Erich Mielke; Head of East German Secret Police

Erich Mielke, the longtime head of East Germany’s notorious secret police and spy apparatus, has died, a Berlin newspaper reported Thursday.

The newspaper Berliner Kurier, in a report to appear in today’s editions, said the 92-year-old Mielke died Monday at a Berlin home for the elderly.

An official at the Berlin registrar’s office confirmed that Mielke’s death had been reported to the agency.

Mielke headed the Ministry of State Security, known more commonly as the Stasi, for three decades. The all-pervasive network included 85,000 full-time domestic spies and as many as 260,000 voluntary informers. The Stasi archive kept tabs on 5.5 million people.

Once the regime’s No. 2 man, the ailing Mielke had recently lived a secluded life in eastern Berlin, reportedly on a monthly pension of about $465.

Jailed shortly after the collapse of East Germany and unification in 1990, Mielke was convicted by a Berlin court in 1993 for involvement as a young Communist street fighter in the murders of two Berlin policemen Aug. 9, 1931. He was released in 1995 after serving two-thirds of his six-year sentence.

But he escaped prosecution for his 1957-89 leadership of the Stasi, including charges related to shooting deaths at the Berlin Wall, because of poor health and senility.

Born in Berlin on Dec. 28, 1907, Mielke joined a Communist youth group in 1921. He became a full member in 1925 and worked as a reporter for the party’s newspaper, Red Flag.

He became a member of the party’s paramilitary force, leading to his participation in the August 1931 demonstration in Berlin during which the two policemen were killed.

Sought for the killings, Mielke escaped to Belgium using identification from the Soviet Union.

Mielke went on to the Soviet Union and attended the elite International Lenin School in Moscow in the mid-1930s.

In 1936, he served in the International Brigade that fought in the Spanish Civil War against Gen. Francisco Franco, whose forces triumphed and set up a fascist dictatorship. Mielke was interned for a time in France, along with other brigade members.

In 1940, Mielke returned to the Soviet Union and then to Soviet-occupied eastern Germany in 1945. He helped organize police in the Soviet-occupied zone and became deputy chief of state security when East Germany was founded in 1950.

He took over as minister in 1957 and joined the Politburo in 1976, posts he held until the Stalinist regime collapsed when the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989.

Mielke went on trial for shootings at the wall along with East Germany’s last Stalinist leader, Erich Honecker, in 1992. But he was dropped from the case because the presiding judge declared him too senile to follow the proceedings.

Honecker was also dropped for reasons of health and died in exile in Chile of liver cancer in 1994.

Mielke lived with his wife in eastern Berlin until March, when he was admitted to a home for the elderly.