Erich Mielke demonstrations politically and giving "every DDR citizen the right to travel." On 17 October 1989, Mielke and the rest of the GDR's Politburo met to follow Gorbachev's demand, voiced in August, for Erich Honecker be removed as General Secretary of the SED and State Council chairman. Suspecting that Honecker's personal bodyguards might try to arrest the members of the Central Committee when they met to vote Honecker out in favour of Egon Krenz, Mielke saw to it that Stasi agents were stationed near the meeting room. While deliberations were underway, Mielke told Honecker that "we simply cannot start shooting with
SM-70 GDR as well, since Erich Honecker saw the SM-70 as troublesome, expensive and bad for the GDR's image, and intended to remove them shortly anyway (along with the rest of the buried mines) when he implemented his plan for a fully "electronic" border defense grid ("Grenze 2000"). Honecker's plan eventually fell through due to lack of funding, but the SM-70 continued to be removed as per the agreement, being replaced with extra buried PMN mines, which remained in place until the fall of East Germany in 1990. SM-70 The SM-70 ("Splittermine Modell 1970") was an East German directional antipersonnel mine