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. 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". 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. 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." 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. However, in 1953 Zaisser was decorated with the Order of Karl Marx. 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