date their power and to maintain control over the populations of these countries for more than four decades?
Stalin told Djilas that "they [the Germans] are a queer people, like sheep . . . The West will make Western Germany their own, and we shall turn Eastern Germany into our own state" (1963, pp. 79, 153). Gelb (1986) says the following:
The Soviets had reestablished a German communist party in Berlin within days of the war's end. The Germans who were to be its leaders had been flow in from Moscow . . . Barely had the non-Communist parties surfaced in the city when it became evidence that the Communists did not intend to confine themselves to conventional political action to compete with them (p. 29).
According to Dornberg (1968), during the occupation, these new German communist leaders headed by Walter Ulbricht relied largely on "local state and police forces [which] were staffed with political commissariats who work with Soviet secret police" (p. 256). After the Socialist Unity Party (SED) was formed as a front for the communists, and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was proclaimed in 1949, German secret police were absorbed into the Ministry of State Security (MSS). Under their first leaders, Wilhelm Zaisser and Ernst Wollweber, they "adopted many of the KGB's practices, torture, temporary detainment [without trial], wiretapping, entrapment and the use of a huge informer network" (Dornberg, 1968, p. 256). Political opponents were intimidated, beaten, killed, abducted, deported or killed. Craig (1982) says that "in 1948-49 . . . the SED transformed itself from a radical democratic mass party to a cadre party of the Stalinist type and became the organizing force of the GDR" (p. 50).
The German secret police, the State Security Service, Staatssicherheitsdienst, or SSD or Stasi for short, was under the control of Minister of State Security Erich Mielcke from 1957 to 1989 and a member of the ruling Politburo after...