Wilhelm Zaisser

Common card · No. 450312

Wilhelm Zaisser (20 June 1893 – 3 March 1958) was a German communist politician and statesman who served as the founder and first Minister for State Security of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) from 1950 to 1953. A veteran of World War I, the Ruhr Uprising, and the Spanish Civil War, he was recruited by the Soviet Union as a GRU agent and served in that capacity for most of the 1920s and 1930s. He returned to Germany after the end of World War II and took part in the founding of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) and the GDR. Following the death of Joseph Stalin and the East German uprising of 1953, he opposed SED First Secretary Walter Ulbricht but lost the power struggle and was stripped of his positions.

Read on Wikipedia · Image ACME, Public domain