Problem: Erich Mielke was born in a tenement in Berlin-Wedding, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire, on 28 December 1907. During the First World War, the neighborhood was known as "Red Wedding" due to many residents' Marxist militancy. In a handwritten biography written for the Soviet secret police, Mielke described his father as "a poor, uneducated woodworker," and said that his mother died in 1911. Both were, he said, members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).

In February 1992, Mielke was put on trial for the first degree murders of Captains Anlauf and Lenck as well as the attempted murder of Senior Sergeant Willig. The evidence for Mielke's guilt was drawn from the original police files, the 1934 trial transcripts, and a handwritten memoir in which Mielke had admitted that, "the Bulowplatz Affair," had been his reason for fleeing Germany. All had been found in Mielke's house safe during a police search in 1990. Mielke was believed to have kept the files for purposes of "blackmailing Honecker and other East German leaders." Former Associated Press reporter and White House Press Secretary John Koehler also testified about how Mielke had boasted of his involvement in the Bulowplatz murders during a confrontation at Leipzig in 1965.  During his trial, Mielke appeared increasingly senile, admitting his identity but otherwise remaining silent, taking naps, and showing little interest in the proceedings. In a widely publicized incident, Mielke appeared to mistake the presiding judge for a prison barber. When a journalist for Der Spiegel attempted to interview him in Plotzensee Prison, Mielke responded, "I want to go back to my bed" (German: "Ich mochte in mein Bett zuruck."). Opinion was divided whether Mielke was suffering from senile dementia or was pretending in order to evade prosecution.  After twenty months of one-and-a-half hour daily sessions, Erich Mielke was convicted on two counts of murder and one of attempted murder. On 26 October 1993, a panel of three judges and two jurors sentenced him to six years' imprisonment. In pronouncing sentence, Judge Theodor Seidel, told Mielke that he "will go down in history as one of the most fearsome dictators and police ministers of the 20th century."

How many persons were murdered?

Answer with quotes: Captains Anlauf and Lenck


Problem: Francis Albert Sinatra was born on December 12, 1915, in an upstairs tenement at 415 Monroe Street in Hoboken, New Jersey. He was the only child of Italian immigrants Antonino Martino "Marty" Sinatra and Natalina "Dolly" Garaventa. Sinatra weighed 13.5 pounds (6.1 kg) at birth and had to be delivered with the aid of forceps, which caused severe scarring to his left cheek, neck, and ear, and perforated his ear drum, damage that remained for life. Due to his injuries at birth, his baptism at St. Francis Church in Hoboken was delayed until April 2, 1916.

Sinatra attempted to pursue an acting career in Hollywood in the early 1940s. While films appealed to him, being exceptionally self-confident, he was rarely enthusiastic towards his own acting, once remarking that "pictures stink". Sinatra made his film debut in 1941, performing in an uncredited sequence in Las Vegas Nights, singing "I'll Never Smile Again" with Tommy Dorsey's The Pied Pipers. In 1943 he had a cameo role along with Duke Ellington and Count Basie in Charles Barton's Reveille with Beverly, making a brief appearance singing "Night and Day". The following year he was given his leading roles in Higher and Higher and Step Lively for RKO Pictures.  In 1945, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cast Sinatra opposite Gene Kelly and Kathryn Grayson in the Technicolor musical Anchors Aweigh, in which he played a sailor on leave in Hollywood for four days. A major success, it garnered several Academy Award wins and nominations, and the song "I Fall in Love Too Easily", sung by Sinatra in the film, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. In 1946, Sinatra briefly appeared at the end of Richard Whorf's commercially successful Till the Clouds Roll By, a Technicolor musical biopic of Jerome Kern, in which he sang "Ol' Man River.  In 1949, Sinatra co-starred with Gene Kelly in the Technicolor musical Take Me Out to the Ball Game, a film set in 1908, in which Sinatra and Kelly play baseball players who are part-time vaudevillians. He teamed up with Kelly for a third time in On the Town, playing a sailor on leave in New York City. Today the film is rated very highly by critics, and in 2006 it ranked No. 19 on the American Film Institute's list of best musicals. Both Double Dynamite (1951), an RKO Irving Cummings comedy produced by Howard Hughes, and Joseph Pevney's Meet Danny Wilson (1952) failed to make an impression. The New York World Telegram and Sun ran the headline "Gone on Frankie in '42; Gone in '52".

What other films was Sinatra in?

Answer with quotes:
Take Me Out to the Ball Game, a film set in 1908, in which Sinatra and Kelly play baseball players who are part-time vaudevillians.