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
Erich Honecker back to Germany a year later to stand trial for his role in the human rights abuses committed by the East German government. However, the proceedings were abandoned due to illness and he was freed from custody to travel to join his family in exile in Chile, where he died in May 1994 from liver cancer. Honecker was born in Neunkirchen, in what is now Saarland, as the son of Wilhelm Honecker (1881–1969), a coal miner and political activist, who had married Caroline Catharina Weidenhof (1883–1963) in 1905. The couple had six children together: Katharina (Käthe, 1906–1925), Wilhelm (Willi, 1907–1944),