Born in Gelsenkirchen, Westphalia, Zaisser studied to become a teacher from 1910 to 1913 in Essen. When World War I began a year later, Zaisser joined the Imperial German Army. Upon leaving the service in 1918, Zaisser joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) and in 1919 returned to Essen, where he became a school teacher. During this period, Zaisser became an active communist. During the Kapp Putsch in 1920, he was a military leader of the fledgling Red Ruhr Army, which led to his arrest and dismissal as a teacher in 1921. After his release, Zaisser worked for the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) as a propagandist. From 1921 to 1922, Zaisser edited the Ruhr Echo and the Bergischen Voice of the People. In 1923, Zaisser was recruited into the KPD's intelligence wing and worked to covertly subvert the Third French Republic's occupation of the Ruhr.

Zaisser's efficient work caused him to be summoned to Moscow a year later, where he received both political and military intelligence training by the GRU.

After returning to the Weimar Republic in 1924, Zaisser became one of the leaders of the KPD intelligence wing, reporting directly to the Central Committee. Throughout the 1920s, Zaisser was also a paramilitary instructor and political leader for the KPD in such the areas of Rhine, Westphalia and Berlin. He also worked covertly in other nations for the [GRU from 1925 to 1926 as a military advisor to Syria. Starting in 1927, Zaisser worked almost exclusively for the Executive Committee of the Comintern, serving as a military advisor to China (1927–1930) and the Czechoslovak Army (1930–1932). His covert activities were ultimately rewarded by full membership in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1932 and full Soviet citizenship in 1940. In 1936, Zaisser traveled to the Second Spanish Republic under the covert identity of "Gomez."

On behalf of the Soviets, Zaisser became a military advisor to the Spanish Republican Army, while secretly remaining a, GRU agent,^[2] and as the Chief of the Servicio de Investigación Militar, the political police of the Second Spanish Republic.^[3] Wilhelm Zaisser's deputy was a career NKVD operative and future Stasi Minister Erich Mielke, who used the cover name "Fritz Leissner."

In addition to Zaisser and Mielke, the S.I.M. was filled with countless other agents of the GRU and NKVD, whose Spanish rezident was General Aleksandr Mikhailovich Orlov. According to author Donald Rayfield, "Stalin, Yezhov, and Beria distrusted Soviet participants in the Spanish war. Military advisors like Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, journalists like Koltsov were open to infection by the heresies, especially Trotsky's, prevalent among the Republic's supporters. NKVD agents sent to Spain were therefore keener on abducting and murdering anti-Stalinists among Republican leaders and International Brigade commanders than on fighting Franco. The defeat of the Republic, in Stalin's eyes, was caused not by the NKVD's diversionary efforts, but by the treachery of the heretics."^[4]

Zaisser quickly achieved the rank of brigadier general (initially commanding XIII International Brigade), and in 1937, he became leader of all the pro-Republican International Brigades operating in Spain. Following the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939, Zaisser returned to Moscow to resume working for the Comintern, but was thrown into jail, apparently because of the failure of the Soviet intervention in Spain.^[5] During and after World War II, Zaisser taught Stalinist re-education courses to German prisoners of war.

In 1947, Zaisser returned to Germany and joined the Socialist Unity Party (SED). Zaisser's career took off rapidly soon afterwards, and by 1948 he was Minister of the Interior and Deputy Minister-President of Saxony-Anhalt. From 1949 to 1954, Zaisser served as a representative in the Volkskammer and in 1950 worked on military and tactical issues at the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin Institute, a facility to which very few non-Soviets had access.

In 1950, Zaisser gained membership in East Germany's Politburo and the Central Committee of the SED, thus becoming one of the most powerful men in the country. In the same year, Zaisser was awarded the Karl Marx Medal and appointed Director of the Ministry of State Security. Using his vast knowledge of intelligence work, Zaisser built the Stasi into a powerful organization.

After the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin on 5 March 1953, Moscow favored replacing East Germany's Stalinist party leader Walter Ulbricht and considered Zaisser a potential candidate. However, the workers' uprising, which was suppressed by the Red Army on 17 June, led to a backlash.

Alarmed by the uprising, Lavrenty Beria, the First Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union and head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, personally travelled from Moscow to East Berlin. He conferred with Wilhelm Zaisser and with Erich Mielke, his deputy, both of whom he had known since the early 1930s. During both conversations, Beria demanded to know why the Stasi had failed to recognize the extreme discontent of the population and inform the Party leadership, which could then have prevented the uprising by taking extremely repressive measures in advance. Both Zaisser and Mielke answered Beria's questions circumspectly, and were accordingly left in their posts.

Beria accordingly returned to Moscow intending to remove Ulbricht from power as Premier. However, he was arrested on 26 June 1953, as part of a coup d'état led by Nikita Khrushchev and Marshal Georgy Zhukov. Beria was tried on charges of 357 counts of rape and high treason. He was sentenced to death and shot by Red Army Colonel-General Pavel Batitsky on 23 December 1953.^[6]

Meanwhile, when the East German Politburo met on 8 July, it still seemed that Ulbricht would be deposed as Party General Secretary. While Zaisser conceded that the SED's whole Politburo was responsible for the "accelerated construction of socialism" and for the subsequent fallout. But he also added that to leave Ulbricht as Premier, "would be opposed catastrophic for the New Course".^[7]

By the end of the meeting, only two Politburo members still supported Ulbricht's leadership: Free German Youth League chief Erich Honecker and Party Control Commission Chairman Hermann Matern. Ulbricht only managed to forestall a decision then and there with a promise to make a statement at the forthcoming 15th SED CC Plenum, scheduled for later that month.^[7]

Meanwhile, Mielke informed a Party commission looking for scapegoats that Zaisser, was calling for secret negotiations with West Germany and that, "he believed the Soviet Union would abandon the DDR."^[8]

Once he knew he had the complete support of new Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, Ulbricht removed Zaisser and all other critics of his leadership from the SED's ruling Politburo. Zaisser was also forced to resign as Minister for State Security in July 1953.^[9] However, in 1953 Zaisser was decorated with the Order of Karl Marx.^[1]

Ultimately, Zaisser and all other anti-Ulbricht members of the Politburo and the Central Committee were dismissed from all their other positions. Ulbricht particularly accused Zaisser of not using more of the repressive power of the Stasi during the uprising of June 1953. Zaisser was stripped of all his posts, expelled from the SED, and classified as an enemy of the people.

Wilhelm Zaisser spent his final years working as a translator and at the Institute of Marxism and Leninism. He died in obscurity in East Berlin in 1958.

Only after the 1989 Peaceful Revolution and German Reunification in 1990, was Zaisser formally rehabilitated. His Party membership posthumously was also restored by the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the successor party to the SED, in 1993.

• Rudolf Herrnstadt
• Heinrich Rau
• Anton Ackermann
• Ruhr Uprising
• International Brigades
• International Brigades order of battle

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