, called Toplak and Mrak v. Slovenia, was ongoing. The aim of the court procedure is to make accessible all polling places in Europe.


title: Accessibility

text: Advances in information technology and telecommunications have represented a leap forward for accessibility. Access to the technology is restricted to those who can afford it, but it has become more widespread in Western countries in recent years. For those who use it, it provides the ability to access information and services by minimizing the barriers of distance and cost as well as the accessibility and usability of the interface. In many countries this has led to initiatives, laws and/or regulations that aim toward providing universal access to the internet and to phone systems at reasonable cost to citizens.


title: Accessibility

text: A major advantage of advanced technology is its flexibility. Some technologies can be used at home, in the workplace, and in school, expanding the ability of the user to participate in various spheres of daily life. Augmentative and alternative communication technology is one such area of IT progress. It includes inventions such as speech-generating devices, teletypewriter devices, adaptive pointing devices to replace computer mouse devices, and many others. Mobile telecommunications devices and computer applications are also equipped with accessibility features. They can be adapted to create accessibility to a range of tasks, and may be suitable for different kinds of disability.


title: Accessibility

text: The following impairments are some of the disabilities that affect communications and technology access, as well as many other life activities:


title: Accessibility

text: Each kind of disability requires a different kind of accommodation, and this may require analysis by a medical specialist, an educational specialist or a job analysis when the impairment requires accommodation.


title: Accessibility

text: One of the first areas where information technology improved the quality of life for disabled individuals is the voice operated wheelchair. Quadriplegics have the most profound disability, and the voice operated wheelchair technology was first developed in 1977 to provide increased mobility. The original version replaced the joystick system with a module that recognized 8 commands. Many other technology accommodation improvements have evolved from this initial development.


title: Accessibility

text: Missing arms or fingers may make the use of a keyboard and mouse difficult or impossible. Technological improvements such as speech recognition devices and software can improve access.


title: Accessibility

text: A communication disorder interferes with the ability to produce clearly understandable speech. There can be many different causes, such as nerve degeneration, muscle degeneration, stroke, and vocal cord injury. The modern method to deal with speaking disabilities has been to provide a text interface for a speech synthesizer for complete vocal disability. This can be a great improvement for people that have been limited to the use of a throat vibrator to produce speech since the 1960s.


title: Accessibility

text: An individual satisfies the definition of hearing disabled when hearing loss is about 30 dB for a single frequency, but this is not always perceptible as a disability. For example, loss of sensitivity in one ear interferes with sound localization (directional hearing), which can interfere with communication in a crowd. This is often recognized when certain words are confused during normal conversation. This can interfere with voice-only interfaces, like automated customer service telephone systems, because it is sometimes difficult to increase the volume and repeat the message.


title: Accessibility

text: Mild to moderate hearing loss may be accommodated with a hearing aid that amplifies ambient sounds. Portable devices with speed recognition that can produce text can reduce problems associated with understanding conversation. This kind of hearing loss is relatively common, and this often grows worse with age.


title: Accessibility

text: The modern method to deal with profound hearing disability is the Internet using email or word processing applications. The telecommunications device for the deaf (TDD) became available in the form of the teletype (TTY) during the 1960s. These devices consist of a keyboard, display and modem that connects two or more of these devices using a dedicated wire or plain old telephone service.


title: Accessibility

text: Modern computer animation allows for sign language avatars to be integrated into public areas. This technology could potentially make train station announcements, news broadcasts, etc. accessible when a human interpreter is not available.


title: Accessibility

text: A wide range of technology products are available to deal with visual impairment. This includes screen magnification for monitors, screen-reading technology for computers and small screen devices, mouse-over speech synthesis browsing, braille displays, braille printers, braille cameras, voice-operated phones, and tablets.


title: Accessibility

text: One emerging product that will make ordinary computer displays available for the blind is the refreshable tactile display, which is very different from a conventional braille display. This provides a raised surface corresponding to the bright and dim spots on a conventional display. An example is the Touch Sight Camera for the Blind.


title: Accessibility

text: Speech Synthesis Markup Language "(V1.0 Released 7 September 2004)" and Speech Recognition Grammar Specification "(V1.0 released 16 March 2004)" are relatively recent technologies intended to standardize communication interfaces using Augmented BNF Form and XML Form. These technologies assist visual impairments and physical impairment by providing interactive access to web content without the need to visually observe the content. While these technologies provides access for visually impaired individuals, the primary benefactor has been automated systems that replace live human customer service representatives that handle telephone calls.


title: Accessibility

text: There have been a few major movements to coordinate a set of guidelines for accessibility for the web. The first and most well known is The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), which is part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This organization developed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 and 2.0 which explain how to make Web content accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. Web "content" generally refers to the information in a Web page or Web application, including text, images, forms, and sounds. (More specific definitions are available in the WCAG documents.)


title: Accessibility

text: The WCAG is separated into three levels of compliance, A, AA and AAA. Each level requires a stricter set of conformance guidelines, such as different versions of HTML (Transitional vs Strict) and other techniques that need to be incorporated into coding before accomplishing validation. Online tools allow users to submit their website and automatically run it through the WCAG guidelines and produce a report, stating whether or not they conform to each level of compliance. Adobe Dreamweaver also offers plugins which allow web developers to test these guidelines on their work from within the program.


title: Accessibility

text: The ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36 WG7 24751 Individualized Adaptability and Accessibility in e-learning, education and training series is freely available and made of 3 parts: Individualized Adaptability and Accessibility in e-learning, education and training, Standards inventory and Guidance on user needs mapping.


title: Accessibility

text: Another source of web accessibility guidance comes from the US government. In response to Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act, the Access Board developed standards to which U.S. federal agencies must comply in order to make their sites accessible. The U.S. General Services Administration has developed a website where one can take online training courses for free to learn about these rules.


title: Accessibility

text: While WCAG provides much technical information for use by web designers, coders and editors, "BS 8878:2010 Web accessibility – Code of Practice" has been introduced, initially in the UK, to help site owners and product managers to understand the importance of accessibility. It includes advice on the business case behind accessibility, and how organisations might usefully update their policies and production processes to embed accessibility in their business-as-usual. On 28 May 2019, BS 8878 was superseded by "ISO 30071-1", the international Standard that built on BS 8878 and expanded it for international use.


title: Accessibility

text: Another useful idea is for websites to include a web accessibility statement on the site. Initially introduced in PAS 78, the best practice for web accessibility statements has been updated in BS 8878 to emphasise the inclusion of: information on how disabled and elderly people could get a better experience of using the website by using assistive technologies or accessibility settings of browsers and operating systems (linking to "BBC My Web My Way" can be useful here); information on what accessibility features the site's creators have included, and if there are any user needs which the site doesn't currently support (for example, descriptive video to allow blind people to access the information in videos more easily); and contact details for disabled people to be able to use to let the site creators know if they have any problems in using the site. While validations against WCAG, and other accessibility badges can also be included, they should be put lower down the statement, as most disabled people still do not understand these technical terms.


title: Accessibility

text: Equal access to education for students with disabilities is supported in some countries by legislation. It is still challenging for some students with disabilities to fully participate in mainstream education settings, but many adaptive technologies and assistive programs are making improvements. In India, the Medical Council of India has now passed the directives to all the medical institutions to make them accessible to persons with disabilities. This happened due to a petition by Dr Satendra Singh founder of Infinite Ability.


title: Accessibility

text: Students with a physical or mental impairment or learning disability may require note-taking assistance, which may be provided by a business offering such services, as with tutoring services. Talking books in the form of talking textbooks are available in Canadian secondary and post-secondary schools. Also, students may require adaptive technology to access computers and the Internet. These may be tax-exempt expenses in some jurisdictions with a medical prescription.


title: Accessibility

text: It is important to ensure that the accessibility in education includes assessments. Accessibility in testing or assessments entails the extent to which a test and its constituent item set eliminates barriers and permits the test-taker to demonstrate their knowledge of the tested content.


title: Accessibility

text: With the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 in the United States, student accountability in essential content areas such as reading, mathematics, and science has become a major area of focus in educational reform. As a result, test developers have needed to create tests to ensure all students, including those with special needs (e.g., students identified with disabilities), are given the opportunity to demonstrate the extent to which they have mastered the content measured on state assessments. Currently, states are permitted to develop two different types of tests in addition to the standard grade-level assessments to target students with special needs. First, the alternate assessment may be used to report proficiency for up to 1% of students in a state. Second, new regulations permit the use of alternate assessments based on modified academic achievement standards to report proficiency for up to 2% of students in a state.


title: Accessibility

text: To ensure these new tests generate results that permit valid inferences about student performance, they must be accessible to as many individuals as possible. The Test Accessibility and Modification Inventory (TAMI) and its companion evaluation tool, the Accessibility Rating Matrix (ARM), were designed to facilitate the evaluation of tests and test items with a focus on enhancing their accessibility. Both instruments integrate principles of accessibility theory and were guided by research on universal design, assessment accessibility, cognitive load theory, and research on item-writing and test development. The TAMI is a non-commercial instrument that has been made available to all state assessment directors and testing companies. Assessment researchers have used the ARM to conduct accessibility reviews of state assessment items for several state departments of education.


title: Erich Mielke

text: Erich Fritz Emil Mielke (; 28 December 1907 – 21 May 2000) was a German communist official who served as head of the East German Ministry for State Security ("Ministerium für Staatsicherheit" – MfS), better known as the Stasi, from 1957 until shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.


title: Erich Mielke

text: 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 Stalinist witch-hunt for ideological dissent within the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.


title: Erich Mielke

text: 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 (SED), later becoming head of the Stasi.


title: Erich Mielke

text: The Stasi under Mielke has been called by historian Edward Peterson the "most pervasive police state apparatus ever to exist on German soil". In a 1993 interview, Holocaust survivor and Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal said that, if one considers only the oppression of their own people, the Stasi under Mielke was "much, much worse than the Gestapo".


title: Erich Mielke

text: During the 1950s and 1960s Mielke led the process of forcibly forming collectivised farms from East Germany's family-owned farms, which sent a flood of refugees to West Germany. In response, Mielke oversaw the construction (1961) of the Berlin Wall and co-signed orders to shoot fatally all East Germans who attempted to leave the country. He also oversaw the establishment of pro-Soviet police states and paramilitary insurgencies in Western Europe, Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.


title: Erich Mielke

text: In addition to his role as head of the Stasi, Mielke was also an Army General in the National People's Army ("Nationale Volksarmee"), and a member of the SED's ruling Politburo. Dubbed "The Master of Fear" () by the West German press, Mielke was one of the most powerful and most hated men in East Germany.


title: Erich Mielke

text: After German reunification in 1990, Mielke was arrested (1991), prosecuted (1992), convicted, and incarcerated (1993) for the 1931 murders of Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck. Released from prison early due to ill health in 1995, he died in a Berlin nursing home in 2000.


title: Erich Mielke

text: Erich Mielke was born in a tenement in Berlin-Wedding, Brandenburg, on 28 December 1907. During the First World War, the neighborhood was known as "Red Wedding" due to many residents' Marxist militancy. In a handwritten biography written for the Soviet secret police, Mielke described his father as "a poor, uneducated woodworker," and said that his mother died in 1911. Both were, he said, members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). After his remarriage to "a seamstress," the elder Mielke and his new wife joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany and remained members when it was renamed the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). His son Erich claimed "My younger brother Kurt and two sisters were Communist sympathisers."


title: Erich Mielke

text: Despite his family's poverty, Mielke was sufficiently academically gifted to be awarded a free scholarship in the prestigious , but had to leave it a year later, for being "unable to meet the great demands of this school." While attending the Gymnasium, Mielke joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1925, and worked as a reporter for the communist newspaper "Rote Fahne" from 1928 to 1931.


title: Erich Mielke

text: Under the Weimar Republic, the KPD was the largest communist party in Europe and was seen as the "leading party" of the communist movement outside the Soviet Union. Under Ernst Thälmann's leadership, the KPD was completely obedient to Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin, and from 1928 the Party was both funded and controlled by the Comintern in Moscow.


title: Erich Mielke

text: Until the end of the Republic, the KPD viewed the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which dominated German politics between 1918 and 1931, as their mortal enemy. In keeping with Stalin's policy towards social democracy, the KPD considered all SPD members to be "social fascists". The KPD also believed that all other political parties were "fascist" and regarded itself as "the only anti-fascist Party" in Germany. Nevertheless, the KPD closely collaborated with the Nazi Party during the early 1930s and both Parties intended to replace the democratically elected government of the Weimar Republic with a totalitarian single party state.


title: Erich Mielke

text: Soon after joining the Party, Mielke joined the KPD's paramilitary wing, or "Parteiselbstschutz" ("Party Self Defense Unit"). At the time, the "Parteiselbstschutz" in Berlin was commanded by KPD Reichstag Representatives Hans Kippenberger and Heinz Neumann.


title: Erich Mielke

text: According to John Koehler, "Mielke was a special protege of Kippenberger's having taken to his paramilitary training with the enthusiasm of a Prussian Junker. World War I veterans taught the novices how to handle pistols, rifles, machine guns, and hand grenades. This clandestine training was conducted in the sparsely populated, pastoral countryside surrounding Berlin. Mielke also pleased Kippenberger by being an exceptional student in classes on the arts of conspiratorial behavior and espionage, taught by comrades who had studied at the secret M-school of the GRU in Moscow."


title: Erich Mielke

text: According to John Koehler, members of the "Parteiselbstschutz" "served as bouncers at Party meetings and specialized in cracking heads during street battles with political enemies." Besides the ruling SPD and its paramilitary Reichsbanner forces, the arch-enemies of the "Parteiselbstschutz" were the Stahlhelm, which was the armed wing of the Monarchist German National People's Party (DVNP), Trotskyites, and "radical nationalist parties."


title: Erich Mielke

text: According to Koehler, the KPD's Selbstschutz men "always carried a "Stahlrute", two steel springs that telescoped into a tube seventeen centimeters long, which when extended became a deadly, 35-centimeter weapon. Not to be outdone by the Nazis, these street-fighters were often armed with pistols as well."


title: Erich Mielke

text: In a 1931 biography written for the Cadre Division of the Comintern, Mielke recalled, "We took care of all kinds of work; terror acts, protecting illegal demonstrations and meetings, arms-trafficking, etc. The last work, which was accomplished by a Comrade and myself, was the Bülowplatz Affair" ().


title: Erich Mielke

text: During the last days of the Weimar Republic, the KPD had a policy of assassinating two Berlin police officers in retaliation for every KPD member killed by the police.


title: Erich Mielke

text: On 2 August 1931, KPD Members of the Reichstag Heinz Neumann and Hans Kippenberger received a dressing down from Walter Ulbricht, the Party's leader in the Berlin-Brandenburg region. Enraged by police interference and by Neumann and Kippenberger's failure to follow the policy, Ulbricht stated, "At home in Saxony we would have done something about the police a long time ago. Here in Berlin we will not fool around much longer. Soon we will hit the police in the head."


title: Erich Mielke

text: Enraged by Ulbricht's words, Kippenberger and Neumann decided to assassinate Paul Anlauf, the 42-year-old Captain of the Berlin Police's Seventh Precinct. Captain Anlauf, a widower with three daughters, had been nicknamed "Schweinebacke", or "Pig Face" by the KPD.


title: Erich Mielke

text: According to historian John Koehler, "Of all the policemen in strife-torn Berlin, the reds hated Anlauf the most. His precinct included the area around KPD headquarters, which made it the most dangerous in the city. The captain almost always led the riot squads that broke up illegal rallies of the Communist Party."


title: Erich Mielke

text: On the morning of Sunday 9 August 1931, Kippenberger and Neumann gave a last briefing to the hit-team in a room at the Lassant beer hall. Mielke and Erich Ziemer were selected as the shooters. During the meeting, Max Matern gave a Luger pistol to fellow lookout Max Thunert and said, "Now we're getting serious. We're going to give Schweinebacke something to remember us by."


title: Erich Mielke

text: Kippenberger then asked Mielke and Ziemer, "Are you sure that you are ready to shoot Schweinebacke?" Mielke responded that he had seen Anlauf many times during police searches of Party Headquarters. Kippenberger then instructed them to wait at a nearby beer hall which would permit them to overlook the entire Bülow-Platz. He further reminded them that Anlauf was accompanied everywhere by Senior Sergeant Max Willig, whom the KPD had nicknamed, "Hussar".


title: Erich Mielke

text: Kippenberger concluded, "When you spot Schweinebacke and Hussar, you take care of them." Mielke and Ziemer were informed that, after the assassinations were completed, a diversion would assist in their escape. They were then to return to their homes and await further instructions.


title: Erich Mielke

text: That evening, Anlauf was lured to Bülow-Platz by a violent rally demanding the dissolution of the Prussian Parliament.


title: Erich Mielke

text: According to Koehler, "As was often the case when it came to battling the dominant SPD, the KPD and the Nazis had combined forces during the pre-plebiscite campaign. At one point in this particular campaign, Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels even shared a speaker's platform with KPD agitator Walter Ulbricht. Both parties wanted the parliament dissolved because they were hoping that new elections would oust the SPD, the sworn enemy of all radicals. That fact explained why the atmosphere was particularly volatile this Sunday."


title: Erich Mielke

text: At eight o'clock that evening, Mielke and Ziemer waited in a doorway as Anlauf, Willig, and Captain Franz Lenck walked toward the Babylon Cinema, which was located at the corner of Bülowplatz and Kaiser-Wilhelm-Straße. As they reached the door of the movie house, the policemen heard someone scream, "Schweinebacke!"


title: Erich Mielke

text: As Anlauf turned toward the sound, Mielke and Ziemer opened fire at point blank range. Willig was wounded in the left arm and the stomach. However, he managed to draw his Luger pistol and fired a full magazine at the assailants. Lenck was shot in the chest and fell dead in front of the entrance. Willig crawled over and cradled the head of Anlauf, who had taken two bullets in the neck. Before he died, Sergeant Willig heard the Captain gasp, ""Wiedersehen... Gruss..."" ("So Long... Goodbye...").


title: Erich Mielke

text: Meanwhile, Mielke and Ziemer made their escape by running into the theater and out an emergency exit. They tossed their pistols over a fence, where they were later found by Homicide Detectives from the elite Mordkommission. Mielke and Ziemer then returned to their homes.


title: Erich Mielke

text: According to Koehler, "Back at Bülowplatz, the killings had triggered a major police action. At least a thousand officers poured into the square, and a bloody street battle ensued. Rocks and bricks were hurled from the rooftops. Communist gunmen fired indiscriminately from the roofs of surrounding apartment houses. As darkness fell, police searchlights illuminated the buildings. Using megaphones, officers shouted, "Clear the streets! Move away from the windows! We are returning fire!" By now the rabble had fled the square, but shooting continued as riot squads combed the tenements, arresting hundreds of residents suspected of having fired weapons. The battle lasted until one o'clock the next morning. In addition to the two police officers, the casualties included one Communist who died of a gunshot wound and seventeen others who were seriously wounded."


title: Erich Mielke

text: Anlauf's wife had died three weeks earlier of kidney failure. The murder of Anlauf thus left their three daughters as orphans. Their oldest daughter was forced to rush her planned wedding in order to keep her sisters from being put in an orphanage. Lenck was survived by his wife. Willig was hospitalized for 14 weeks, but made a full recovery and returned to active duty. In recognition for Willig's courage, the Berlin Police promoted him to Lieutenant.


title: Erich Mielke

text: After the murders, the act was celebrated at the Lichtenberger Hof, a favorite beer hall of the Rotfrontkämpferbund, where Mielke boasted: "Today we celebrate a job that I pulled!" ()


title: Erich Mielke

text: According to Koehler, "Kippenberger was alarmed when word reached him that Sergeant Willig had survived the shooting. Not knowing whether the sergeant could talk and identify the attackers, Kippenberger was taking no chances. He directed a runner to summon Mielke and Ziemer to his apartment at 74 Bellermannstrasse, only a few minutes walk from where the two lived. When the assassins arrived, Kippenberger told them the news and ordered them to leave Berlin at once. The parliamentarian's wife Thea, an unemployed schoolteacher and as staunch a Communist Party member as her husband, shepherded the young murderers to the Belgian border. Agents of the Communist International (Comintern) in the port city of Antwerp supplied them with money and forged passports. Aboard a merchant ship, they sailed for Leningrad. When their ship docked, they were met by another Comintern representative, who escorted them to Moscow."


title: Erich Mielke

text: Beginning in 1932, Mielke attended the Comintern's Military Political school under the alias Paul Bach. He later graduated from the Lenin School shortly before being recruited into the OGPU.


title: Erich Mielke

text: According to Koehler, "In mid-March 1933, while attending the Lenin School, Mielke received word from his OGPU sponsors that Berlin police had arrested Max Thunert, one of the conspirators in the Anlauf and Lenck murders. Within days, fifteen other members of the assassination team were in custody. Mielke had to wait six more months before the details of the police action against his Berlin comrades reached Moscow. On 14 September 1933, Berlin newspapers reported that all fifteen had confessed to their roles in the murders. Arrest warrants were issued for ten others who had fled, including Mielke, Ziemer, Ulbricht, Kippenberger, and Neumann."


title: Erich Mielke

text: Koehler also stated, "Defenders of Mielke later claimed that confessions had been obtained under torture by the Nazi Gestapo. However, all suspects were in the custody of the regular Berlin city criminal investigation bureau, most of whose detectives were SPD members. Some of the suspects had been nabbed by Nazi SA men and probably beaten before they were turned over to police. In the 1993 trial of Mielke, the court gave the defense the benefit of the doubt and threw out a number of suspect confessions."


title: Erich Mielke

text: On 19 June 1934, the 15 conspirators were convicted of first degree murder. The three deemed most culpable, Michael Klause, Max Matern, and Friedrich Bröde were sentenced to death. Their co-defendants received sentences ranging from nine months to fifteen years incarceration at hard labor. Klause's sentence was commuted to life in prison based upon his cooperation. Bröde hanged himself in his cell. As a result, only Matern was left to be executed by beheading on 22 May 1935.


title: Erich Mielke

text: Matern was subsequently glorified as a martyr by KPD and East German propaganda. Ziemer was officially killed in action while fighting on the Republican-side during the Spanish Civil War. Mielke, however, would not face trial for the murders until 1993.


title: Erich Mielke

text: Although Moscow's German Communist community was decimated during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, Mielke survived and was promoted.


title: Erich Mielke

text: In a handwritten autobiography prepared after World War II, Mielke recalled, "During my stay in the S.U. (Soviet Union), I participated in all Party discussions of the K.P.D. and also in the problems concerning the establishment of socialism and in the trials against the traitors and enemies of the S.U."


title: Erich Mielke

text: Among the German communists executed as a result of these "discussions" were Mielke's former mentors Heinz Neumann and Hans Kippenberger.


title: Erich Mielke

text: Mielke further recalled, "I was a guest on the honor grandstand of Red Square during the May Day and October Revolution parades. I became acquainted with many comrades of the Federation of World Communist Parties and the War Council of the Special Commission of the Comintern. I will never forget my meeting with Comrade Dimitrov, the Chairman of the Comintern, whom I served as an aide together with another comrade. I saw Comrade Stalin during all demonstrations at Red Square, especially when I stood on the grandstand. I mention these meetings because all these comrades are our models and teachers for our work."


title: Erich Mielke

text: During his time in the USSR, Mielke also developed a lifelong reverence for Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Polish aristocrat who founded the Soviet secret police. Mielke also began an equally permanent habit of calling himself a Chekist.


title: Erich Mielke

text: In a citation written decades later, Mielke described his philosophy of life, "The Chekist is the political combatant. He is the loyal son of... the workers' class. He stands at the head of the battle to strengthen the power of our workers' and peasants' state."


title: Erich Mielke

text: From 1936 to 1939, Mielke served in Spain as an operative of the Servicio de Investigación Militar, the political police of the Second Spanish Republic. While attached to the staff of, "veteran GRU agent," and future Stasi minister Wilhelm Zaisser, Mielke used the alias Fritz Leissner. Bernd Kaufmann, the director of the Stasi's espionage school later said, "The Soviets trusted Mielke implicitly. He earned his spurs in Spain."


title: Erich Mielke

text: At the time, the S.I.M. was heavily staffed by agents of the Soviet NKVD, whose Spanish rezident was General Aleksandr Mikhailovich Orlov. According to author Donald Rayfield, "Stalin, Yezhov, and Beria distrusted Soviet participants in the Spanish war. Military advisors like Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, journalists like Koltsov were open to infection by the heresies, especially Trotsky's, prevalent among the Republic's supporters. NKVD agents sent to Spain were therefore keener on abducting and murdering anti-Stalinists among Republican leaders and International Brigade commanders than on fighting Franco. The defeat of the Republic, in Stalin's eyes, was caused not by the NKVD's diversionary efforts, but by the treachery of the heretics."


title: Erich Mielke

text: In a 1991 interview, Walter Janka, a fellow German communist exile and company commander in the International Brigade, recalled his encounters with Mielke. During the winter of 1936, Janka was summoned by the SIM and interrogated by Mielke. Mielke demanded to know why Janka had voluntarily traveled to Spain rather than being assigned there by the Party. When he told Mielke to get lost, the SIM demoted Janka to the ranks and then expelled him from the International Brigade. Years later, Janka recalled, "While I was fighting at the front, shooting at the Fascists, Mielke served in the rear, shooting Trotskyites and Anarchists."


title: Erich Mielke

text: Upon the defeat of the Spanish Republic, Mielke fled across the Pyrenees Mountains to the Third French Republic, which interned him at Camp de Rivesaltes, Pyrénées-Orientales. Mielke, however, managed to send a message to exiled KPD members and, in May 1939, he escaped to Belgium. Although the Public Prosecutor of Berlin learned of Mielke's presence and filed for his extradition, the Belgian Government refused to comply, regarding the assassinations of Captains Anlauf and Lenck as "a political crime."


title: Erich Mielke

text: Both the Spanish Red Terror and the NKVD and the SIM's witch hunt for both real and imagined anti-Stalinists, however, had deadly serious political consequences. They horrified numerous formerly pro-Soviet Westerners who had been witnesses, including John Dos Passos, Arthur Koestler and George Orwell, and caused them to permanently turn against the U.S.S.R.


title: Erich Mielke

text: Mielke's belief in Stalin's official explanation for the defeat, that anti-Stalinists had stabbed the Spanish Republic in the back, continued to shape his attitudes for the rest of his life. In a 1982 speech before a group of senior Stasi officers, Mielke said, "We are not immune from villains among us. If I knew of any already, they wouldn't live past tomorrow. Short shrift. It's because I'm a Humanist, that I'm of this view."


title: Erich Mielke

text: In the same speech, Mielke also said, "All this blithering over to execute or not to execute, for the death penalty or against—all rot, Comrades. Execute! And, when necessary, without a court judgment."


title: Erich Mielke

text: During World War II, Mielke's movements remain mysterious. In a biography written after the war, he claimed to have infiltrated Organisation Todt under the alias Richard Hebel, but historian John O. Koehler considers this unlikely.


title: Erich Mielke

text: Koehler admits, however, "Mielke's exploits must have been substantial. By war's end, he had been decorated with the Order of the Red Banner, the Order of the Great Patriotic War First Class, and twice with the Order of Lenin. It is likely that he served as an NKVD agent, at least part of the time with guerrilla units behind German lines, for he knew all the partisan songs by heart and sang them in faultless Russian."


title: Erich Mielke

text: On April 25, 1945, Mielke returned to the Soviet Zone of Occupied Germany aboard a special Soviet aircraft that also carried fellow German Communists Walter Ulbricht, Wilhelm Zaisser, Ernst Wollweber, and many of the future leaders of the East Germany.


title: Erich Mielke

text: That same month, Mielke's future handler, NKGB General Ivan Serov, travelled to Germany from Warsaw and, from his headquarters in the Berlin suburb of Karlshorst, divided the Soviet Zone into "Operative Sectors."


title: Erich Mielke

text: On 10 July 1945, Marshal Georgy Zhukov signed SMA Order No. 2, which legalized the re-establishment of "anti-fascist" political parties like the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). On 15 July 1945, Mielke walked into the KPD's headquarters and volunteered his services.


title: Erich Mielke

text: In an autobiography written for the KPD, Mielke disclosed—truthfully—his involvement in the 1931 murders of Berlin Police Captains Anlauf and Lenck, and—mistakenly or misleadingly—that for this he had been tried "in absentia", found guilty, and sentenced to death. In actuality, Mielke's "name was mentioned in the 1934 trials but he was never tried". He admitted—truthfully—fighting on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, but claimed—falsely—that he had been released from the French internment camps and had worked in Belgium for an underground Communist newspaper under the code name "Gaston". Furthermore, Mielke concealed his past and contemporaneous involvement with the NKVD, NKGB, and the Nazi Organisation Todt (which he asserted he'd infiltrated).


title: Erich Mielke

text: According to Koehler, "As might be expected, Mielke's account of his past was approved by the Soviets. Had Serov not been part of the conspiracy, Mielke would have been instantly arrested or at least subjected to an intense internal investigation because of his membership in the Nazi Organisation Todt, which used thousands of slave laborers. But he was cleared in record time and by the end of June the Soviets had installed him as a station commander of the newly formed "Volkspolizei" (Vopo), the People's Police."


title: Erich Mielke

text: On 16 August 1947, Serov ordered the creation of "Kommissariat 5", the first German political police since the defeat of Nazi Germany.


title: Erich Mielke

text: According to Anne Applebaum, however, not everyone approved of the plan. In Moscow, Soviet Interior Minister Viktor Abakumov argued that a new secret police force would be demonized by Western governments and the media, which would paint the K-5 as a "new Gestapo." Furthermore, Abakumov, like Stalin, intensely distrusted German Communists and alleged that there "were not enough German cadres who have been thoroughly checked." Notwithstanding Abakumov's objections, however, recruitment into the K-5 began almost immediately. It is possible, as Norman Naimark suspects, that the NKGB had realized that their officers' lack of fluency in the German language was engendering massive popular resentment.


title: Erich Mielke

text: Wilhelm Zaisser, who had been Mielke's commanding officer in Republican Spain, was appointed the K-5's head. Mielke was installed as his deputy.


title: Erich Mielke

text: According to John Koehler, "The K-5 was essentially an arm of the Soviet secret police. Its agents were carefully selected veteran German communists who had survived the Nazi-era in Soviet exile or in concentration camps and prisons. Their task was to track down Nazis and anti-communists, including hundreds of members of the Social Democratic Party. Mielke and his fellow bloodhounds performed this task with ruthless precision. The number of arrests became so great that the regular prisons could not hold them. Thus, Serov ordered the establishment or re-opening of eleven concentration camps, including the former Nazi death camps of Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen."


title: Erich Mielke

text: According to Anne Applebaum, "One of the few documents from that era to survive (most were removed by the KGB or perhaps destroyed, in 1989 or before) mentions a departmental training meeting and included a list of attendees. Topping the list is a group of Soviet advisers. In this sense, K-5 did resemble the political police in the rest of Eastern Europe: as in Hungary, Poland, and the USSR itself, this new political police force was initially extra-governmental, operating outside the ordinary rule of law."


title: Erich Mielke

text: According to Edward N. Peterson, "Not surprisingly, K-5 acquired a reputation as bad as that of Stalin's secret police and worse than that of the Gestapo. At least with the Nazis, albeit fanatically racist, their victims did not suddenly disappear into the GULAG."


title: Erich Mielke

text: Despite the K-5's mass arrests of members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in the Soviet Zone, the number of SPD members continued to grow. By March 1946, SPD members outnumbered KPD members by more than 100,000. Fearing that they would lose the elections scheduled for the autumn, the leadership of the KPD asked for and received Stalin's permission to merge the two parties. When the SPD's leadership agreed only to schedule a vote for the rank and file to decide, permission was denied by the Soviet occupation authorities. The K-5 then began mass arrests of SPD members who refused to support the merger.


title: Erich Mielke

text: On 22 April 1946, the remaining leaders of the SPD in the Soviet Zone announced that they had united with the KPD to form the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). The SPD in the western zones of Occupied Germany responded by forming the SPD East Bureau in order to support and finance those Social Democrats who refused to accept the merger. Those who joined or worked with the East Bureau were, however, in serious danger of arrest by the K-5 and trial by Soviet military tribunals. By 1950, more than 5,000 SPD members and sympathisers had been imprisoned in the Soviet Zone or transferred to the GULAG. More than 400 were either executed or died during their imprisonments.


title: Erich Mielke

text: John Koehler has written that, prior to the spring of 1946, many Germans in the Soviet Zone, "merely shrugged at the wave of arrests, believing that the victims were former Nazi officials and war criminals." But then came the mass arrests of Social Democrats who opposed the merger, who, "were joined by people who had been denounced for making anti-communist or anti-Soviet remarks, among their number hundreds who were as young as fourteen years. Although these arrests were made by Germans purporting to be officials of the criminal police, the existence of the K-5 political police eventually was exposed. Mielke, meanwhile, had risen to the post of vice-president of the German Administration for Interior Affairs – the equivalent of the NKVD – and continued his manipulations from behind the scenes."


title: Erich Mielke

text: In January 1947, two retired Berlin policemen recognized Mielke at an official function. Informing the head of the criminal police in West Berlin, the policemen demanded that Mielke be arrested and prosecuted for the murders of Captains Anlauf and Lenck. Wilhelm Kühnast, the Public Prosecutor of Berlin, was immediately informed and ordered a search of the Kammergericht archives. To his astonishment, the files of the 1931 murders had survived the wartime bombing of Germany. Finding ample evidence of Mielke's involvement, Kühnast ordered the arrest of the communist policeman.


title: Erich Mielke

text: According to John Koehler, "At that time, the city administration, including the police, was under the control of the Allied Control Commission, which consisted of U.S., British, French, and Soviet military officers. All actions by city officials, including the judiciary, were to be reported to the Commission. The Soviet representative alerted the MGB. Action was swift. Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky, who had replaced Zhukov, protested, and his representatives at the Commission launched a vicious campaign to discredit Kühnast."


title: Erich Mielke

text: The Soviet representatives falsely claimed that Kühnast, a jurist with an impeccable anti-Nazi record, had been an official of Roland Freisler's People's Court. Taking the Soviets at their word, the Western Allies removed Kühnast from his position and placed him under house arrest. During the Berlin airlift, Kühnast fled from his home in East Berlin and was granted political asylum in the American Zone.


title: Erich Mielke

text: Meanwhile, the Soviet authorities confiscated all documents relating to the murders of Captains Anlauf and Lenck. According to Koehler, "The Soviets handed the court records to Mielke. Instead of destroying the incriminating papers, he locked them in his private safe, where they were found when his home was searched in 1990. They were used against him in his trial for murder."


title: Erich Mielke

text: In 1948, Mielke was appointed as security chief of the German Economic Commission (), the precursor to the future East German government.


title: Erich Mielke

text: Mielke's task was to investigate the theft and sale of state property on the black market. He was also charged with intercepting the growing number of refugees fleeing to the French, British, and American Zones.


title: Erich Mielke

text: Those his security forces caught while attempting to defect were used as slave labor in the uranium mines that were providing raw material for the Soviet atomic bomb project.


title: Erich Mielke

text: In 1949, the Soviet Military Administration ceded its legal functions to the newly created German Democratic Republic.


title: Erich Mielke

text: On 14 January 1950, Marshal Vasili Chuikov announced that all Soviet "internment camps" on German soil had been closed. Soon after, the DWK was absorbed into the newly created Ministry for State Security. In keeping with earlier syllabic abbreviations along the same lines (see OrPo, KriPo, and GeStaPo) East Germans immediately dubbed it the "Stasi" (from Staatssicherheit). With the approval of the Soviets, Mielke's commanding officer from Spain and in the K5, Wilhelm Zaisser, was appointed as the Stasi's head. Mielke was appointed to his staff with the rank of State Secretary. Mielke was also granted a seat in the SED's ruling Politburo.


title: Erich Mielke

text: According to John Koehler, "In the five years since the end of World War II, the Soviets and their vassals had arrested between 170,000 and 180,000 Germans. Some 160,000 had passed through the concentration camps, and of these about 65,000 had died, 36,000 had been shipped to the Soviet Gulag, and another 46,000 had been freed."


title: Erich Mielke

text: In 1949, as a response to the remilitarization of East Germany and the Soviet blockade of West Berlin, the United States, Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Portugal formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. In 1950, as a response to the outbreak of the Korean War, West Germany was also permitted to join NATO, which was then upgraded into a military alliance.


title: Erich Mielke

text: According to Koehler, however, "As the Cold War intensified, living conditions in Soviet-occupied East Germany showed little improvement beyond the postwar level of bare subsistence. The new government of the DDR – a mere puppet of the Kremlin – relied more and more on the Stasi to quell discontent among factory workers and farmers. Ulbricht, claiming that the social unrest was fomented by capitalist agents, once ordered Mielke to personally visit one large plant and 'arrest four or five such agents' as an example to the others. The Stasi deputy 'discovered' the agents in record time."


title: Erich Mielke

text: Also in 1949, Noel Field, an American citizen who had spied for the NKVD from inside the U.S. State Department, the Office of Strategic Services, and the CIA, fled from his posting in Switzerland to Communist Czechoslovakia after his cover was blown by fellow mole Whittaker Chambers. On 11 May 1949, the Czechoslovakian secret police, or StB, in obedience to a direct order from KGB chief Lavrenti Beria, arrested Field in Prague. Field was then handed over to the Hungarian ÁVO. After his interrogation in Budapest, Fields was used as a witness at show trials of senior Soviet Bloc Communists who, like László Rajk and Rudolf Slánský, stood accused of having spied for the United States. The real reason for the trials was to replace homegrown Communists in Eastern Europe with those who would be blindly loyal to Joseph Stalin and to blame the division of Germany on the intrigues of U.S. intelligence.


title: Erich Mielke

text: At the Rajk show trial, the prosecutor declared, "Noel Field, one of the leaders of American espionage, specialized in recruiting spies from among left-wing elements."


title: Erich Mielke

text: In August 1950, six senior SED members, including Willi Kreikemeyer, the director of Deutsche Reichsbahn and head of Berliner Rundfunk, were accused of "special connections with Noel Field, the American spy." All were either imprisoned or shot.


title: Erich Mielke

text: John Koehler writes, "Similar purges were conducted in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria, where Field appeared as a witness in show trials that resulted in some death sentences. The Soviets simply distrusted all Communists who had sought exile in the West. All the while, Mielke remained untouched and continued to serve as the deputy secret police chief. His survival reinforced the belief that he had spent the war years in the Soviet Union instead of France and Belgium as he had claimed in the 1945 questionnaire."


title: Erich Mielke

text: In June 1950, Erica Wallach, Noel Field's adopted daughter, decided to search for him. From Paris, she telephoned Leo Bauer, the editor-in-chief of Berliner Rundfunk. The call was monitored by agents of the Soviet Ministry for Internal Affairs, and Bauer's handler instructed him to invite Mrs. Wallach to East Berlin, where she was immediately arrested. Mielke personally interrogated her and, at one point, offered Mrs. Wallach immediate release if she named the members of her fictitious spy network. She was condemned to death by a Soviet military tribunal in East Berlin and shipped to the Lubianka prison in Moscow for her execution. After Joseph Stalin's death in on 5 March 1953, Erica Wallach's sentence was reduced to hard labor in Vorkuta, a region of the Gulag located above the Arctic Circle. She was released during the Khrushchev thaw in October 1955. At first, she was unable to join her husband and daughters in the U.S. because of the U.S. State Department's concern over her former membership in the Communist Party of Germany. It took the personal intervention of CIA Director Allen Dulles to reunite Erica Wallach with her family in 1957. Wallach's memoir of her experiences, "Light at Midnight", was published in 1967.


title: Erich Mielke

text: After Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin died inside his Kuntsevo Dacha on 5 March 1953, the Central Committee of the East German Socialist Unity Party met in a special session and eulogized the dictator as the "great friend of Germany who was always an advisor of and help to our people."


title: Erich Mielke

text: Two months later, on 5 May 1953, the SED's General Secretary, Walter Ulbricht, and the rest of the leadership increased work quotas by 10%. They also decided to rename Chemnitz Karl-Marx-Stadt and to institute the Order of Karl Marx as the GDR's highest award.


title: Erich Mielke

text: Two weeks later, Mielke accused "a group of Party officials" of "plotting against the leadership", which "resulted in more expulsions from the Politburo and the Central Committee."


title: Erich Mielke

text: Discontent among factory workers about a 10% increase of work quotas without a corresponding wage hike boiled over. On 16 June 1953, nearly one hundred construction workers gathered before work for a protest meeting at Stalinallee, in East Berlin. Words spread rapidly to other construction sites and hundreds of men and women joined the rally, which marched to the House of Ministries. The protesters chanted slogans for five hours, demanding to speak to Walter Ulbricht and Otto Grotewohl. Only Heavy Industry Minister Fritz Selbmann and Professor Robert Havemann, president of the GDR Peace Council, emerged. Their speech, however, was answered with jeers and the Ministers retreated into the heavily armed building. The regular and the Kasernierte Volkspolizei were summoned from their barracks, but made no move to attack the protesters, who returned to Stalinallee, where a general strike was called.