History of Germany (1945–90) eventually hundreds of thousands of people in several cities—particularly in Leipzig—continued to grow. On 7 October, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev visited Berlin to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the establishment of East Germany and urged the East German leadership to pursue reform, without success. The movement of civil resistance against the East German regime—both the emigration and the demonstrations—continued unabated. On 18 October, Erich Honecker was forced to resign as head of the SED and as head of state and was replaced by Egon Krenz. But the exodus continued unabated, and pressure for political reform mounted. On 4 November,
Zersetzung whom sustained irreversible damage. Pensions for restitution have been created for the victims. The Stasi, or Ministry for State Security (German: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS) by its full name, defined "Zersetzung" in its 1985 dictionary of political operatives as During its first decade of existence, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) subdued political opponents primarily through the penal code, by accusing them of incitement to war or of calls of boycott. To counteract the international isolation of the GDR following the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, judicial terror was abandoned. From the start of the Erich Honecker era in