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
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