Word: zaisser
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Communists set out to identify and punish the rioters of the June uprising, to sniff out and crush every lingering trace of dissidence, and to discipline party members who were guilty of "capitulatory behavior." Strongman Ulbricht fired Wilhelm Zaisser, boss of the SSD (the Soviet zone security police), reinstated the backbreaking work norms, launched a clattering campaign against Western "spies" and "saboteurs." East German papers were crammed with lurid stories of arrests, trials, confessions and stern punishments. By last week, in the courts of cold-eyed Minister of Justice Hilde Benjamin, "the Red guillotine," some 320 sentences had been handed...
Last week, in a shakeup following the June 17 workers' revolt, Zaisser was one of half a dozen who lost their jobs. He was the biggest to fall. His Ministry of State Security was merged with the Ministry of the Interior, and he was kicked off the German Communist Party's Central Committee and the German Politburo. The official reason: "Representing a wing hostile to the party, and being an exponent of the defeatist line calculated to undermine the unity of the party...
...Germany's turbulent Ruhr, Gomez was actually Wilhelm Zais-ser. He had got his taste for fighting in Germany's World War I army, in which he rose to the rank of lieutenant. When the bloody "workers' rebellion" broke out in the Ruhr in 1923, Zaisser organized workers' brigades. He was already known as the "Red General of the Ruhr." Taken prisoner, he escaped to Russia, where he became a Soviet citizen and a colonel in the Red army. During the Nazi regime, he returned to Germany, a leader and organizer of the Communist underground...
After his Spanish Civil War days, he went to Moscow, only to be thrown into a Russian jail, apparently because of the failure of Communist intervention in Spain. The resourceful Stalin remembered him when Germany attacked Russia in 1941, put him to work indoctrinating German officers taken prisoner. Zaisser, as he now called himself again, helped build a renegade German army inside Russia. But it was four years before Stalin let him go back to Germany. In 1945 he turned up in Saxony-Anhalt as chief of police. His real job was building up the 130,000-man Volkspolizei...
...army group: some were assigned to a fleet of 31 armed ships, others to flight training in Yak-17s Behind the "Vopos" rose the secret police, some 30,000 organized in NKVD style by a veteran (60) Red of the Spanish civil war and Moscow fraternity named Wilhelm Zaisser...