Commander of the Austro-Prussian army who issued the Brunswick Manifesto
On 25 July 1792 at Koblenz he issued a manifesto in his name warning that Paris and its people would face severe reprisals if the French royal family were harmed.
Ruling prince of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, a nephew of Frederick the Great and a Prussian field marshal, he took command of the combined Austrian and Prussian armies when war began in 1792. On 25 July he issued the Brunswick Manifesto at Koblenz; it bore his name, but the text is generally attributed to émigré circles. Meant to protect the king, the threat instead hardened feeling against the monarchy in Paris. He took Longwy and Verdun, then halted at Valmy on 20 September and withdrew from France. He was mortally wounded at the Battle of Auerstedt in 1806.
Career timeline
1780Succeeded his father as ruling prince of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel.
1792As commander of the Austro-Prussian army he issued the Brunswick Manifesto on 25 July.
1792Took Longwy and Verdun, then halted at Valmy on 20 September and withdrew from France.
1806Commanded the Prussian army at Auerstedt, was mortally wounded and died at Ottensen on 10 November.
King of Prussia who signed the Declaration of Pillnitz and campaigned against France
In August 1791 he co-signed the Declaration of Pillnitz with Leopold II in support of the French king, and in 1792 he joined in person the campaign led by the Duke of Brunswick.
He succeeded his uncle Frederick II as King of Prussia in 1786 and, at home, turned away from his predecessor’s enlightened style towards tighter censorship and religious control. In reaction to the French Revolution he set aside the old rivalry with Austria: in August 1791 he joined Leopold II in the Declaration of Pillnitz, and a formal alliance followed in February 1792. He took part in person in the 1792 and 1793 campaigns against France, but was held back by lack of money while his advisers looked more to the partitions of Poland. He signed a separate peace with France at Basel in 1795 and died in 1797.
Career timeline
1786Became King of Prussia on the death of his uncle Frederick II.
1791Issued the Declaration of Pillnitz with Leopold II in August in support of the French king.
1792–1793Concluded a formal alliance with Austria in February 1792 and took part in person in the campaigns of 1792 and 1793 against France.
1793–1795Gained territory in the second and third partitions of Poland and made a separate peace with France at Basel in April 1795.
Author of Capital and leader of the First International
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!" — Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)
Born into a lawyer's family in Trier, he began as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung. He renounced his Prussian citizenship in 1845 and remained stateless for the rest of his life, living in London exile from 1849. Over forty years with Engels he wrote the Communist Manifesto and Capital and led the First International. The late Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) takes apart, line by line, the Lassallean thinking lodged in the German workers' party's unity programme, his last answer to the idea of the state as the instrument of socialism.
Career timeline
1842–1843Editor of the Rheinische Zeitung until Prussian censorship closed it
1844Met Engels in Paris, beginning a lifelong collaboration
Marx's co-author and patron; author of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
"The State is not 'abolished'. It dies out." — Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)
Born to a Barmen mill-owning family, he managed the family firm in Manchester and wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). After the 1848 revolution and the Baden rising he returned to the office for twenty years to keep the Marx household in London. From Anti-Dühring (1878) he drew three chapters into the pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), which was translated into ten languages and became the introduction to Marxism. After Marx's death he edited Capital vols. II and III, and in 1891 he published the Critique of the Gotha Programme (buried for fifteen years) over the objections of the party leadership.
Career timeline
1842–1844Clerked at Ermen and Engels in Manchester — the field for The Condition of the Working Class in England
1844Met Marx in Paris, beginning a lifelong collaboration
1848Co-wrote the Communist Manifesto; on the staff of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung
1849Fought in the Baden-Palatinate campaign as an adjutant
1850–1870Returned to the Manchester firm and supported the Marx family for twenty years
1878Published Anti-Dühring, whose footnote calls Bismarckian nationalisation 'a kind of spurious Socialism'
1880At Lafargue's request drew out three chapters as Socialisme utopique et Socialisme scientifique
1883–1894Edited Capital vols. II and III from Marx's manuscripts
1891Published the Critique of the Gotha Programme in Die Neue Zeit, answering the party's objections in his foreword
Founder of the ADAV, Germany's first workers' party
"Das eiserne und grausame Gesetz" — the iron and cruel law Lassalle said held wages down to bare subsistence (1863)
A lawyer and agitator from a Jewish merchant family in Breslau. In May 1863 he founded the General German Workers' Association (ADAV) at Leipzig and was elected its president for five years, arguing that universal suffrage would turn the state toward funding producers' co-operatives and so toward socialism. That same year he met Bismarck in secret to sound out an alliance between the workers and the Prussian monarchy, which drew Marx's deep suspicion. In 1864 he was shot in a duel over a marriage and died three days later outside Geneva. Eleven years afterwards his programme supplied the frame of the Gotha unity programme.
Career timeline
1848–1849Agitated in the Rhineland during the revolution; jailed six months for inciting armed resistance
1862The Workers' Programme lecture, addressing the working class as an independent political force
1863.5Founded the ADAV at Leipzig and became its president for a five-year term
1863Secret meetings and correspondence with Bismarck on a workers–monarchy alliance
1864.8Shot in a duel outside Geneva; died three days later
Co-founder of the Eisenach party and drafter of the Gotha Programme
"Nobody has combatted State Socialism more than we German Socialists, nobody has shown more distinctively than I, that State Socialism is really State capitalism!" — 'Our Recent Congress' (1896)
Born in Giessen, he joined the risings of 1848 and fled by way of Switzerland to London, where he spent twelve years as a close associate of Marx and Engels. In 1869 he founded the Social Democratic Workers' Party with August Bebel at Eisenach; arrested for opposing war credits, he was convicted at the Leipzig treason trial of 1872. He was the man who brought off the Gotha unity congress of 1875 and drafted its programme, the document Marx took apart line by line. From 1890 until his death he edited the party paper Vorwärts. He was the father of Karl Liebknecht.
Career timeline
1848–1849Fought in the Baden rising and fled to Switzerland after its defeat
1850–1862Exile in London, close to Marx and Engels, and a member of the Communist League
1869Co-founded the Social Democratic Workers' Party at Eisenach with Bebel
1870–1872Arrested for opposing war credits; sentenced to two years' fortress confinement at the Leipzig treason trial
1875Led the Gotha unity congress and drafted the programme that merged the party with the Lassalleans
1878–1890Held the party together as a Reichstag deputy under the Anti-Socialist Laws
1890–1900Editor-in-chief of the party paper Vorwärts
Co-founder of the SPD who led the German workers' movement for over 40 years, the 'shadow emperor' of the working class
"The struggle in Paris is only a small outpost skirmish; the main affair in Europe is still ahead of us. Before a few decades have passed, 'War on the palaces, peace to the cottages' will become the battle cry of the entire European proletariat." — Reichstag, 25 May 1871
A woodturner's apprentice who co-founded the Social Democratic Workers' Party with Wilhelm Liebknecht in 1869 and, through the Gotha unity congress of 1875, built the SPD into the world's largest socialist party. Under the Anti-Socialist Laws (1878–1890) he ran the illegal party paper from Zurich exile and held the underground organisation together; he steered the adoption of the Erfurt Programme (1891), which became the Marxist benchmark for European social democracy, and led the orthodox defence against Eduard Bernstein's revisionism. His Woman and Socialism (1879) ran through over fifty editions as the founding text of socialist feminism, and his funeral in 1913 drew the leaders of the Second International.
Career timeline
1866–1867Co-founded the Saxon People's Party with Wilhelm Liebknecht; active in the Leipzig Workers' Educational Association
1867First elected to the Reichstag of the North German Confederation; held a seat continuously until his death
1869Co-founded the Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP) with Liebknecht at Eisenach
1870–1872Opposed war credits in the Franco-Prussian War and defended the Paris Commune; convicted of high treason, served two years' fortress confinement
1875Led the Gotha unity congress, merging with the Lassalleans to form the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany
1878–1890Published Der Sozialdemokrat from Zurich exile and directed the underground party under the Anti-Socialist Laws
1891Steered the adoption of the Erfurt Programme, establishing the Marxist benchmark for European social democracy
1899–1906Defended orthodox Marxism against Bernstein's revisionism; mediated the mass strike debate between radicals and trade unions
The elder theoretician of German Marxism: historian, literary critic, and Spartacus League co-founder
Lenin characterized Mehring as 'a man not only wanting but also knowing how to be a Marxist.'
Franz Mehring was the foremost Marxist historian, literary critic, and philosopher of the German workers' movement. Joining the SPD in 1891, he became a lead writer for Die Neue Zeit and, alongside Kautsky and Luxemburg, formed the theoretical backbone of the party's Marxist left. He co-founded the Spartacus League in 1916, led the founding of the German Communist Party (KPD) in 1919, and authored the classical Marx biography Karl Marx: The Story of His Life (1918) and the landmark History of German Social Democracy (1898). His The Lessing Legend (1893), a materialist demolition of Prussian mythology, drew high praise from Engels, and he extended historical materialism into cultural criticism against the encroachments of neo-Kantianism and Nietzsche.
Career timeline
1846Born in Schlawe, Pomerania (Prussia)
1884–1890Editor, Berliner Volks-Zeitung
1891Joined SPD; lead writer, Die Neue Zeit (to 1913)
German field marshal in World War I and president of the Weimar Republic
Paul von Hindenburg commanded German land forces during World War I and was elected president of the Weimar Republic in 1925, serving until 1934. In the early 1930s he authorized governments lacking parliamentary support to rule through presidential emergency decrees, and on January 30, 1933, appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor. Hitler’s government soon expanded its power through terror and political manipulation.
German field marshal who governed occupied Ukraine in 1918 and was assassinated in Kiev by a Left SR
Prussian field marshal Hermann von Eichhorn became military governor of occupied Ukraine in 1918 and was assassinated in Kiev by Left Socialist-Revolutionary Boris Donskoy, who bombed his carriage.
A Prussian officer who fought in the wars of 1866 and 1870–71 and rose to command the XVIII Army Corps. In the First World War he led the 10th Army from January 1915, taking Kovno and Grodno, and from 1916 also Army Group Eichhorn; he was made field marshal in December 1917. On 3 April 1918 he became commander of Army Group Kiev and military governor of occupied Ukraine. On 30 July 1918 the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Boris Donskoy killed him in Kiev with a bomb thrown at his carriage.
Career timeline
1866–1914Joined the Prussian Army; fought in 1866 and 1870–71; commanded 9th Division (1901–1904) and XVIII Army Corps (1904–1912)
1915–1918Commander, 10th Army; took Kovno and Grodno; Army Group Eichhorn from 1916; field marshal 1917
1918Commander, Army Group Kiev, and military governor of Ukraine; assassinated in Kiev on 30 July
German admiral who built the High Seas Fleet to rival the Royal Navy, set off a naval arms race and urged unrestricted U-boat war
Born in Küstrin in Brandenburg, the son of a lawyer, he was State Secretary of the Imperial Naval Office from 1897 to 1916 and turned the modest Imperial Navy into a world-class force that could threaten the Royal Navy. The Fleet Acts of 1898–1912, built on his “risk theory”, gave Germany the second-largest navy in the world, but started a costly naval arms race and pushed Britain closer to France. He saw sea power as a “palliative against” the Social Democrats. When the High Seas Fleet could not break Britain’s blockade, he became an outspoken advocate of unrestricted submarine warfare, and resigned in March 1916. In 1917 he co-founded and chaired the far-right Fatherland Party, which opposed a negotiated peace, and after the war sat in the Reichstag for the German National People’s Party. He died in 1930.
Career timeline
1897–1916State Secretary of the Imperial Naval Office
1898–1912Built the High Seas Fleet through the Fleet Acts
1917Co-founder and chairman of the German Fatherland Party
Founder of Marxist revisionism and evolutionary socialism, author of The Preconditions of Socialism
"I have extraordinarily little interest in what is called the 'final goal of Socialism.' This aim, whatever it be, is nothing to me, the movement everything." — Response to critics (1899)
German SPD theorist and politician. Engels's literary executor and editor of Der Sozialdemokrat, Bernstein began as an orthodox Marxist before his 1899 The Preconditions of Socialism challenged Marx's predictions of capitalist collapse, class polarization, and revolutionary necessity. His dictum "the goal is nothing, the movement everything" laid the foundation for social democracy's reformist, parliamentary turn, creating the schism between revolutionary socialism and evolutionary social democracy. He broke with the SPD's pro-war majority to co-found the anti-war USPD during World War I, and spent his final years defending Weimar parliamentary democracy, dying six weeks before Hitler took power.
Career timeline
1872Joined SDAP (Eisenachers); delegate to 1875 Gotha unification congress
1881–1890Editor of Der Sozialdemokrat in exile (Zurich, then London); close collaborator of Engels
1891Co-drafted Erfurt Programme with Kautsky; named Engels's literary executor (1895)
1899Published The Preconditions of Socialism — launched revisionism debate that divided the international socialist movement
1902–1928Reichstag deputy (Breslau-West, later Potsdam II) — specialist in taxation, trade, and constitutional law
1915–1917Turned against war credits; issued peace manifesto with Haase and Kautsky; co-founded the anti-war USPD
1918–1928Assistant secretary in Weimar Treasury; defended parliamentary democracy; died 1932
Creator of International Women's Day, she set women's liberation at the heart of class struggle
Six months before Hitler took power, she opened the Reichstag as its oldest member with a call for a united front against Nazism (1932)
Founder of Marxist feminism, she saw women's liberation as inseparable from class struggle and proposed International Women's Day in 1910. From anti-war resistance to co-founding the KPD, she opened the Reichstag at seventy-five with a call for a united front against Nazism.
Career timeline
1878–1917Leads the SPD women's movement; edits Die Gleichheit (1892–1917)
1910Proposes International Women's Day at Copenhagen
1915–1919Anti-war work; in at the founding of the Spartacus League and the KPD
1920–1933Reichstag deputy; Comintern executive
1925Published the memoir Lenin on the Women’s Question
1932Opens the Reichstag as its oldest member, calling for a united front against Nazism
1933Exile to the USSR; dies in June, buried in the Kremlin Wall
Last German Emperor, who backed Austria-Hungary in the July Crisis and abdicated and fled in 1918
The son of the Prussian crown prince and Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, he became emperor in 1888 and dismissed Bismarck in 1890. In 1900 he urged the troops sent against the Boxers to fight like Huns, and his naval build-up and Moroccan interventions isolated Germany. In the July Crisis of 1914 he assured Austria-Hungary of military support. In the war he left decisions largely to the Supreme Army Command, leading to the de facto military dictatorship of Hindenburg and Ludendorff. When his abdication was announced on 9 November 1918 he went into exile in the Netherlands, which refused to extradite him as the Treaty of Versailles provided. He died at Doorn in 1941.
Career timeline
1888German Emperor and King of Prussia
1890Dismissed Bismarck; the “New Course”
1914Guaranteed support to Austria-Hungary in the July Crisis
1918Abdication announced on 9 November; exile in the Netherlands
German trade-union leader who signed the 1918 agreement with Stinnes and met the Kapp Putsch of 1920 with a general strike
Born in Marienburg, he grew up in an orphanage and became a wood turner. He joined the Social Democrats in 1885, chaired the General Commission of the German Trade Unions from 1890, and sat in the Reichstag in 1893–1898 and 1903–1920. In 1913 he became the first President of the International Federation of Trade Unions. He led the SPD’s right wing, and in the First World War supported the civil truce and the renunciation of strikes. On 15 November 1918 he signed an agreement with Hugo Stinnes under which employers for the first time accepted the unions as workers’ representatives, with the eight-hour day and works councils, while the unions rejected the radical socialists’ demands. In 1919 he became chairman of the new General German Trade Union Federation (ADGB), and in March 1920 he organised the general strike against the Kapp Putsch. He died in Berlin later that year.
Career timeline
1885Joined the SPD
1890Chairman of the General Commission of the German Trade Unions
1893Elected to the Reichstag
1913First President of the International Federation of Trade Unions
The premier who held the gallows in one hand and reform in the other
Addressing the Second Duma on 10 May 1907, he declared to the revolutionaries: "You need great upheavals — we need a Great Russia!"
The imperial premier who crushed the 1905 revolution with field courts-martial while breaking up the peasant commune through agrarian reform to build a new base of support for the regime. Assassinated in 1911.
Career timeline
1906Interior Minister, then premier
1906–07Field courts-martial against the revolution
1906–11Agrarian reform: exit from the commune, independent farmers
1907.6The June 3 system: a rewritten franchise tames the Duma
Lawyer who founded the USPD against the war and co-chaired the Council of People’s Deputies with Ebert in 1918
After Ebert’s government bloodily suppressed the revolutionary Volksmarinedivision in December 1918, Haase and fellow USPD delegates resigned from the Council of the People’s Deputies in protest.
Born to a Jewish family in East Prussia, he made his name as a lawyer defending socialists and in 1911 became SPD co-chairman alongside Bebel. In August 1914 he opposed war credits but had to read the party’s statement in their favour in the Reichstag. In 1917 he founded the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) with the war’s opponents. In November 1918 he co-chaired the Council of People’s Deputies with Ebert, leaving the government after the Christmas crisis. Shot outside the Reichstag in October 1919, he died in November.
Career timeline
1888Established himself as a lawyer, defending workers, peasants, and socialist activists.
1911Became co-chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) with August Bebel.
1914Opposed war credits but, following party discipline, voted for them in the Reichstag and defended the party’s support.
1917Helped found the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) and became its chairman.
1918From November, co-chaired the Council of the People’s Deputies with Ebert; resigned in December to protest the government’s suppression of the sailors’ division.
1919Was shot while entering the Reichstag on 8 October and died of blood poisoning from the wound on 7 November.
German Social Democratic and Independent Social Democratic politician who headed Berlin police in 1918
“I got my job from the Revolution, and I shall give it up only to the Revolution.”
A trained mechanic, Eichhorn worked for the Social Democratic Party before joining the Independent Social Democratic Party in 1917. After the November Revolution of 1918, he became Berlin police president and pursued a policing policy favorable to left-wing political groups. On 4 January 1919, the Prussian cabinet tried to dismiss him and replace him with Social Democrat Eugen Ernst. Mass demonstrations and a general strike opposed the move, followed by occupations and armed clashes that became the January uprising.
Career timeline
1893Became a full-time Social Democratic Party official and worked as an editor in Dresden
1903–1911Member of the Reichstag for Baden's 9th constituency
1908–1917Head of the Berlin Social Democratic press office
1917Joined the Independent Social Democratic Party
1918–1919Served as Berlin police president
1919–1920Member of the Weimar National Assembly for Berlin
1920–1925Joined the Communist Party of Germany and served in the Reichstag
General who directed Germany’s war with Hindenburg and later joined Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch
Born to a commoner family in the Province of Posen, he served on the General Staff and won fame at Liège and Tannenberg in 1914. In August 1916 he and Hindenburg took over the Supreme Army Command; as First Quartermaster General he directed the war under a de facto military dictatorship and drove the Hindenburg Programme. His spring offensive, opened with Operation Michael in March 1918, failed; in September he demanded an immediate armistice and in October he was dismissed. After the war he spread the stab-in-the-back myth and took part in the Kapp Putsch of 1920 and Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. He sat in the Reichstag for the National Socialist Freedom Movement in 1924–1928 and died in Munich in 1937.
Career timeline
1914Liège and Tannenberg
1916–1918First Quartermaster General
1918Spring offensive (Operation Michael); dismissed in October
SPD politician who proclaimed the republic from a Reichstag window on 9 November 1918 and became Weimar’s first head of government
On 9 November 1918, he proclaimed Germany a republic from a Reichstag window. In June 1919, he resigned as head of government rather than sign the Treaty of Versailles.
A printer from Kassel who became an SPD journalist and Reichstag deputy, he joined Prince Max of Baden’s cabinet in October 1918. On 9 November, hearing that Liebknecht was about to proclaim a socialist republic, he proclaimed a republic first from a Reichstag window, to Ebert’s fury. A People’s Deputy, he became head of government in February 1919 but resigned in June rather than accept the Treaty of Versailles. He was mayor of Kassel in the 1920s, survived a far-right cyanide attack in 1922, went into exile in 1933 and died in Copenhagen.
Career timeline
1903Entered the Reichstag and served in the leadership of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) parliamentary group.
1917Was elected chairman of the SPD.
1918Became vice president of the Reichstag in June and a Social Democratic minister in Max von Baden’s cabinet in October. Proclaimed the republic from a Reichstag window on 9 November and joined the revolutionary provisional government, the Council of the People’s Deputies.
1919Was appointed head of government of the Weimar Republic on 13 February. On 20 June, he refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles and resigned with his cabinet.
Freikorps commander who tried to keep Germany's eastern influence in Finland and the Baltic
White Army quartermaster Hannes Ignatius described him as the "true regent of Finland."
He led the Baltic Sea Division to the aid of the Finnish Whites in 1918, then commanded the German troops and Freikorps in Latvia in 1919, retaking Riga but backing a coup against the Latvian government he saw as an obstacle. Recalled after Cēsis, he led far-right veterans' movements in the Weimar years.
Career timeline
1895Assigned to the Great General Staff
1914Led the 76th Infantry Regiment, wounded at the First Battle of the Marne
1918Commander of the Baltic Sea Division, aided the Finnish Whites, then 'German General in Finland'
1919Commander of the VI Reserve Corps, retook Riga, defeated at Cēsis (Wenden) and recalled
1920Commander in Berlin during the Kapp Putsch
1924–1933Chairman of the United Patriotic Associations of Germany (VVVD)
German socialist and a leading figure in the workers’ council movement.
A social-democratic journalist, Däumig joined the Independent Social Democratic Party during the First World War and became influential among Berlin radicals and the revolutionary shop stewards. As a leading member of the Berlin workers’ council executive in November 1918, he sought to make the council system the basis of the constitution, but lost to supporters of a national assembly. In 1920 he led the USPD left into the Communist International and became co-chair of the United Communist Party of Germany. He resigned as co-chair with Paul Levi in February 1921, left the party after the March Action and Levi’s expulsion, and helped found the Communist Working Group; in 1922 he rejoined the USPD.
Career timeline
1901Began working for Social Democratic newspapers in Gera, Halle and Erfurt.
1911Joined the Berlin Social Democratic newspaper Vorwärts to cover military affairs and workers’ education.
1916After leaving Vorwärts, campaigned for the Independent Social Democratic Party.
1918Became a leader of the revolutionary shop stewards and a leading member of the Berlin workers’ council executive.
1920Entered the Reichstag as an Independent Social Democrat, backed acceptance of the Bolsheviks’ 21 conditions and affiliation with the Communist International, and became co-chair of the United Communist Party of Germany in December.
1921Resigned as co-chair of the United Communist Party of Germany with Paul Levi in February. After the March Action, he left the party and helped found the Communist Working Group.
1922Rejoined the Independent Social Democratic Party with the Communist Working Group.
Journalist who overthrew the Bavarian monarchy in Munich in November 1918, proclaimed the People’s State and was assassinated the next year
He organized the November 1918 Bavarian Revolution, overthrew the monarchy and proclaimed the People’s State; he was assassinated in February 1919 while on his way to resign.
Born to a Jewish merchant family in Berlin, he was a theatre critic and editor of the SPD’s Vorwärts before moving to Munich. He joined the USPD against the war and was jailed for leading the munitions strike of January 1918. On 7 November he led demonstrators from a rally on the Theresienwiese round the barracks, and the next day proclaimed the People’s State of Bavaria and became premier. His publication of documents on German war guilt earned him the right’s hatred. Heavily defeated in the January 1919 election, he was assassinated by Count Arco-Valley on 21 February on his way to resign.
Career timeline
1890–1895Contributing editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung.
1898Joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).
1900–1905Edited Vorwärts.
1907–1910Chief editor of the Fränkische Tagespost in Nuremberg.
1917Joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD).
1918Convicted of treason for inciting a munitions workers’ strike, he was imprisoned at Stadelheim and released in October under a general amnesty.
1918–1919Served as the first republican premier of the People’s State of Bavaria.
Last chancellor of the German Empire, who sought the armistice, announced the emperor’s abdication and handed power to Ebert
On 9 November 1918, as revolutionary demonstrations spread in Berlin, Max von Baden announced the emperor’s abdication and transferred the chancellorship to Friedrich Ebert.
Heir to the grand-ducal house of Baden and a former Prussian army officer, he won moderates’ respect in the war through Red Cross and prisoner-of-war relief work. Chancellor from 3 October 1918, he brought the SPD into government, asked the Allies for an armistice and carried the constitutional amendment that made the Empire a parliamentary monarchy. On 9 November, with Berlin full of demonstrators, he announced the emperor’s abdication without his consent, handed the chancellorship to Ebert and withdrew. In 1920 he founded the Salem boarding school with Kurt Hahn.
Career timeline
1918.10.3Became German Empire chancellor and brought the SPD and other majority-party representatives into the cabinet.
1918.10Sought an armistice from the Allies and advanced constitutional amendments shifting the Empire toward parliamentary government.
1918.11.9Announced the emperor’s abdication and transferred the chancellorship to Friedrich Ebert.
General who struck the 1918 secret pact with Ebert that preserved the officer corps and later served Weimar as defence and interior minister
On 10 November 1918, he made a secret telephone pact with Ebert, pledging army support for the new government while preserving the officer corps’ command.
A Württemberg staff officer and railway transport expert, he ran the War Office in the war, directing munitions production and labour mobilisation. In October 1918 he succeeded Ludendorff as First Quartermaster General and in November told the emperor that the army no longer stood behind him. On the night of 10 November he struck a secret telephone pact with Ebert, trading the army’s support for the preservation of the officer corps’ command. He later served as transport, defence and interior minister and fell in 1932 over his ban on the Nazi SA.
Career timeline
1884Entered the army.
1912Became head of the General Staff’s railway department, overseeing wartime troop movement and supply.
1918In October replaced Ludendorff as first quartermaster general; after the armistice, worked with Ebert on troop repatriation and volunteer units to suppress the uprising.
SPD defence minister who said “someone has to be the bloodhound” and used the Freikorps to crush the left risings of 1919
He directed the suppression of the 1919 Berlin uprising with Freikorps and army forces, then authorized summary executions by military forces in a March order.
A basket-maker from Brandenburg who became an SPD journalist, he entered the Reichstag in 1906 and was known as its military expert. Sent to Kiel as the government’s representative in November 1918, he calmed the mutiny and became governor. After the Christmas crisis he joined the Council of People’s Deputies for military affairs and, saying “someone has to be the bloodhound”, organised the Freikorps that crushed the January rising and the March battles. First defence minister from February 1919, he resigned after the Kapp Putsch of 1920, later governed the province of Hanover and was arrested after the July 1944 plot.
Career timeline
1890년대Helped build the social-democratic movement and basket-makers’ union; chaired the Social Democratic Association in Brandenburg.
1906년Elected to the Reichstag, where he became known as an expert on naval and army affairs.
1918년 11월–12월Sent to Kiel as government representative, he led the sailors and Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council; on 28 December he became national commissioner for the army and navy.
1919년 2월–1920년Appointed Reichswehr minister, he deployed Freikorps and army forces against the January uprising and March fighting in Berlin; he resigned after the 1920 Kapp Putsch.
1920년–1933년Served as chief president of the Prussian province of Hanover; dismissed in September 1933 under the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.
German Eastern Front chief of staff who placed his soldier's boot on the Brest-Litovsk negotiating table
"The General on several occasions put his soldier's boot on the table around which the discussion was taking place": Trotsky, who wrote that 'Hoffmann's boot was the only reality to take seriously'
An outstanding strategic staff officer who, as Chief of Operations of the German Eighth Army, devised the plans that destroyed the Russian armies at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes. As Chief of Staff of the Eastern Front from late 1917, he was the driving force behind the German position at the Brest-Litovsk peace talks: on 18 January 1918 he spread a map before the Soviet delegation and demanded the severance of Poland, the Baltic states, and Ukraine from Russia. After Trotsky's 'neither war nor peace' declaration, Hoffmann commanded Operation Faustschlag, an unopposed advance that compelled the Bolsheviks to accept far harsher final terms. He embodied the asymmetry between revolutionary diplomacy and imperial military force, most memorably by placing his soldier's boot on the negotiating table.
Career timeline
1899–1914Served in Russian Section of German General Staff; observer with Japanese army, Russo-Japanese War
1914–1916Operations officer, 8th Army, 9th Army & Ober Ost; architect of Tannenberg & Masurian Lakes
1916–1918Chief of Staff, Eastern Front (Major General); led German side at Brest-Litovsk negotiations
1918.2–3Commanded Operation Faustschlag; imposed final treaty terms on Soviet Russia
1919–1920Brigade commander on Polish border; retired March 1920
1920–1927Campaigned for anti-Soviet coalition intervention (Hoffmann Plan); wrote memoirs
German anarchist thinker who served in Bavaria’s revolutionary government and was killed by counterrevolutionary troops in 1919.
The state is a social relationship. Create new communities, and it can be replaced by a different social relationship.
Landauer argued that the state was not merely an apparatus to overthrow but a social relationship that could be replaced by creating voluntary communities. In 1908 he founded the Socialist Bund to pursue socialism through cooperatives and communal association. He opposed the First World War and came to Munich at Kurt Eisner’s request in 1918 to support the revolution. In April 1919 he joined the Bavarian Soviet Republic as Commissioner for Enlightenment and Public Instruction. After government forces crushed the republic, he was arrested and killed at Stadelheim Prison on 2 May.
Career timeline
1908Founded the Socialist Bund
1918Came to Munich at Kurt Eisner’s request to support the revolutionary government
1919Commissioner for Enlightenment and Public Instruction in the Bavarian Soviet Republic
Social Democratic chancellor whose government accepted the Treaty of Versailles under an Allied ultimatum
Born in Darkehmen in the Province of Prussia, he worked as a lawyer’s clerk, co-founded the office employees’ union and was second chairman of the General Commission of Trade Unions from 1908 to 1918. Elected to the Reichstag for the SPD in 1912, he became labour secretary in Max von Baden’s cabinet in October 1918. When Scheidemann resigned in protest at the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919, Bauer, until then a vocal critic of the treaty, succeeded him and got it through the National Assembly. His government carried out tax reform and extended social insurance, but was forced out in March 1920 over the negotiations conducted with the Kapp putschists. He was later vice-chancellor and treasury minister, and the Barmat corruption scandal cost him his seat in 1925. He died in Berlin in 1944.
Career timeline
1908–1918Second chairman of the General Commission of Trade Unions
The lone vote against the war; the revolution's first martyr
“The main enemy is at home.” — anti-war pamphlet, 1915
German socialist revolutionary. The only Reichstag deputy to vote against war credits during the First World War. Co-founded the Spartacus League and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) with Rosa Luxemburg. Murdered by Freikorps after the January 1919 uprising.
Career timeline
1907Published Militarism and Anti-Militarism and was sentenced to fortress imprisonment
1912–1916Reichstag deputy; the sole vote against war credits in December 1914
1916Arrested at a May Day anti-war rally; sentenced to prison
1918.11November Revolution — proclaims the 'Free Socialist Republic' from the Berlin palace
1918.12–1919.1Co-founds the Spartacus League and the KPD; the January uprising
1919.1Seized by the Freikorps and killed alongside Luxemburg
SPD leader who headed the revolutionary government of 1918, steered the councils into parliamentary democracy and became the first president
During the November Revolution of 1918, Ebert led the Council of People’s Representatives and advocated elections to a National Assembly. Elected the first president of the German Republic in 1919, he served until 1925.
Born to a tailor in Heidelberg, he worked as a saddler, became a party organiser in Bremen and in 1913 succeeded Bebel as SPD co-chairman. In the war he backed war credits and the Burgfrieden. Taking over the chancellorship on 9 November 1918, he led the Council of People’s Deputies and that night won the army’s support in a secret pact with General Groener. Elected president by the National Assembly in February 1919, he put down risings from left and right with the army, the Freikorps and emergency decrees under Article 48. He died in office in 1925 after an appendicitis operation.
Career timeline
1889Joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).
1905Elected to the SPD party executive.
1912Became a member of the Reichstag of the German Empire.
1913Elected one of the SPD’s two chairmen.
1918Took over state affairs from Chancellor Max von Baden during the November Revolution and led the Council of People’s Representatives.
1919Elected president of the German Republic by the National Assembly.
1925Died on 28 February from complications of appendicitis.
The last Empress, whose reliance on Rasputin helped doom the dynasty
When told of Nicholas's abdication, Alexandra said only: 'Dieu donne que cela sauve la Russie!' — 'God grant that this may save Russia!'
Granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Alexandra became Empress of Russia in 1894 and guided Nicholas II with an unshakeable conviction that autocratic power was a divine trust that could not be compromised. Desperate to save her hemophiliac son Alexei, she fell under the sway of Grigori Rasputin, and during World War I (with Nicholas at the front as supreme commander) she dismissed and replaced ministers on Rasputin's counsel, effectively directing domestic policy. Her German birth, her reliance on Rasputin, and her refusal of political reform earned her public hatred and accelerated the collapse of the Romanov dynasty. On 17 July 1918 she was shot by Bolsheviks in the cellar of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, alongside her husband and five children.
Career timeline
1894Marries Nicholas II, Empress of Russia
1904Birth of Tsarevich Alexei
1905First meets Rasputin
1915–17Controls domestic affairs with Rasputin during Nicholas's absence at the front
The 'Rook' who flew across borders building the Iskra network, and the revolution's first martyr
He was handsome, a fine fellow with a guitar — even in exile he played, composed epigrams on the spot, drew caricatures. So the historian Vladlen Loginov recalled Bauman.
A Volga German veterinary surgeon turned Bolshevik, he ran Lenin's Iskra illegal distribution network inside Russia. Killed by a monarchist during the October 1905 demonstrations, his funeral drew 100,000 mourners and turned into a show of revolutionary force.
Career timeline
1895Graduates Kazan Veterinary Institute; works in Saratov province
1896–97Member, St. Petersburg Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class
1897–99Arrested; 22 months solitary in Peter and Paul Fortress; exiled to Vyatka
1900Works with Lenin in Switzerland to launch Iskra; heads illegal transport into Russia
1901–03Moscow Committee; arrested in Kiev, escapes ('Escape of the Eleven'); delegate to 2nd RSDLP Congress — Bolshevik
1903–04Leads Moscow Bolshevik organization & Northern Bureau of CC; arrested, 16 months in Taganka Prison
1905.10Released from prison; killed days later by a monarchist during a street demonstration
Soviet Union
Soviet communism
1874–1940
→ Died in prison
The Menshevik statistician who designed Gosplan's early control figures and balance method, leading voice of genetic planning
December 27, 1929, at the All-Union Conference of Marxist Agrarians. Stalin, from the rostrum, aimed directly at Groman's theory that 'the October Revolution gave the peasantry less than the February Revolution.' When a voice from the audience asked 'Who was it?' Stalin answered: 'It was Groman.' In that moment, genetic planning received its political death sentence.
Statistician and economist, born in Moscow to a German father and Russian mother. Joined the RSDLP in 1898 as a Menshevik, co-authoring the agrarian program; as head of the Penza statistical bureau he developed a multi-phase sampling method. After the February Revolution he chaired the Petrograd food-supply commission, and in 1921 joined Gosplan where he headed the Conjunctural Institute, designing the first Control Figures and the balance method. With Bazarov he championed the genetic planning approach; after Stalin's public condemnation he was arrested in 1930 and as lead defendant in the 1931 Menshevik Trial received ten years, dying in the Suzdal camp.
Career timeline
1894–1908Entered Moscow University; expelled for revolutionary activity; graduated externally 1908
1898–1905Joined RSDLP; stayed Menshevik after 2nd Congress; co-authored agrarian program; began statistical work in exile in Vyatka and Yenisei
1909–1914Headed Penza provincial statistical bureau; developed multi-phase sampling method for peasant household surveys
1917–1918After February Revolution: chairman of Petrograd Soviet food commission and Central Food Administration; after October: Northern Regional Food Administration head
1921–1926Headed Gosplan's Conjunctural Institute; designed first Control Figures and the balance method; formulated 'restorative growth' concept
1926–1929Chaired Gosplan agricultural section; with Bazarov championed genetic planning; publicly condemned by Stalin at All-Union Conference of Marxist Agrarians
1930–1940Arrested in 'Union Bureau of Mensheviks' case; 1931 trial: 10 years; died in Suzdal ITL 1940; rehabilitated 1991
German social-democratic politician and co-chair of the Independent Social Democratic Party.
A painter and journalist, Crispien opposed the Social Democratic Party's support for the war and helped found the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) in 1917. He served as interior minister in Württemberg's provisional government in 1918–19 and became a USPD co-chair in 1919. He attended the Communist International's Second Congress in 1920 as a USPD delegate but opposed its admission conditions and merger with the Communist Party of Germany. After most of the USPD reunited with the Social Democratic Party in 1922, he joined its leadership; he went into exile after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.
Career timeline
1918–1919Interior minister in Württemberg's provisional government
1919–1922Co-chair of the Independent Social Democratic Party
1920Attended the Second Congress of the Communist International as a USPD delegate
1922–1933Co-chair of the Social Democratic Party of Germany
A Social Democratic politician of the Weimar Republic who served twice as chancellor.
Müller joined the Social Democratic Party in 1893 and rose to its leadership. As foreign minister from 1919 to 1920, he signed the Treaty of Versailles for Germany. His first chancellorship in 1920 combined the suppression of left-wing uprisings with reforms expanding disability employment, primary education, unemployment benefits and workers’ social protection. He returned as chancellor in 1928 to lead a grand coalition, which collapsed amid the Great Depression and disputes over financing unemployment insurance; he resigned in 1930.
Career timeline
1893Joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany.
1916Elected to the Reichstag of the German Empire.
1919–1920Served as foreign minister and signed the Treaty of Versailles.
1920Served as chancellor.
1928–1930Served as chancellor of the grand coalition.
Non-party chancellor who answered the Ruhr occupation with passive resistance and fell amid hyperinflation
Born to a civil servant’s family in Suhl, he studied law and, as a Treasury official, helped organise Germany’s food supply early in the First World War. In 1917 he joined the Hamburg America shipping line, which he went on to head. In November 1922 he was appointed chancellor by presidential decree without a Reichstag vote, the first Weimar chancellor who belonged to no party, and formed a “business ministry”. When French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr in January 1923 he called for passive resistance; paying for it, mostly by printing money, began the run-up to hyperinflation. Amid a wave of strikes his cabinet resigned in August in the face of a no-confidence vote initiated by the SPD. In 1932 he joined in advising Hitler on economics, and he died in January 1933.
Wehrmacht field marshal who directed the encirclement of Leningrad
In September 1941 he believed Leningrad was about to fall, but the city did not surrender.
Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb was a German field marshal and one of the Wehrmacht's senior operational commanders in the Second World War. In 1941 he led Army Group North through the Baltic states toward Leningrad, completing the land encirclement and directing the operational pressure that sustained it. Forces under his command committed crimes against civilians and cooperated with the SS in the murder of Jews. Convicted after the war in the High Command Trial for transmitting the Barbarossa Decree and its criminal application by subordinate units, he was sentenced to time served and released.
Career timeline
1895Entered the Bavarian Army
1914–1918Served on the Eastern Front and in the Serbian campaign during the First World War
1930–1933Commander of the 7th Division
1939–1941Commander of Army Group C
1941.06–1942.01Commander of Army Group North, directing the attack and encirclement of Leningrad
1948Convicted in the High Command Trial and released after a sentence of time served
A Nazi German naval commander who pursued a grand surface fleet
In the 1940 planning for Operation Sea Lion, control of the English Channel and the vulnerability of invasion transport exposed the German navy’s fundamental weakness.
Erich Raeder was an admiral who rose through the Imperial German Navy and went on to command the navies of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. He pursued a battleship-centered ocean fleet combined with commerce raiding, although Germany’s navy was unready to confront the Royal Navy when the Second World War began. Raeder was skeptical of Operation Sea Lion in 1940, pointing to German weakness in controlling the English Channel and the vulnerability of an invasion transport, and those naval limits constrained the plan’s feasibility. At the postwar International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, he was convicted of conspiracy, crimes against peace, and war crimes, sentenced to life imprisonment, and released in 1955.
Career timeline
1894Entered the Imperial German Navy
1912–1918Senior naval staff officer; served in the First World War
1928–1935Chief of the Naval Command, Reichsmarine
1935–1939Commander-in-chief of the Kriegsmarine; Generaladmiral
1939–1943Grand Admiral and commander-in-chief of the Kriegsmarine
1943Resigned as commander-in-chief and retired
1946–1955Convicted at Nuremberg and served a life sentence
From the Spartacus League to GDR head of state, the sole founding member who lived the full arc of German communism
On the night of 15 January 1919, Pieck was arrested alongside Luxemburg and Liebknecht and taken to the Eden Hotel. He became the sole survivor — the last to witness his comrades alive.
A coachman's son turned carpenter, he joined the SPD in 1895 and was radicalized under Rosa Luxemburg's influence. Court-martialed for anti-war agitation, he co-founded the Spartacus League and the KPD. Arrested with Luxemburg and Liebknecht in January 1919, he alone survived. He served on the ECCI (1921) and its Presidium (1931), then led the KPD in Moscow exile as Comintern secretary. Returning after the war, he drove the SPD-KPD merger that created the SED and became the first President of the GDR in 1949, holding that office until his death.
Career timeline
1895Joins the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)
1915Conscripted; court-martialed for anti-war agitation; flees to Amsterdam
1918–1919Co-founds Spartacus League and KPD; Central Committee member
1921ECCI member; elected to the Prussian Landtag
1928–1933Reichstag deputy
1931Elected to the ECCI Presidium
1934–1946KPD chairman (exile leadership)
1935–1943Secretary of the Comintern
1943Co-founds the National Committee for a Free Germany
1946–1950Co-chairman of the Socialist Unity Party (SED)
1949–1960President of the German Democratic Republic
The chancellor who made provisional statehood durable
As president of the Parliamentary Council, Adenauer helped present the Basic Law as a provisional settlement rather than a final constitution for a divided Germany.
Konrad Adenauer was a Catholic conservative statesman who helped shape the Federal Republic after the collapse of Nazism and the division of Germany. As president of the Parliamentary Council, he supported a provisional Basic Law rather than a permanent constitution, leaving open the possibility of reunification while establishing democratic institutions in the western zones. As the first Federal Chancellor, he pursued Westbindung, European integration, and a socially regulated market economy, while his anti-communist policy hardened the political division of the Cold War. His career thus joined parliamentary reconstruction with the consolidation of a state whose provisional founding became durable.
Career timeline
1906–1909Deputy mayor of Cologne
1917–1933Lord Mayor of Cologne
1921–1933President of the Prussian State Council
1948–1949President of the Parliamentary Council
1949–1963First Federal Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany
1951–1955Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs
1950–1966Chairman of the Christian Democratic Union
Weimar chancellor who ended passive resistance in 1923 and, as foreign minister, concluded the Locarno treaties
Born in Berlin, he entered the Reichstag for the National Liberals in 1907 and during the war backed annexations and unrestricted submarine warfare. After the defeat he founded the German People’s Party and came to accept the republic. Chancellor and foreign minister from August 1923, he ended passive resistance in the Ruhr, used the army to remove the Saxon and Thuringian governments that included Communists, and halted hyperinflation with the Rentenmark. Ousted by a no-confidence vote in November, he remained foreign minister until his death, shaping the Dawes Plan, the Locarno treaties and entry into the League of Nations, and shared the 1926 Nobel Peace Prize. He died of a stroke in 1929.
Weimar finance minister who founded the CDU in the Soviet zone in 1945 and was deposed for opposing the land reform
The son of a Cologne railway worker, he studied agriculture and from 1911 worked at the International Institute of Agriculture in Rome. A member of the Catholic Centre Party, he became Minister of Food in 1920 and was Minister of Finance from 1922 until the Cuno cabinet resigned in August 1923. Arrested after the Nazis took power, he later served as an economic adviser to the government of Colombia. Back in Germany he joined the resistance around Goerdeler, was arrested after 20 July 1944 and sentenced to death in January 1945, but his wife delayed the execution until the Red Army took Berlin. On 26 June 1945 he became the first chairman of the CDU of Berlin and the Soviet zone; because he refused to agree to the land reform without compensation, SMAD deposed him in December. In the West he founded the German Farmers’ Association and argued for reunification.
Career timeline
1911–1914Department director at the International Institute of Agriculture, Rome
1920Reich Minister of Food
1922–1923Reich Minister of Finance
1945Sentenced to death by a Nazi court
1945Chairman of the CDU in the Soviet zone; deposed in December
First woman to lead a Soviet government, between revolution and terminal illness
As German troops advanced on Kyiv, Bosch refused to abandon the city without a fight. Her comrades had to forcibly evacuate her.
A Bolshevik of German settler background, she became the first woman to head a Soviet government as acting leader of Ukraine's People's Secretariat in 1917. In Swiss exile she opposed Lenin on the national question; later she signed the Left Opposition's Declaration of 46. She died in 1925 after years of incurable illness.
Career timeline
1901Joined RSDLP; active in Bolshevik faction after the 1903 split
1907–1911Underground revolutionary work in Kyiv; secretary of the Kyiv Committee
1912–1914Arrested, exiled to Siberia, escaped via Japan and the US to Switzerland
1914–1917Swiss exile; opposed Lenin on the national question in the 'Baugy group'
1917.04–07Chair of South-Western Regional Party Committee; VI Party Congress delegate
1917.12–1918.03Acting head, People's Secretariat of Ukraine; People's Secretary of Internal Affairs
1918–1919Chair of Penza Party Committee; political commissar on Caspian-Caucasus Front
1923–1924Joined the Left Opposition; signed the Declaration of 46
Lathe operator who led Berlin’s Revolutionary Stewards, chaired the council Executive in 1918 and later wrote the revolution’s history
During the November Revolution of 1918, he chaired the Executive Council of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils. He led the Revolutionary Stewards in organising political strikes against the war from 1916.
A lathe operator from rural Thuringia, he became a leader of the turners’ branch of the Berlin metalworkers’ union. In the war he led the Revolutionary Stewards, a clandestine network of factory delegates, organising the 1916 strike against Liebknecht’s arrest and the mass strikes of April 1917 and January 1918. On the night of 9 November 1918 he occupied the Reichstag and called council elections, and as chairman of the Executive Council of the Greater Berlin workers’ and soldiers’ councils was formal head of the council regime. He later joined and left the KPD, and published a three-volume history of the revolution in 1924–1925.
Career timeline
1916Began organising political strikes against the First World War with the Revolutionary Stewards.
1918Chaired the Executive Council of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils during the German Revolution.
Freikorps officer who ordered the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in January 1919 and joined the Kapp Putsch
As a staff officer, he ordered the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in January 1919. He organised the 1920 Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch and became a leading Heimwehr organiser in Austria.
As staff officer of the Guards Cavalry Rifle Division, the largest Freikorps unit, he had Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht interrogated after their capture in January 1919 and ordered them killed, later boasting “I had them executed”. A leading figure in the Kapp Putsch of 1920, he went to Austria to help organise the right-wing Heimwehr and was deported. In Nazi Germany he faded from public life, only loosely tied to the party. In a 1962 interview and his memoirs he claimed Noske and Ebert had approved the killings, which was never confirmed. Never punished, he died in Düsseldorf in 1970.
Career timeline
1911–1913Served as a first lieutenant in the Prussian General Staff.
1914–1918Served on the Western Front in the First World War as a captain and staff officer.
1918–1919As first general staff officer of the Guards Cavalry Rifle Division, took part in suppressing the revolution in Berlin. After Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were captured and briefly interrogated on 15 January 1919, he ordered their murder.
1919–1920As managing director of the nationalist National Association, organised the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch; he fled to Austria after its failure.
1921–1930Became chief of staff of the Tyrolean Heimwehr, then federal chief of staff in 1928. Arrested and expelled from Austria in 1930.
1930–1943Headed the arms department at Rheinmetall-Borsig in Berlin and acquired his own business in 1938. In 1943 he remained in Switzerland and received political asylum.
1955–1970Returned to Germany in 1955. He took no further part in politics after the war and died in Düsseldorf in 1970.
Chief of the Hungarian General Staff who was the strongest advocate of alliance with Germany and of war on the Soviet Union
Born into a Swabian family at Rezsőháza in the Banat (now Knićanin, Serbia), he became a cadet in Vienna in 1897 and served as an Austro-Hungarian officer in the First World War. In 1919 he commanded the I Corps of the Hungarian Soviet Republic’s Red Army before going over to Horthy’s National Army in June. Retired in 1936, he was recalled in 1938 as Chief of the General Staff and, with Defence Minister Károly Bartha, became the leading advocate of alliance with Germany. He oversaw the invasion and annexation of Carpatho-Ukraine in March 1939 and, after the Kassa bombing of June 1941, at once blamed the Soviet Union and urged an immediate declaration of war. He left the post of chief of staff in September 1941; arrested by Soviet forces in February 1945, he was taken to the USSR and died there in 1952.
Career timeline
1897–1901Infantry cadet school, Vienna
1914–1918Austro-Hungarian staff officer
1919Commander, Red Army I Corps; joined the National Army in June
1938–1941Chief of the General Staff
1945–1952Arrested by Soviet forces; died in Soviet captivity
German field marshal who commanded the Stalingrad offensive
In May 1941, days after Yugoslavia's surrender, he ordered reprisals killing one hundred Serbs for every German soldier wounded.
Maximilian von Weichs was a German professional officer shaped by the Bavarian and Reichswehr staff traditions who commanded corps and armies in Nazi Germany's wars of aggression. In 1942 he became commander of the newly formed Army Group B, placing the Sixth Army and Axis allies within the command structure of the southern offensive toward Stalingrad, where he advocated withdrawal after the encirclement but could not overcome Hitler's orders. He later commanded Army Group F and the German forces in the Balkans, where responsibility for reprisals against civilians and other war crimes was raised, and proceedings against him in the Hostages Trial were halted because of his failing health.
Career timeline
1900Joined the Bavarian Army's 2nd Heavy Cavalry Regiment
1935Commanded the 1st Panzer Division
1937–1939Commander of XIII Army Corps and Military District XIII
1939–1942Commander of the 2nd Army
1942–1943Commander of Army Group B during the offensive toward Stalingrad
1943–1945Commander of Army Group F and OB Southeast
1947Released from the Hostages Trial proceedings on medical grounds
KPD chairman who called off a revolution; co-founder of the International Right Opposition
At the Chemnitz conference on 21 October 1923, Brandler saw the left-wing Social Democrats walk out and abruptly called off the planned insurrection. Word never reached Hamburg in time — workers there rose in isolation and were crushed within 24 hours.
Chairman of the German Communist Party (KPD) who led the party through the 1921 March Action and the 1923 'German October' uprising plan, which he ultimately called off, judging that revolutionary conditions were not ripe. Held responsible by the Comintern, he was summoned to Moscow and sidelined. After opposing Ernst Thälmann's leadership, he was expelled from the KPD in 1929 and co-founded the Communist Party Opposition (KPO) with August Thalheimer, becoming a central figure of the International Right Opposition. Following the Nazi seizure of power he lived in exile in France and Cuba, returning to West Germany in 1949 where he led the Gruppe Arbeiterpolitik, maintaining an independent communist line to the end of his life.
Career timeline
1897–1901Began trade union activity as a bricklayer; joined the SPD
1914–1916Anti-war agitation; founding member of the Spartacus League; arrested and deported
1918.12Founding member of the KPD; elected to the Central Committee
1921–1924KPD Chairman; led March Action and 1923 'German October,' summoned to Moscow after failure
1924–1928Comintern and Profintern work; exiled to Kazakhstan; worked at VSNKh in Moscow
1929Expelled from KPD; co-founded KPO with Thalheimer; built the International Right Opposition
1933–1948Exile in France and Cuba; advocated an anti-fascist united front
1949–1956Returned to West Germany; founded and led Gruppe Arbeiterpolitik
German general who headed the Wehrmacht High Command and was complicit in Nazi war crimes.
As head of the Wehrmacht High Command, he signed criminal orders and bore responsibility for Nazi mass murder and the conduct of the war.
Keitel became head of the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW) in 1938 and served under Hitler's supreme command as an executor of policy. He signed orders and decrees that violated international law, including one shielding German crimes in the East from prosecution, the Commissar Order requiring the summary execution of Soviet political officers, and the Night and Fog Decree. As OKW chief, he was also responsible for cooperation between the Einsatzgruppen and the military in mass murder of civilians in the Soviet Union, and for the brutal treatment of Soviet prisoners of war. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg convicted him on all four counts; he was hanged in 1946.
Career timeline
1901Joined the Prussian army as an artillery officer.
1938Appointed head of the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW).
1945Signed the German surrender document in May.
1946Convicted by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and hanged.
From Rosa Luxemburg's lawyer to KPD leader, his 'anti-putschism' took on Comintern adventurism
Right after the March Action of 1921 he wrote: 'When I conceived this pamphlet, the Communist Party had 500,000 members in Germany. Eight days later when I wrote it, the party was shaken to its foundations and its very existence called into question. The fallen, sacrificed to this Bakuninist madness, cry out: Never again!'
A socialist who rose from Rosa Luxemburg's lawyer to chairman of the German Communist Party (KPD). Expelled for his pamphlet Unser Weg, which condemned the 1921 March Action as 'Bakuninist putschism,' he returned via the USPD to lead the SPD left. Trotsky called him 'the only man in Germany who had a head to lose.'
Career timeline
1906Joined the SPD; began law practice in Frankfurt
1913Defended Rosa Luxemburg in court on charges of inciting soldiers to disobedience
1915–1918Co-founded the Spartacus League; Zimmerwald Left bureau; edited Spartakusbriefe
1918.12Introduced the 'National Assembly' debate at the KPD founding congress
1919.03–1921.02KPD chairman — rebuilt the party after the murders of Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and Jogiches
1920Led unification with the USPD left, turning the KPD into a mass party; championed the 'Open Letter' tactic
1921Expelled from the KPD for Unser Weg: Wider den Putschismus, his critique of the March Action
1922Returned to the SPD via the USPD; published Luxemburg's suppressed manuscript The Russian Revolution
1924–1930SPD Reichstag deputy; fought to expose the Liebknecht–Luxemburg murders and opposed the rising Nazi movement
Wehrmacht general who directed anti-Partisan operations
Lüters assessed the Partisans' combat morale as “surprisingly high.”
Rudolf Lüters was a professional German officer who served through the First World War, the Imperial Army, and the Reichswehr before becoming a Wehrmacht general of infantry in the Second World War. From late 1942 he commanded German forces in Croatia and took part in planning and directing the Neretva and Sutjeska offensives against the Yugoslav Partisans. He assessed the Partisans as well organized and well led, with surprisingly high combat morale, yet at Sutjeska ordered that no able-bodied man leave the encirclement alive, exposing the annihilatory character of the occupation war. Captured by Soviet forces in 1945, he died in detention later that year.
Career timeline
1902Entered the Imperial German Army's 118th Infantry Regiment
1914–1918Commanded companies and a battalion on the Western Front in the First World War
1920–1933Served with the Reichswehr's 15th Infantry Regiment and 5th Division
1933–1938Commanded the 1st Prussian Infantry Regiment, then inspected military replacement districts
1941–1942Commanded the 223rd Infantry Division during the invasion of the Soviet Union
1942–1943Commander of German troops in Croatia, directing the Neretva and Sutjeska offensives
1943First commander of the XV Mountain Corps
1944–1945Honorably discharged, then died in Soviet captivity
Kaiser’s successor at the head of the East German CDU, who brought it into line with the SED as deputy prime minister
Born in Frohburg in Saxony, he worked as a journalist, moved through the left-liberal parties, helped found the German Democratic Party in 1918, and sat in the Weimar National Assembly and the Prussian Landtag. He joined the opposition after 1933 and went into hiding after the 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life. In 1945 he co-founded the CDU in the Soviet zone; when the Soviet authorities deposed Jakob Kaiser and Ernst Lemmer in 1947 he became acting chairman, and chairman in 1948. As a co-chairman of the German People’s Council he took part in drafting the GDR constitution, and in 1949 became deputy prime minister and head of the Church Office. A loyal supporter of the SED regime, he pushed out CDU members unwilling to follow the Communists. He died in 1957.
Career timeline
1918Co-founder of the German Democratic Party
1921–1933Member of the Prussian Landtag
1945Co-founder of the CDU in the Soviet zone
1948–1957Chairman of the East German CDU
1949–1957GDR deputy prime minister and head of the Church Office
Main theorist of the KPD and Bonapartist analyst of fascism
In July 1937, when six KPO members were arrested by Stalinists in Barcelona, Thalheimer and Brandler issued a joint statement: 'We take upon ourselves any political and personal guarantee for our arrested comrades. They are anti-Fascists and revolutionaries, incapable of any action that could be construed as high treason to the Spanish Revolution.'
One of the leading theorists of the founding generation of the German Communist Party (KPD), and the originator of the 'Bonapartist' theory of fascism, which saw fascism not as a mere instrument of finance capital but as an autonomous executive power rising above class antagonism. Expelled from the KPD in 1929, he co-founded the Communist Party Opposition (KPO) with Heinrich Brandler, holding a line opposed to both Stalinism and Social Democracy while continuing his anti-fascist writings in exile.
Career timeline
1910Joined the SPD; edited left-wing party newspapers
1916–1918Active in the Spartacus League; drafted and jailed for anti-war agitation
1918.12Founding member of the KPD; its main theorist in the early 1920s
1923Co-led the KPD with Brandler; summoned to Moscow after the failed 'German October'
1924–1928Taught and researched at the Marx-Engels Institute and Sun Yat-sen University, Moscow
1929Expelled from the KPD; co-founded the Communist Party Opposition (KPO) with Brandler
1933–1948Exile in France and Cuba; continued anti-fascist theoretical work
Chief of the German Army General Staff who planned Barbarossa and later forged the myth of the "clean Wehrmacht"
On 11 August 1941, his early optimism shattered, Halder wrote in his diary: 'The Russian colossus...has been underestimated by us...whenever a dozen divisions are destroyed the Russians replace them with another dozen.'
Franz Halder served as Chief of the German Army General Staff from 1938 to 1942, directing operational planning for the invasions of Poland, France, and, most consequentially, the Soviet Union. His diary entry of 31 July 1940 records Hitler's decision, delivered at the Berghof, to destroy the USSR; Halder's staff subsequently drafted the Commissar Order mandating summary execution of Red Army political officers, and the Barbarossa Decree granting German soldiers judicial immunity for atrocities in the East. After the war he served as lead consultant to the U.S. Army Historical Division, supervising over 700 former German officers in a systematic effort to suppress evidence of Wehrmacht crimes and fabricate the myth of the 'clean Wehrmacht,' a narrative that shaped Western historiography for decades.
Career timeline
1914–1918Served as staff officer in World War I; awarded Iron Cross 1st and 2nd Class
1938–1942Chief of the Army General Staff (OKH); directed planning for invasions of Poland, France, the Balkans and the USSR
1940.07Berghof conference of 31 July: recorded Hitler's decision to destroy the USSR in his diary; Barbarossa planning commenced
1941Drafted Commissar Order and Barbarossa Decree, radicalising warfare on the Eastern Front
1942.09Dismissed as Chief of Staff after strategic failures on the Eastern Front and conflict with Hitler
1944–1945Arrested for connection to the 20 July plot; imprisoned at Dachau and Flossenbürg concentration camps
1947–1961Lead consultant to U.S. Army Historical Division; supervised 700+ former officers, constructing the 'clean Wehrmacht' myth
1961Awarded U.S. Meritorious Civilian Service Award, the only German decorated by both Hitler and an American president
Nazi field marshal who built the Luftwaffe and directed the defence of Italy
His trial opened at Venice in February 1947; convicted on 6 May of the Ardeatine massacre and of inciting the killing of civilians, he was sentenced to death, commuted to life imprisonment on 4 July 1947 and released in October 1952.
Albert Kesselring was a Nazi field marshal who helped build the Luftwaffe and commanded German forces in the invasions of Poland, France and the Soviet Union, then from November 1941 as Commander-in-Chief South in the Mediterranean and Italy, delaying the Allied advance at the Gustav and Gothic Lines. Under his command reprisals were carried out against civilians: a directive of June 1944 authorised the utmost severity, and some 22,000 Italian civilians are believed to have been killed during the occupation, including 335 shot in the Ardeatine Caves. Convicted at Venice in 1947 and sentenced to death, he was commuted to life imprisonment, released in 1952, and never repudiated his conduct of the war.
Career timeline
1904Joined the 2nd Bavarian Foot Artillery Regiment
1933Headed the administrative office of the Reich Air Ministry, helping prepare the Luftwaffe
1936–1937Chief of the Luftwaffe General Staff
1939–1941Commanded Luftflotte 1 and 2 in Poland and on the Western and Eastern Fronts
1941–1943Commander-in-Chief South, commanding German forces in the Mediterranean theatre
1943–1945Commander-in-Chief Southwest and Army Group C, directing the defence of Italy
1945Commander-in-Chief West; surrendered to US forces in May
1947–1952Convicted of war crimes and released in 1952
A German general whose armoured successes were inseparable from crimes on the Eastern Front
In December 1942, Hoth's Fourth Panzer Army tried and failed to relieve the encircled Sixth Army at Stalingrad.
Hermann Hoth was a German general who carried the Prussian and imperial army tradition into the Wehrmacht and rose as a panzer commander. He directed rapid mobile operations in the invasions of France and the Soviet Union, and in 1942 commanded the Fourth Panzer Army during Case Blue and the failed attempt to relieve Stalingrad. Hoth understood the war against the Soviet Union as a war of annihilation and transmitted and implemented the Commissar Order and brutal measures against civilians. Convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the OKW trial, he received fifteen years in prison and was released early in 1954.
Career timeline
1904Entered service in the Prussian Army
1914–1918Staff and field commands in the First World War
1935–1938Commanded the 18th Infantry Division
1939–1940Commanded XV Army Corps in the invasions of Poland and France
1941Commanded Panzer Group 3 in the capture of Minsk and Vitebsk
1941–1942Commander of the 17th Army
1942–1943Commander of the Fourth Panzer Army and its Stalingrad relief attempt
1948–1954Convicted at the OKW trial and imprisoned at Landsberg
Philosopher of the not-yet: thinker of concrete utopia and human emancipation in The Principle of Hope
“The true genesis is not at the beginning but at the end, and it begins only when society and existence become radical, i.e. grasp themselves at the root.” — The Principle of Hope
German Marxist philosopher who formulated the philosophy of concrete utopia and the 'not-yet' (Noch-Nicht) in his magnum opus The Principle of Hope. Alongside Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno, and Brecht, he shaped a central current of Western Marxism. Returned to East Germany in 1948 to hold the chair of philosophy at Leipzig and receive the GDR National Prize, but was forced into retirement after the 1956 Hungarian uprising for his humanistic Marxism; defected to West Germany in 1961. His thought profoundly influenced liberation theology and the 1968 student movements.
Career timeline
1905–1908Studies philosophy, physics, music at Munich and Würzburg; doctorate on Rickert
1912–1914In Heidelberg, associates with Max Weber, Simmel, and Lukács
1918Publishes The Spirit of Utopia — first major work
1921Publishes Thomas Müntzer as Theologian of Revolution
1920sFreelance journalist in Berlin; befriends Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno
1933–1938Flees Nazi Germany for Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia
1935Publishes Heritage of Our Times; analyses fascism's appeal through non-synchronism
1938–1947Writes the three-volume The Principle of Hope in US exile
1949–1957Chair of philosophy, Leipzig University; GDR National Prize (1955); Academy of Sciences
1957Forced into retirement for teaching humanistic Marxism after the Hungarian uprising
1961Defects to West Germany after Berlin Wall built; guest professor at Tübingen
1967Receives the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade
1968–1970sInfluences the 1968 movement and liberation theology; mentors Rudi Dutschke
The labour commissar who steered the statification of Soviet trade unions
Arthur Ransome met him soon after his December 1918 appointment and described "a clean-shaven, intelligent young man, whose attention to business methods is reflected in his Commissariat"; Schmidt said the commissariat was controlled directly by the unions.
Born in Saint Petersburg on 17 (29) December 1886, the son of a domestic servant, and listed as German in the Russian-language biography. He joined the RSDLP in 1905 as a railway fitter, worked as a painter in German emigration from 1907 to 1911, and from 1915 served as secretary of the Petrograd committee. After February 1917 he was secretary of the Petrograd Party Committee and the Central Council of Trade Unions and a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee, and was appointed People's Commissar for Labour in November 1917, serving until 1928. He was Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of People's Commissars from 1928 to 1930; arrested in January 1937, sentenced to death by the Military Collegium on 28 January 1938 and shot the same day, and rehabilitated on 30 July 1957.
Career timeline
1905Joined RSDLP; railway fitter
1907–1911Exiled in Germany; worked as a painter
1912–1914Secretary, Petersburg Union of Metalworkers
1915–1916Secretary, Petrograd Committee of RSDLP(b); repeatedly arrested
1917.2–10Secretary of Petrograd Party Committee & Central Trade Union Council; member of Milrevcom
1917–1918Deputy People's Commissar for Labour, RSFSR
1918–1928People's Commissar for Labour (RSFSR, then USSR from 1923); Presidium member & secretary, AUCCTU
1928–1930Deputy Chairman, Sovnarkom & STO USSR
1930–1931Deputy People's Commissar for Agriculture, USSR
1931–1933Chief Arbitrator, Sovnarkom USSR
1933–1937Chairman, Primorye Regional Planning Commission; local economic posts
Hitler's personal prisoner, unbroken by eleven years in solitary
“A vote for Hindenburg is a vote for Hitler; a vote for Hitler is a vote for war.” — presidential campaign, 1932
KPD chairman. A Hamburg dock worker, he built the party into a Weimar mass force. Arrested after the Nazi takeover, he spent eleven years in solitary and was shot at Buchenwald in 1944.
Career timeline
1903–1920Hamburg docker; from the SPD via the USPD to the KPD
1925–1933KPD chairman; leads the Red Front-Fighters' League
1925, 1932Runs for Reich President
1933Arrested by the Gestapo; eleven years in solitary
Co-founder of Western Marxism, the German philosopher who challenged Marxist orthodoxy with Marxism and Philosophy
“If we get a few more of these Professors spinning out their theories, we shall be lost.” — Zinoviev at the 5th Comintern Congress, 1924, attacking Korsch and Lukács
German Marxist philosopher and revolutionary who, alongside Lukács, laid the foundations of Western Marxism. In Marxism and Philosophy (1923) he applied the materialist conception of history to Marxism itself, arguing for the revolutionary recovery of the Hegelian dialectic, a move that drew fierce denunciation from the Comintern. Served as Justice Minister in the 1923 Thuringian workers' government and as a KPD Reichstag deputy before his expulsion as a left-oppositionist. Fled the Nazis for American exile, where his scholarship left a deep imprint on Brecht, Benjamin, and the Frankfurt School.
Career timeline
1906–1910Studies law and philosophy at Munich, Geneva, Berlin; doctorate in law, University of Jena
1912–1914Legal research in London; joins the Fabian Society
1914–1918German Army service — refuses to carry weapons; awarded the Iron Cross twice for bravery
1917Joins USPD; elected delegate to soldiers' soviet
1920Joins KPD with the USPD left wing; lecturer at University of Jena
1923.3Publishes Marxism and Philosophy; becomes target of fierce Comintern criticism
1923.10–11Justice Minister, Thuringian workers' government — collapses after 27 days under Reichswehr intervention
1924–1928KPD Reichstag deputy; delegate to 5th Comintern Congress
1926.4Expelled from KPD; forms the Resolute Lefts (Entschiedene Linke) opposition faction
1933Flees Germany the night of the Reichstag fire; passes through Denmark and England
1936–1961US exile — Tulane University, Institute for Social Research; teaches Marxism to Brecht
1938Publishes Karl Marx; deeply influences Benjamin's Arcades Project
1950Ten Theses on Marxism Today — declares break with orthodox Marxism
The Wehrmacht's defensive specialist on the Eastern Front
On 16 April 1945, he pulled the main body out of the forward trenches before the Soviet bombardment, preserving the deeper defensive line.
Gotthard Heinrici was a senior German army commander in the Second World War who gained a reputation as the Wehrmacht's leading specialist in defensive operations. He fought in the invasion and occupation of the Soviet Union, bearing command responsibility as war crimes and ideological orders shaped the conduct of the campaign. As commander of Army Group Vistula in 1945, he anticipated the Soviet main thrust and built a defense in depth around the Seelow Heights, but tactical skill could not reverse Germany's defeat.
Career timeline
1905Entered the Prussian Army
1914–1918Served on the Western and Eastern Fronts in the First World War; staff officer
1937–1940Commander of the 16th Infantry Division
1940–1941Commander of XII Army Corps; fought in the French campaign and invasion of the Soviet Union
1942–1944Commander of the 4th Army; directed defensive operations on the Eastern Front
1944–1945Commander of the 1st Panzer Army; led retreating operations through Poland and Slovakia
1945.03–04Commander of Army Group Vistula; directed the defense at the Seelow Heights and before Berlin
1945–1948British prisoner of war; released in 1948
German Communist who abstained on the Comintern’s founding at its first congress and was later shot in the Great Purge
At the 1919 Comintern founding congress, Eberlein conveyed Luxemburg and Jogiches’s mandate against immediate foundation. Lenin persuaded him personally, but he followed the mandate and abstained rather than vote against.
A draughtsman from Saalfeld, he joined the SPD and during the war co-founded the Spartacus League with Luxemburg. As the KPD’s delegate to the Comintern’s founding congress in March 1919 he abstained on the founding vote, as Luxemburg and Jogiches had advised, believing a premature International would be dominated by the Bolsheviks. Afterwards he did organisational and financial work for the Comintern and the German party and sat in the Prussian Landtag. He fled to the Soviet Union in 1933, was arrested in 1937 and was shot in Moscow in October 1941.
Career timeline
1916Helped organize the Spartacus League as an underground political organization.
1918Helped found the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).
1919Attended the Comintern’s founding congress as the KPD delegate and abstained on its founding vote.
Chief of the General Staff who ordered the Bačka intervention behind the Novi Sad massacre and later sought contact with the West
Born Ferenc Knaus (or Knauz) at Moson, he served as an Austro-Hungarian staff officer in the First World War and in 1934 took his mother’s surname, Szombathelyi. In 1941 he led the Carpathian Group in the invasion of the Soviet Union. That September he succeeded Werth as Chief of the General Staff, and in January 1942 he ordered General Feketehalmy-Czeydner to intervene in Bačka, an operation that grew into punitive raids on Serb villages and the Novi Sad massacre. In 1943 he opened the investigation and court martial of those responsible for the massacre, and with Kállay he led the contacts with the Western Allies. Removed after the German occupation of 1944, he was sentenced to life imprisonment by a People’s Court after the war, handed over to Yugoslavia and shot at Petrovaradin in 1946.
Career timeline
1914–1918Austro-Hungarian staff officer
1926–1938Instructor and commander, Ludovica Military Academy
1938–1939Deputy Chief of Staff
1941Commander, Carpathian Group
1941–1944Chief of the General Staff
1946Life sentence by a People’s Court; executed after extradition to Yugoslavia
The general who represented Germany's surrender in Italy
On 29 April 1945 at Caserta, his representatives signed the surrender instrument for the German forces in Italy.
Born into a Prussian military family, Heinrich von Vietinghoff became a senior commander after serving in the Imperial Army and the Reichswehr. He took part in the invasions of Poland and the Soviet Union, and from 1943 commanded German defensive operations in occupied Italy. In April 1945 he negotiated with the Allies at Caserta and represented the German forces in the surrender arrangements, making him a central participant in ending the German war in Italy. After captivity, he joined West German rearmament discussions.
Career timeline
1906–1918Officer in the Prussian Army; served in the First World War
1919–1935Officer of the Reichswehr; served in the Army Ministry and corps staff
1938–1939Commander of the 5th Panzer Division
1940–1942Commander of the XLVI Panzer Corps in the Balkans and on the Eastern Front
1942–1943Commander-in-chief of the Ninth and Fifteenth Armies
1943–1944Commander-in-chief of the Tenth Army in Italy, defending the Gustav and Gothic Lines
1944–1945Commander-in-chief of Army Group C and the Southwest theatre
1945Represented the German forces in the Caserta surrender arrangements
Nazi Germany's finest operational strategist and the apex of the 'clean Wehrmacht' myth
"Preussische Feldmarschälle meutern nicht": "Prussian field marshals do not mutiny." With these words he explained why he did not join the 20 July 1944 plot on Hitler's life.
Erich von Manstein was a field marshal of Nazi Germany and widely regarded as the most dangerous operational mind on the Eastern Front. He devised the Ardennes flanking manoeuvre (the Sichelschnitt, or sickle cut) that broke France in 1940, captured the Crimea and Sevastopol in 1941–42, and in February–March 1943 executed the backhand-blow counteroffensive at Kharkov that restored the German southern front and created the Kursk salient. Relieved in March 1944 for disagreements with Hitler, he was convicted of war crimes by a British tribunal in 1949 and sentenced to 18 years (released 1953), then advised West Germany on rearming. His memoir Lost Victories narrated only his operational record, ignoring the Holocaust and Wehrmacht crimes, and became a cornerstone of the 'clean Wehrmacht' myth.
Career timeline
1906Commissioned in the 3rd Prussian Foot Guards
1914–1918Served on both fronts as staff officer; ended war as captain
1920s–1935Reichswehr staff and command; War Ministry; major to colonel
1936Deputy Chief of Staff, Army General Staff (Generalmajor)
1939–1940Poland and France: Army Group South CoS, devised Sichelschnitt, XXXVIII Corps
1941–194211th Army: Crimea and Sevastopol; Generalfeldmarschall
1942–1944Army Group Don→South; Kharkov backhand blow, Kursk southern pincer; relieved March 1944
1949–195518 years for war crimes (released 1953); Lost Victories, West German advisor
A leading architect of armoured warfare and a general of Nazi Germany
In May 1940, he argued that the armoured forces across the Meuse should keep moving toward the Channel rather than wait for the infantry.
Heinz Guderian was a professional soldier who helped develop the doctrine of concentrated armoured manoeuvre and shape Germany’s panzer force and early wartime victories. He presented himself after the war as the “father” of the panzer arm, but his ideas rested on work by Oswald Lutz and many other officers. During the 1940 invasion of France, he pressed for a rapid thrust through the Ardennes, across the Meuse and onward to the English Channel, helping isolate Allied forces around Dunkirk. He nevertheless collaborated with the Nazi regime and commanded in an eastern war of aggression marked by occupation crimes, while his postwar memoirs minimized his responsibility and political ties.
Career timeline
1908Officer, Hanoverian Light Infantry Battalion
1914–1918World War I, signals and staff officer
1927–1931Staff officer and instructor in army transport and motorized units
1935–1938Commander of 2nd Panzer Division, Inspector of Motorized Troops
1938–1940Commander of XIX Army Corps, armoured command in the Western Campaign
1941Commander of 2nd Panzer Group, Operation Barbarossa
1943–1945Inspector General of Armoured Troops, Acting Chief of the Army General Staff
Christian Democrat who led the CDU in the Soviet zone until SMAD removed him, then became West Germany’s minister for all-German affairs
A bookbinder from Hammelburg in Bavaria, he became a leader of the Catholic trade-union movement and was elected to the Reichstag for the Centre Party in 1933. He joined the resistance against the Nazis, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1938, and went into hiding after the 20 July 1944 plot. After the war he co-founded the CDU in the Soviet zone and became its co-chairman with Ernst Lemmer; as a Christian Socialist he called for the nationalisation of key industries. Critical of the Communists, he and Lemmer were removed as chairmen by the Soviet Military Administration in December 1947, and he moved to West Berlin. He opposed Adenauer’s Western integration in favour of a neutral, united Germany, and was minister for all-German affairs from 1949 to 1957. He died in Berlin in 1961.
Career timeline
1933Reichstag deputy for the Centre Party
1938Arrested by the Gestapo
1945–1947Co-chairman of the CDU in the Soviet zone
Commander of the Waffen-SS IX Mountain Corps who led the German forces in the siege of Budapest and refused to surrender
He joined the army in 1907 and in the First World War served as a General Staff officer, including with the German military mission in Constantinople. Moving to the police in 1919, he headed Chile’s Carabineros and became inspector general of police schools, then joined the SS and served on Himmler’s staff. He commanded the SS Polizei Division from late 1939 and the VI SS Army Corps (Latvian) from 1943. Appointed commander of the IX SS Mountain Corps in Budapest in December 1944, he led the German forces in the siege from 24 December 1944 to 11 February 1945 and refused all invitations to surrender, setting off a long and bloody siege. Taken prisoner by the Soviets after the failed breakout, he was sentenced in 1949 to 25 years, released in 1955 and killed in a traffic accident at Bielefeld in 1971.
Career timeline
1907–1919German army officer and General Staff officer
1919Joined the police
1928Chief of the Chilean Carabineros
1936Inspector General of Police schools
1939–1940Commander, SS Polizei Division
1943–1944Commander, VI SS Army Corps (Latvian)
1944–1945Commander, IX SS Mountain Corps; defence of Budapest
1945–1955Soviet prisoner; sentenced to 25 years in 1949
The 'Red Millionaire' who exposed Nazi terror through publishing, the Comintern's greatest propagandist, who broke with Stalin
"Stalin, you are a traitor!" — Münzenberg's response to the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
The Comintern's most brilliant mass-propagandist. He founded Workers International Relief, co-founded the League Against Imperialism, and his Brown Book (1933) exposed the Reichstag fire as a Nazi frame-up. He broke with Stalin and died under mysterious circumstances.
Career timeline
1915–1919Secretary, Intl. Union of Socialist Youth Organizations
1919–1921First Secretary, Young Communist International
1921–1937Founder & leader, Workers International Relief (IAH/Mezhrabpom)
1924–1933Reichstag deputy for Hesse-Nassau (KPD)
1927–1935Co-founder & leader, League Against Imperialism
Presiding judge of the Moscow show trials, Stalin's 'judicial guillotine'
To an Estonian lawyer he had just condemned to death, Ulrikh smiled and said: "So your profession came in handy after all!"
Chairman of the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court (1926–1948) and the judicial face of the Stalin-era Great Purge. Born in Riga to a Baltic German revolutionary father and a Russian noble mother, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1910 and began his Cheka career in 1918. He presided over the Moscow show trials of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and Tukhachevsky (1936–1938), directing a body that handed down over 30,000 death sentences in two years. After the war he presided over the trials of Nazi collaborators Vlasov and Krasnov, and the leaders of the Polish Underground State. Reporting directly to Stalin outside the ordinary judicial hierarchy, he embodied a parallel justice system designed for political repression. Removed in 1948, he died of a stroke in 1951.
Career timeline
1910Joined RSDLP (Bolsheviks)
1914Graduated from Riga Polytechnical Institute, commercial dept.
1915–1917Podporuchik, Imperial Russian Army sapper battalion
1918–1919Head of Finance, NKVD and Cheka
1920Judge, Revolutionary Military Tribunal of the Republic
1921–1926Chairman, Military Collegium of RSFSR Supreme Court
1926–1948Chairman, Military Collegium of USSR Supreme Court
1935–1948Deputy Chairman, USSR Supreme Court
1948–1951Director, Higher Military-Juridical Courses, Military Law Academy
The social democrat who became the voice of divided Berlin
“People of the world, look upon this city! You cannot, you must not, forsake us!”
Ernst Reuter was a German politician whose path from social democracy through communism and back reflected the upheavals of twentieth-century Europe. After Nazi persecution and exile in Turkey, he returned to Berlin and joined municipal administration to a practical social-democratic politics. During the Berlin Blockade, he gave West Berliners’ resolve an international voice and helped make the divided city a symbol of freedom and self-government. His career also reveals the tensions of a generation that moved from revolutionary radicalism toward democratic local government.
Career timeline
1912Joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany
1918–1919First chairman of the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic
1921First secretary of the Berlin district of the Communist Party of Germany
1926–1931Berlin city councillor for transport
1931–1933Mayor of Magdeburg
1935–1946Lecturer in urban planning at Ankara University and adviser to the Turkish government
1947Elected mayor of Berlin, without Soviet consent
1948–1953Mayor of West Berlin, Governing Mayor from 1951
On 30 June 1940 he wrote, “The final German victory over England is now only a question of time.”
Alfred Jodl was a career officer who served throughout the Second World War as chief of the Operations Staff of Germany's Armed Forces High Command, translating Nazi political decisions into military directives. In 1940 he judged final victory over Britain to be only a matter of time, while the OKW examined pressure and invasion options and coordinated the associated operational preparations and orders. He signed or circulated the Commissar and Commando Orders and bore responsibility for forced evacuation and the destruction of homes in occupied territory. Convicted on all four counts at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, he was hanged in 1946.
Career timeline
1910Entered military service in the 4th Bavarian Field Artillery Regiment
1914–1918Artillery officer on the Western Front in World War I
1932–1935Served in the Army Operations Department
1935–1939Chief of the National Defense Section in the OKW
1939–1945Chief of the OKW Operations Staff
1944Promoted to Generaloberst
1945Defendant at Nuremberg and signatory of Germany's surrender instrument
Hungarian general who directed the Novi Sad massacre, fled to Germany after his conviction and joined the SS
Born Franz Zeidner into a Transylvanian Saxon family, he served as an artillery and staff officer in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War, and between the wars changed his surname to the more Magyar-sounding Feketehalmy-Czeydner. In August 1941 he became commander of the Fifth Corps at Szeged. In January 1942 Chief of Staff Szombathelyi sent him against the partisans in Bačka; villagers there were massacred on his orders, and he organised the Novi Sad massacre. Sentenced to fifteen years by a court martial in January 1944, he fled to Vienna with other convicted officers and volunteered for the SS. As deputy defence minister under the Arrow Cross he signed the death warrant of his critic Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky. After the war he was handed via Hungary to Yugoslavia and executed in November 1946.
Career timeline
1910Commissioned lieutenant of artillery
1914–1918Austro-Hungarian artillery and staff officer
1941–1942Commander, Fifth Corps; directed the Bačka massacres
1944Convicted by court martial; fled to Vienna and joined the SS
1944–1945Deputy defence minister under the Arrow Cross
A field commander undone by the collision of orders and reality
After being told that no German field marshal had ever been captured alive, Paulus refused suicide and surrendered.
Friedrich Paulus was a German staff officer and general whose work included planning the invasion of the Soviet Union. As commander of the Sixth Army, he led the advance on Stalingrad, then became trapped between Hitler's order to hold the city and the army's collapse after the Soviet encirclement. He surrendered on 31 January 1943 and, in captivity, became a critic of the Nazi regime who joined anti-Nazi German officers' organizations sponsored by the Soviet Union. In postwar East Germany he researched military history, leaving a legacy shaped both by responsibility for an aggressive war and by his late break with Nazism.
Career timeline
1910Officer candidate, 111th Infantry Regiment of the Imperial German Army
1914–1918Served in the First World War and as a staff officer
1935–1939Chief of staff, Panzer Troop Command, then Tenth Army
1939–1940Chief of staff of the Tenth Army, later redesignated Sixth Army
1940–1941Deputy chief of the German Army General Staff
1942–1943Commander of the Wehrmacht's Sixth Army
1943Generaloberst, promoted to field marshal on 30 January
1954–1957Military-history research and teaching in East Germany
Hitler's "fireman" who rushed from crisis to crisis on the Eastern Front, the Wehrmacht's most tenacious defensive commander
Driving through a blizzard to confront Hitler in East Prussia, Model glared through his monocle and demanded: "Mein Führer, who commands Ninth Army, you or I?"
Walter Model distinguished himself as a staff officer in the First World War and rose to become the Wehrmacht's finest defensive commander in the Second. As commander of the 9th Army in the Rzhev salient, he repelled repeated major Soviet offensives, earning the nickname "the Lion of Defence" and Hitler's trust as the "fireman" who could be rushed to any crisis. On 27 April 1943, Model was the first senior commander to warn Hitler against Operation Citadel, presenting aerial reconnaissance photographs of the Red Army's deeply prepared defences in the Kursk salient, yet the offensive went ahead and his 9th Army failed to advance even 12 kilometres on the northern face. In the war's final weeks, trapped in the Ruhr Pocket, he dissolved his army group rather than order a mass surrender and shot himself in a forest.
Career timeline
1909Officer cadet, 52nd Infantry Regiment
1917Ordnance officer, Supreme Army Command (OHL)
1935Head of Section 8 (Technical), Army General Staff
1940Commander, 3rd Panzer Division
1942Commander, 9th Army: Rzhev
1943Northern pincer, Operation Citadel
1944Army Group Centre → Army Group B
1945Ruhr Pocket encircled, dissolved army group, suicide
“I order the immediate cessation of resistance. Every hour you keep on fighting prolongs the suffering of the civilians in Berlin and of our wounded.”
Helmuth Weidling was a German general who rose from imperial service to become an artillery officer and corps commander in the Wehrmacht. His command on the Eastern Front implicated him in Nazi Germany’s war of aggression and occupation, and his corps was later examined in connection with the Ozarichi camp crimes. Appointed commander of the Berlin Defence Area on 23 April 1945, he directed the city’s defence under Hitler’s ban on surrender, then negotiated with Vasily Chuikov and ordered the garrison to cease resistance on 2 May. Taken prisoner by the Soviet Union, he received a 25-year sentence for war crimes and died in custody in 1955; Russian prosecutors declared him ineligible for rehabilitation in 1996.
Career timeline
1911–1918Officer in Prussian artillery and Zeppelin units
1919–1938Reichswehr artillery officer and regimental commander
1939–1941Artillery commands in Poland, France and on the Eastern Front
1942–1943Commander of the 86th Infantry Division
1943–1945Commander of the XLI Panzer Corps
1945.04Commander of the LVI Panzer Corps at the Oder front and Berlin
1945.04.23–05.02Commander of the Berlin Defence Area, ordering the garrison’s surrender
1952–1955Imprisoned in the Soviet Union after a war-crimes conviction
Soviet Union
Soviet communism
1891–1956
○ Died of illness
Mathematician who mastered the Arctic through science and built Glavsevmorput
Every evening on the ice floe he lectured on philosophy, mathematics, and geography. Coughing blood from tuberculosis, he refused to leave until every one of his 104 castaways was safe. In two months, not one person broke discipline.
Mathematician, Arctic explorer, and state administrator. Born in Mogilev to a German-Latvian family, he founded the Moscow algebraic school through his work in group theory. In 1932 his icebreaker Sibiryakov achieved the first single-season transit of the Northern Sea Route; in 1934, after the Chelyuskin sank, he led 104 survivors through two months on a drifting ice floe. As head of Glavsevmorput he directed Soviet Arctic development, and in his later years proposed the influential cosmogonic hypothesis that the Solar System's planets formed through cold accretion of a dust cloud.
Career timeline
1913Graduated Kiev University, began group theory research under D.A. Grave
1916Published Abstract Theory of Groups; privat-docent at Kiev University
1918–1920Official at Narkomprod; joined RSDLP (Internationalists), merged into RKP(b)
1921–1924Head of State Publishing House, led education and publishing reforms
1924–1942Founding chief editor, Great Soviet Encyclopedia
1929–1949Founded and chaired Dept. of Higher Algebra, Moscow University; led Soviet algebraic school
1930–1932Director, All-Union Arctic Institute
1932Led Sibiryakov: first single-season transit of the Northern Sea Route
1932–1938Head of Glavsevmorput (Main Administration of the Northern Sea Route)
1934Chelyuskin sank; led 104 survivors for two months on drifting ice, all rescued
1937Organized drifting station North Pole-1; Hero of the Soviet Union
1939–1942Vice-President, USSR Academy of Sciences
1942–1956Director, Institute of Theoretical Geophysics; developed cold-accretion cosmogonic hypothesis
German naval commander of the U-boat fleet who briefly became head of state after Hitler's death.
Dönitz commanded Germany's U-boat force during the Second World War and became commander-in-chief of the Navy in January 1943. He continued to send submarines into battle through 1945 despite mounting losses. After Hitler's suicide, Hitler's will named him head of state; on 7 May 1945, Dönitz ordered Alfred Jodl to sign Germany's surrender instrument. Convicted at Nuremberg of crimes against peace and war crimes, he was sentenced to ten years in prison.
Career timeline
1943Became commander-in-chief of the German Navy
1945Became head of state after Hitler's death and ordered Germany's surrender
Frankfurt School's spectral companion, Marxist critic who dissected capitalist culture through the lens of mechanical reproduction
In the "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Benjamin wrote: "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism."
Born to a prosperous assimilated Jewish family in Berlin, Walter Benjamin was a singular Marxist cultural critic who intersected deeply with the Frankfurt School yet remained irreducible to any single tradition. His thought, fusing Jewish mysticism with historical materialism, analyzed how capitalist production destroys art's "aura" in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), while his posthumous "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940) challenged the Marxist faith in progress through the indelible allegory of the "angel of history," drawn from a Paul Klee painting. In exile he pursued the unfinished Arcades Project, an archaeological excavation of 19th-century Parisian commodity culture, and through his tense intellectual friendships with Brecht, Adorno, and Scholem, he expanded the horizons of Western Marxism.
Career timeline
1919PhD summa cum laude, University of Bern, on 'The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism'
1925Withdrew habilitation thesis 'The Origin of German Tragic Drama' from University of Frankfurt
1928Published 'One-Way Street' and 'The Origin of German Tragic Drama'
1933Fled Nazi Germany permanently, exiled to Paris
1935–1936Wrote 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,' published in French
1940Completed 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'; took his own life at Portbou on the Spanish border
First East German justice minister, dismissed and imprisoned in 1953 after opposing the prosecution of striking workers
A toolmaker from Berlin, he joined the SPD in 1910 and sat in the Prussian Landtag from 1928 to 1933. Under the Nazis he took part in a resistance group and was twice imprisoned. After the war he supported the forced merger of the SPD and KPD, sat on the SED’s Central Committee, and in October 1949 became the GDR’s first Minister of Justice. In the trial of the Gladow gang he had adult criminal law applied unlawfully so that a death sentence was possible. In an interview with Neues Deutschland on 30 June 1953 he said that members of the 17 June strike leadership would not be punished on mere suspicion; denounced as an “enemy of the state and the party”, he was dismissed, expelled and arrested, and sentenced to eight years. Released and pardoned in 1956, readmitted to the party in 1958, he died in 1973.
German Jewish Expressionist playwright who took part in the Bavarian revolution
After volunteering for the German army in World War I and being wounded at Verdun, Toller was discharged in 1917; his wartime experience turned him toward pacifism, and he joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. In April 1919 he served six days as president of the Bavarian Soviet Republic and took part in its armed resistance; sentenced to five years for high treason, he wrote several major plays in prison. Exiled after the Nazis came to power, he continued warning against Nazism and died by suicide in New York in 1939.
Career timeline
1914Volunteered for the German army and served in World War I.
1917Discharged from military service after wartime injury and ill health.
1919As a member of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, joined the leadership of the Bavarian Soviet Republic and served as its president, April 6–12.
1919Sentenced to five years in prison for high treason over his role in the republic's armed resistance.
1925Released, expelled from Bavaria, and went to Berlin.
1933After the Nazi seizure of power, left Germany and went into exile, moving through Switzerland, France, and England before the United States.
Baltic German Nazi ideologue from Reval who served as Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories in 1941–1945
Born in 1893 in Reval (Tallinn), in the Governorate of Estonia of the Russian Empire, he studied architecture at the Riga Polytechnical Institute. In 1918 he left for Germany with the retreating German army and in January 1919 joined the German Workers’ Party, eight months before Hitler; in 1923 he became editor of the party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter. In 1930 he published his racial treatise The Myth of the Twentieth Century, and he fed Hitler’s belief in Jewish conspiracies by introducing him to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Appointed Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories on 17 July 1941, he had Hinrich Lohse installed as Reichskommissar for Ostland, though his own authority was severely limited. He saw the Baltic lands as German “Lebensraum”. Found guilty on all four counts at Nuremberg, he was hanged on 16 October 1946.
Career timeline
1919Joined the German Workers’ Party
1923Editor of the Völkischer Beobachter
1930Published The Myth of the Twentieth Century
1941–1945Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories
A Luftwaffe chief who organized Nazi war and plunder
In August 1940, redirecting the air offensive toward London and civilian cities gave the RAF time to recover.
Hermann Göring rose from a First World War fighter ace to a central power-holder in Nazi Germany and commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe. He helped build dictatorship and the machinery of aggressive war by directing the Prussian police, the creation of the Gestapo, rearmament, and wartime economic mobilization. During the Battle of Britain in 1940, he overestimated the Luftwaffe and was involved in shifting attacks from the RAF's struggling airfields and fighter defences toward British cities, giving Fighter Command time to recover. After the war, the Nuremberg Tribunal condemned him as a major war criminal, and he committed suicide on the eve of his execution.
Nazi Germany’s foreign minister, he played a key role in negotiating the German-Soviet nonaggression pact.
Joachim von Ribbentrop served as Germany’s foreign minister from 1938 to 1945. He played a key role in negotiating the 1939 German-Soviet nonaggression pact, which made possible Germany’s invasion of Poland that September. He also directed diplomatic efforts to persuade Axis partners to deport Jews to German killing centers and to hand over their Jewish citizens in Germany to deportation. The International Military Tribunal convicted him on all four counts and sentenced him to death; he was hanged on October 16, 1946.
First East German Minister for State Security, purged in 1953 after trying to replace Ulbricht
Born in Gelsenkirchen to a gendarmerie sergeant’s family, he trained as a teacher and was a military leader of the Red Ruhr Army during the Kapp Putsch of 1920. As a GRU agent and Comintern military adviser he co-organised the Guangzhou Uprising in China, and in the Spanish Civil War, as “Gomez”, he led the International Brigades. He returned to Germany in 1947, joined the SED, and in 1950 became the first Minister for State Security and a Politburo member, building up the Stasi. After the uprising of June 1953 he moved to replace Ulbricht with Herrnstadt, but once Ulbricht had Khrushchev’s backing he lost his ministry and all his posts in July and was expelled from the party. He worked as a translator, died in East Berlin in 1958 and was rehabilitated after 1990.
Career timeline
1920Red Ruhr Army leader during the Kapp Putsch
1927–1930Comintern military adviser in China
1936–1938International Brigades commander in Spain (“Gomez”)
1950–1953GDR Minister for State Security; Politburo member
1953Stripped of all posts and expelled from the SED
SED Politburo member and chairman of the Central Party Control Commission who stood by Ulbricht in 1953
Born in Burg, the son of a Social Democratic worker, he worked as a tanner and left the SPD when it voted for war loans. He went through the USPD into the KPD and led its Magdeburg and East Prussia districts. Arrested in 1933, he escaped and went into exile, joining the National Committee for a Free Germany in the Soviet Union. He returned in 1945 with Anton Ackermann’s group and until 1946 was first secretary of the KPD in Saxony. From 1948 until his death he chaired the SED’s Central Party Control Commission, responsible for party discipline, and was a Politburo member and vice-president of the People’s Chamber. After the 1953 uprising, when a Politburo majority wanted to remove Ulbricht, he and Honecker alone stayed loyal. He died in East Berlin in 1971.
Career timeline
1918Joined the USPD; workers’ and soldiers’ council
1931–1933KPD political leader in East Prussia
1945–1946First secretary of the KPD in Saxony
1948–1971Chairman of the SED Central Party Control Commission
East Germany
Communism
1893–1973
○ Natural causes (stroke)
German communist leader who built the GDR and erected the Berlin Wall
At a press conference on 15 June 1961 he declared, 'Nobody intends to build a wall'; two months later, on 13 August, his orders launched the Berlin Wall.
Born in Leipzig in 1893 to a tailor's family and trained as a joiner, he joined the SPD in 1912, passed through the USPD (1917) and the Spartacus League (1919) into the KPD (1920), and sat on the KPD Central Committee from 1923 and in the Reichstag from 1928 to 1933. After the Nazi takeover he fled via Paris and Prague to the Soviet Union to work for the Comintern, and returned on 30 April 1945 leading the 'Ulbricht Group'. He was pivotal in the forced 1946 merger of the KPD and SPD into the SED and became its First Secretary in 1950, the effective leader of East Germany. He backed the suppression of the June 1953 uprising, ordered the Berlin Wall in 1961, and launched the New Economic System in 1963. Forced out on 3 May 1971 'for health reasons' in favour of Erich Honecker, he died of a stroke on 1 August 1973.
Career timeline
1912Joins the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)
1918Co-founds the Spartacus League and the KPD
1923–1933KPD Central Committee member, Reichstag deputy
1933–1945Exile in Paris, Prague and Moscow; works for the Comintern
1943Helps found the National Committee for a Free Germany
1950–1971First Secretary of the SED Central Committee
1960–1973Chairman of the GDR State Council
1971Forced to resign party leadership under Brezhnev pressure
The Social Democrat who led a divided state into being
In April 1946, he was elected co-chairman of the newly founded Socialist Unity Party alongside Wilhelm Pieck.
Otto Grotewohl was a Weimar-era Social Democratic politician who voted against Hitler’s Enabling Act and later led the postwar SPD in the Soviet occupation zone. Initially cautious, he helped drive the merger with the Communist Party under Soviet occupation authorities, becoming the SED’s co-chairman in 1946. The merger created the political foundation of East Germany, but it also followed the suppression of free choice within the SPD. As the GDR’s first head of government from 1949, Grotewohl helped build the new state while operating within the limits imposed by Soviet power.
Career timeline
1912Joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany
1920–1926Member of the Brunswick state parliament
1922–1924Brunswick Minister of Justice and Public Education
1925–1933Member of the Reichstag
1945–1946Chairman of the SPD Central Committee in the Soviet occupation zone
1946–1950Co-chairman of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany
1949–1964Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the GDR
1960–1964Withdrew from active politics because of severe illness
The German general who surrendered Paris rather than destroy it
On 25 August 1944, he signed the capitulation of the German garrison in Paris.
Dietrich von Choltitz was a German professional officer who served in both world wars and carried out Nazi Germany’s war on the Eastern and Western Fronts. As military governor of Paris in August 1944, he did not execute Hitler’s order to destroy the city and surrendered the garrison to French forces, helping make the liberation of Paris possible. British recordings made after his capture also preserve his admission of responsibility for the liquidation of Jews in Crimea, so his refusal in Paris does not erase his wider responsibility for the war.
Career timeline
1914–1918Officer, Royal Saxon Army 107th Infantry Regiment, Western Front
1919–1939Reichswehr officer, commander of III Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment
1939–1940Commander, 16th Air Landing Infantry Regiment, Poland and the Netherlands campaigns
1941–1942Commander, 16th Infantry Regiment, Crimea and Siege of Sevastopol
1943Commander, 11th Panzer Division and XLVIII Panzer Corps, Eastern Front
1944Commander, LXXVI Panzer Corps and LXXXIV Army Corps, Italy and Normandy
1944Commander of Greater Paris and military governor, surrendered on 25 August
1944–1947Interned at Trent Park and a US prisoner-of-war camp
A social democrat who moved from municipal politics into state power amid Germany's division
On 30 November 1948, he was elected Lord Mayor of the “provisional democratic magistrate” in Berlin's Soviet sector.
Friedrich Ebert Jr. was a German politician who moved from the Social Democratic Party to the leadership of the Socialist Unity Party, carrying both the symbolism of being the first president's son and the consequences of his own choices. The Nazis detained him in concentration camps for illegal political activity; after the war, he became a central figure in the Soviet zone as social democracy was forcibly fused with communism and the SED consolidated power. On 30 November 1948 he led the extraordinary assembly in the Soviet sector that deposed Berlin's elected magistrate and installed a rival East Berlin magistrate, then combined municipal reconstruction with senior work in East German state institutions.
Career timeline
1919–1925Editor of the Social Democratic daily Vorwärts
1927–1933Brandenburg an der Havel city councillor
1928–1933Member of the Reichstag
1946–1949President of the Brandenburg Landtag
1946–1979SED Central Committee and Politburo member
1948–1967First Lord Mayor of East Berlin
1949–1979People's Chamber and Council of State leadership
1971–1979Chairman of the SED People's Chamber faction
Nazi Party leader and Hitler’s deputy, sentenced to life imprisonment at the Nuremberg trials.
Hess joined the Nazi Party in 1920 and became a close associate of Hitler. He was appointed deputy party leader in 1933, and in 1939 Hitler placed him second after Hermann Göring in the line of succession. In May 1941 he flew alone to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate an end to the war with Britain; the British government rejected his proposals and held him as a prisoner of war. After the war, the Nuremberg tribunal convicted him of crimes against peace and sentenced him to life imprisonment, which he served at Spandau Prison.
“The world war… exerted the deepest influence on my entire life. Whatever other factors may have affected me, it was solely because of this war that I became a communist.” — from his 1927 autobiography
A Soviet intelligence officer who worked under cover as a German correspondent in Tokyo. He warned of Operation Barbarossa and confirmed Japan's southward turn, enabling Siberian divisions to be thrown into the Moscow front. Executed in 1944; made a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964.
Career timeline
1925–29Comintern, then Red Army intelligence
1930–33The Shanghai network
1933–41Tokyo: the correspondent the German embassy trusted
1941.5–6Warns of Barbarossa; ignored
1941.9“Japan will not strike north”, the basis for moving the Siberian divisions
SS special-unit commander implicated in the Wola massacre
Waffen-SS commander of a unit recruited from convicted criminals; from 1940 he led it in anti-partisan operations in occupied Poland and Belarus, massacring civilians on a mass scale.
Nazi German SS officer and war criminal. From 1940 he commanded the special unit bearing his name, which committed war crimes in Poland and Belarus. During the suppression of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, his formation participated in the massacre of civilians in Wola. His command responsibility belongs within the history of Nazi occupation policy and the SS and police command structure.
Career timeline
1913Enlisted in the Württemberg Army as a machine gunner; rose to lieutenant in World War I and received the Iron Cross in both classes.
1919~1921Joined the Freikorps and helped crush the German Revolution, workers' uprisings, strikes and communist revolts by force.
1922~1934Took a doctorate in political science at Frankfurt and joined the Nazi Party, but in 1934 was imprisoned for a sexual offence involving a minor and theft, expelled from the party and stripped of his doctorate and military honours.
1937~1939Served with the Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War, was wounded three times, and on the strength of that service had his 1934 conviction annulled and his party membership restored in 1940.
1940Took command of the Oranienburg poacher unit recruited from convicted poachers; renamed Sonderkommando Dirlewanger, it was assigned guard and anti-partisan duties in occupied Poland.
1943Expansion of the unit to regimental size was authorized, and in Belarus it conducted anti-partisan operations that massacred civilians on a mass scale.
1944Took part in suppressing the Warsaw Uprising and the Wola massacre, and was then deployed against the Slovak National Uprising.
1945Was seriously wounded fighting Soviet forces near Guben in February and sent to the rear; in April he deserted and went into hiding.
Higher SS and Police Leader who directed the mass shootings at Kamianets-Podilskyi, Babi Yar and Rumbula
The son of a textile factory owner in Hornberg in the Black Forest, he fought as an officer in the First World War. He joined the Nazi Party in 1929 and the SS in 1930, and from 1933 was police president and head of the political police in Brunswick. Chosen by Himmler in June 1941 as Higher SS and Police Leader for southern Russia and Ukraine, he controlled all Einsatzgruppen killings in his area and used his method in the mass shootings at Kamianets-Podilskyi (23,600 killed) and Babi Yar (33,771 killed). Moved to Ostland in November with orders to complete the extermination of Riga’s Jews, he watched over two days as 25,000 people were killed at Rumbula. Taken prisoner fighting the Red Army in April 1945, he was sentenced to death at the Riga trial and hanged in Riga on 3 February 1946.
Career timeline
1914–1918German army officer and pilot
1929–1930Joined the Nazi Party and the SS
1932–1945Reichstag deputy
1933–1938Police president and head of political police, Brunswick
1941Higher SS and Police Leader, southern Russia and Ukraine
SPD leader who survived ten years in Nazi camps and, after the war, refused the merger with the Communists
Born in Kulm in West Prussia, he lost his right arm in the First World War and joined the SPD in 1918. As a member of the Württemberg Landtag and the Reichstag he fought the Nazis. Arrested in July 1933, he refused to sign a renunciation of political activity and spent ten years in concentration camps. In 1945 he rebuilt the party from Hanover, rejected the merger with the Communists urged by Otto Grotewohl in the Soviet zone, and called the KPD “red-painted Nazis”. Elected SPD chairman in 1946 and the Bundestag’s first leader of the opposition in 1949, he called for the nationalisation of heavy industry and a united Germany and opposed Adenauer’s integration with the West. He died in Bonn in 1952.
Career timeline
1918Joined the SPD
1930–1933Reichstag deputy
1933–1943Held in Nazi concentration camps
1946–1952SPD chairman
1949–1952Leader of the opposition in the Bundestag
SPD organiser in the Soviet zone who signed the merger with the KPD, then left the SED in 1948 and fled west
The son of a shipyard worker in Elbing, he joined the SPD in 1913 and became a white-collar union official in Brunswick, where he worked closely with Otto Grotewohl. Under the Nazis he belonged to a Social Democratic resistance circle and was imprisoned with Grotewohl in 1938. In May 1945 he and Grotewohl rebuilt the SPD in Berlin; he sat on its Central Committee and was the first SPD signatory of the agreement with the KPD and of the unity declaration. Elected to the SED Central Secretariat in 1946, he was isolated as the party was Stalinised and in September 1948 was relieved of all functions. In October he wrote a letter of resignation warning that the “party of a new type” would lead to a totalitarian dictatorship, and fled to the West. He died in 1964.
Career timeline
1913Joined the SPD
1938Imprisoned with Grotewohl
1945Member of the SPD Central Committee
1946Member of the SED Central Secretariat
1948Relieved of all functions, left the SED and fled west
Nazi Gauleiter of Schleswig-Holstein who, as Reichskommissar for Ostland in 1941–1944, ordered the ghettoisation and expropriation of Jews
Born into a peasant family in Schleswig-Holstein, he was severely wounded in the First World War. He joined the Nazi Party in 1923, became Gauleiter of Schleswig-Holstein in 1925 and in 1933 also Oberpräsident of the province. Appointed Reichskommissar for Ostland on 25 July 1941, he shuttled between Riga and Kiel; his decree of 27 July ordered lists of Jews, the yellow badge, the confiscation of their property and their concentration in ghettos. Asked to explain his order forbidding the execution of Jews in Libau (Liepāja), he wrote on 15 November asking whether all Jews were to be liquidated regardless of economic interests, yet he stayed at his post for three more years. He fled Ostland without authorisation on 13 August 1944 and was removed. Sentenced in 1948 to ten years, he was released for ill health in 1951 and died in his home village in 1964.
Nazi Party propaganda chief and minister who promoted antisemitism and dictatorship.
Joseph Goebbels was a Nazi Party propaganda leader who headed the party organization in Berlin from 1926 and became its propaganda chief in 1930. Appointed minister of propaganda by Hitler in 1933, he brought the press, film, radio, and cultural life under Nazi ideological control and promoted antisemitism and persecution of Jews. He was a chief instigator of the November 1938 pogrom and later campaigned for total war.
Career timeline
1926–1945Nazi Party Gauleiter for Berlin
1930–1945Nazi Party propaganda chief
1933–1945Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda
The West German economic statesman who shaped currency reform and the social market economy
On 21 June 1948, he announced by radio the abolition of price controls and compulsory rationing for selected manufactured goods.
Ludwig Erhard was an economist and politician who conceived West Germany’s postwar order as a combination of competitive markets and social security. As director of the Bizonal Economic Administration in 1948, he helped prepare monetary reform and, alongside the introduction of the Deutsche Mark, began a staged relaxation of price and production controls that opened the institutional path to recovery. He is often mythologized as the sole architect of the economic miracle, although Allied reform, international conditions, and the recovery of production by workers and firms all mattered, while price liberalization initially raised living costs and provoked working-class resistance. As economics minister and later chancellor, he helped make that order part of West Germany’s political identity, but resigned in 1966 amid recession and the collapse of his coalition.
Career timeline
1919–1922Studied business administration at Nuremberg Business School
1925Received a doctorate in economics from Frankfurt University
1947Led the Bizonal Special Office for Money and Credit
1948–1949Director of the Bizonal Economic Administration
1949–1963West German Federal Minister of Economics, also Vice-Chancellor from 1957
1963–1966Second Federal Chancellor of West Germany
1966–1967Chairman of the Christian Democratic Union
Father of the Katyusha rocket, the engineer who perfected the RS‑82 and RS‑132 and coined the word 'cosmonautics'
During the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion, mutineers arrested Langemak and sentenced him to death. He was held from 2 March to 18 April and freed only after the Red Army crushed the uprising — twenty years before he would build the rockets that became the Katyusha.
Of German descent, Langemak began developing smokeless-powder rockets at the Gas Dynamics Laboratory (GDL) and, as chief engineer of the Rocket Research Institute (RNII, 1934–1938), brought the RS-82 and RS-132 solid-fuel rockets to operational readiness. These became the core munition of the BM-13 Katyusha multiple rocket launcher: one of the most iconic Soviet weapons of World War II. He introduced the term 'cosmonautics' into the Russian language and corresponded with Tsiolkovsky about the peaceful space applications of rocketry. Arrested on false charges during the Great Purge in 1937, he was shot on 11 January 1938, rehabilitated in 1955, and posthumously made a Hero of Socialist Labor in 1991.
Career timeline
1916–18Entered Petrograd University for Japanese philology; graduated from Naval Ensign School, served in the fleet
1919–22Mobilized into the Red Army; battery commander and assistant division chief, Kronstadt Fortress
1923–28Graduated from the Red Army Military-Technical Academy
1928–33Led development of smokeless-powder rockets RS-82 and RS-132 at the Gas Dynamics Laboratory (GDL)
1934–37Deputy director and chief engineer of RNII (NII-3); Military Engineer 1st Rank
1937–38Arrested by NKVD; sentenced to death by Military Collegium, shot same day, 11 January 1938
1955/1991Posthumously rehabilitated (1955); Hero of Socialist Labor (1991)
Marxist playwright who weaponized theatre for class struggle through epic theatre and the Verfremdungseffekt
When I read Marx's Capital, I understood my plays — Marx was the only spectator for my plays I'd ever come across.
Bertolt Brecht was the 20th century's most important Marxist playwright and the founder of epic theatre, a poet and director who transformed the stage into a forum for class consciousness and anti-capitalist critique. After embracing Marxism under Karl Korsch in the late 1920s, he developed the Verfremdungseffekt — a defamiliarization technique that broke emotional immersion to provoke critical reflection — and with works like The Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage and Her Children, and The Good Person of Szechwan, he fused avant-garde form with popular idiom to anatomize capitalism and war. Driven out by the Nazis in 1933, he lived in exile in Scandinavia and the US—where HUAC investigated him in 1947—before returning to found the Berliner Ensemble with Helene Weigel in East Berlin in 1949, defining postwar theatre worldwide until his death in 1956.
Career timeline
1922Wins Kleist Prize for Drums in the Night
1924Moves to Berlin; assistant dramaturg at Deutsches Theater
1928The Threepenny Opera premieres, biggest Berlin hit of the 1920s
1933Flees Nazi Germany; begins 15-year exile through Scandinavia and the US
1947Testifies before HUAC in Hollywood; leaves the US the next day
1949Founds Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin with Helene Weigel
Communist who ran an anti-fascist sabotage network before the war and headed the Stasi from 1953 to 1957
Born in Münden in the Province of Hanover, he took part in the sailors’ revolt of 1918, joined the KPD in 1919 and led party military wings; he sat in the Reichstag in 1932–1933. In exile he organised the “Wollweber League” in 1936–1940, which carried out 21 known acts of sabotage against ships of fascist nations, and supplied arms to the Spanish Republicans. Back in Germany in 1946 he ran shipping administration. In July 1953, when Zaisser was removed and the Ministry for State Security was downgraded to a State Secretariat, he became its head, and in November 1955 Minister of State Security again. He clashed with Ulbricht and Honecker and sided with Schirdewan, resigned in 1957, and in 1958 was removed from the Central Committee for “factional activity”. He died in East Berlin in 1967.
Career timeline
1918Took part in the sailors’ revolt
1932–1933KPD Reichstag deputy
1936–1940Organised the Wollweber League sabotage network
Frankfurt School philosopher and the pre-eminent theorist of the 1960s New Left
'In its advanced positions, it is the Great Refusal — the protest against that which is' — One-Dimensional Man (1964)
Herbert Marcuse was a central philosopher of the Frankfurt School who fused Marxism with Freudian psychoanalysis to develop a critical theory of modern capitalist society. In Eros and Civilization (1955) he analyzed the repressive structures of capitalist society and explored the utopian potential of liberated Eros, while in One-Dimensional Man (1964) he diagnosed advanced industrial society as a 'one-dimensional' order where technological abundance erodes critical consciousness, introducing the concept of repressive desublimation. A German-Jewish émigré who fled Nazism for the United States, he served in the OSS during the war and later taught at Brandeis and UC San Diego, becoming the intellectual pillar of the 1960s student movements and the New Left. His radical thought, crystallized in the 'Great Refusal,' has had a lasting impact on critical theory and emancipatory politics.
Career timeline
1932Joined Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt School) in exile, Geneva
1934–1942Researcher, Institute for Social Research, Columbia University, New York
1942–1951Analyst, OSS and State Department; head of Central European Section
1954–1965Professor of political theory, Brandeis University
Communist who chaired the German Economic Commission, the forerunner of the GDR government, and led East German economic policy
Born in Feuerbach near Stuttgart, he worked as a metal presser at Bosch and passed through the Spartacists and the USPD into the KPD in 1919, becoming the party’s leading agricultural policy maker in the 1920s. Imprisoned after the Nazis came to power, he emigrated to the Soviet Union and in the Spanish Civil War commanded the XI International Brigade. Interned in France and handed to the Gestapo by Vichy in 1942, he was liberated at Mauthausen. In March 1948 he became chairman of the German Economic Commission (DWK), which carried out the eastern currency reform and the first plans. In the GDR he was a Politburo member, deputy prime minister and chairman of the State Planning Commission; at the Politburo session of 8 July 1953 he recommended replacing Ulbricht, yet kept his posts. Minister of Machine Construction and then of Foreign Trade, he died of a heart attack in 1961.
Career timeline
1919Joined the KPD
1923Head of the KPD agricultural division
1937–1938Commander of the XI International Brigade
1943–1945Mauthausen concentration camp
1948–1949Chairman of the German Economic Commission
1950–1961SED Politburo member; deputy prime minister
1955–1961Minister of Foreign and Inter-German Trade
East German heavy-industry minister who faced the striking workers outside the House of Ministries on 16 June 1953
The son of a coppersmith from Lauterbach in Hesse, he was working underground at seventeen, served in the First World War and in 1918 sat on a soldiers’ council. He joined the USPD in 1920 and the KPD in 1922, becoming the party’s political secretary in Saxony and a Reichstag deputy. Arrested in 1933, he survived the Nazi years in prisons and in concentration camps including Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg. After the war he was Saxony’s minister for economics and planning, then deputy chairman of the German Economic Commission, and in the GDR minister of industry and of heavy industry. On 16 June 1953 he walked into the crowd outside the House of Ministries and tried to address it from a desk, but was whistled down. In 1958 Ulbricht pushed him out of his offices for a “deviant attitude”, and he turned to writing. He died in East Berlin in 1975.
Career timeline
1922Joined the KPD
1932–1933Reichstag deputy
1933–1945Imprisoned; held in Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg
1948–1949Deputy chairman of the German Economic Commission
1949–1955Minister of Industry, then of Heavy Industry
SS officer who led Einsatzgruppe A in 1941, instigating the Kaunas pogrom and directing the murder of Baltic Jews
Born into a pastor’s family in Sternenfels, he took a doctorate in law at Tübingen. He joined the Nazi Party and the SS in 1932, headed the Gestapo in Württemberg and then Breslau, and in 1938 became formal head of the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration in Vienna. Given command of Einsatzgruppe A in February 1941, he followed Army Group North into the Baltic states in June. He had Klimaitis start a pogrom in Kaunas and Arājs raise a unit in Riga, staging the killings as the “self-cleansing” of the local population. By the winter of 1941 he reported that Einsatzgruppe A had murdered some 249,420 Jews, and at the end of November he became commander of the Security Police and SD for Ostland. He was fatally wounded by Soviet partisans near Krasnogvardeysk, Russia, in March 1942.
Career timeline
1927Doctorate in law, Tübingen
1932Joined the Nazi Party and the SS
1938Head of the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration, Vienna
1941Commander of Einsatzgruppe A; Security Police commander for Ostland
At Posen in October 1943, he told SS officers that standing firm before 100, 500, or 1,000 corpses and staying 'decent' was 'a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of.'
Heinrich Himmler was a central Nazi leader who expanded the SS and police into a bureaucratic apparatus for racial rule and mass murder. He directed the concentration-camp system, extermination policies, and killing formations in occupied Europe, making him one of the principal perpetrators of the Holocaust and the murder of millions of other victims. During the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, he approved and directed the German reprisal that treated the city and its population as targets for destruction, massacre, and deportation. After attempting unauthorized negotiations with the Western Allies as Germany’s defeat became unavoidable, he was dismissed by Hitler, captured by British forces, and died by suicide in custody.
Career timeline
1923Joined the Nazi Party and took part in the Beer Hall Putsch.
1925Joined the Schutzstaffel, or SS.
1929–1945Led the SS as Reichsführer-SS.
1936–1945Served as Chief of German Police, controlling the police and apparatus of political repression.
1943–1945Served concurrently as Reich Minister of the Interior.
1944Directed the destruction of Warsaw and the massacre and deportation of civilians during the uprising.
1945Was dismissed over unauthorized peace contacts, then captured and died by suicide in custody.
“Li De”, the only Westerner on the Long March and the Comintern military adviser blamed at Zunyi
Sent to China as a Comintern agent under the name Li De, he was nearly the only foreigner on the Long March, and the Zunyi Conference of 1935 removed him and Bo Gu from command. East Germany revealed only in 1964 that Li De was Otto Braun.
A German Communist from Munich who escaped prison in 1928 and studied at the Frunze Military Academy in the Soviet Union. Sent to Shanghai as Comintern military adviser in 1932, he entered the Jiangxi Soviet in 1933 and with Bo Gu directed a positional defence that lost the fifth encirclement campaign. On the Long March the Zunyi Conference of 1935 condemned his and Bo Gu’s military leadership and elevated Mao. He returned to Moscow in 1939 and after the war lived in East Germany as a translator and lecturer, publishing his memoir A Comintern Agent in China in 1973.
A senior Nazi SS coordinator who became a late-war negotiating envoy
On 8 March 1945, Wolff met Allen Dulles in Switzerland to discuss terms for the surrender of German forces in northern Italy.
Karl Wolff was a senior Nazi SS officer who served as Heinrich Himmler’s chief of staff and stood close to the regime’s central decisions and crimes. As the highest SS and police leader in occupied Italy, he oversaw a system marked by the deportation of Jews, forced labor, and repression of the resistance, responsibilities not erased by his later negotiations. In 1945 he conducted the secret Operation Sunrise talks with OSS chief Allen Dulles in Switzerland, helping secure the early surrender of German forces in northern Italy, though his influence and motives were limited. After the war he was convicted for facilitating mass murder.
Career timeline
1917–1920Officer candidate in the Imperial German Army’s 115th Infantry Regiment, serving on the Western Front
1931Joined the Nazi Party and the SS
1935–1943Chief of the Reichsführer-SS Personal Staff
1943–1944Highest SS and Police Leader in Italy
1944–1945Plenipotentiary General of the German Wehrmacht in Italy
1945German negotiating representative in Operation Sunrise, involved in the surrender in northern Italy
1964–1969Convicted by a Munich court for facilitating the murder of 300,000 Jews and sentenced to 15 years, released in 1969
Exiled SPD functionary who succeeded Schumacher as SPD leader and leader of the West German opposition
Born in Magdeburg, the son of a bricklayer, he joined the SPD in 1918 and led the Socialist Workers’ Youth. In May 1933 he went into exile in Prague with the party executive, helped form the exiled SPD (Sopade), and by way of Paris and Lisbon spent the war in London. Returning in February 1946, he worked in Kurt Schumacher’s office in Hanover and that year became his deputy, running the party organisation and its international contacts. After Schumacher’s death in 1952 he became party chairman, parliamentary leader and leader of the opposition. He lost to Adenauer as candidate for chancellor in 1953 and 1957, and backed the 1959 Godesberg Programme, with which the SPD broke with Marxism. He died in Bonn in 1963.
Career timeline
1918Joined the SPD
1928Chairman of the Socialist Workers’ Youth
1933Exile in Prague; member of the exiled SPD executive
1946SPD deputy chairman
1952–1963SPD chairman and leader of the opposition
East German jurist who succeeded Fechner as justice minister after the 1953 uprising and led its harsh political trials
Born into a liberal middle-class family in Bernburg, Anhalt, she was among the first women to study law in Germany. A Social Democrat, she married the physician Georg Benjamin, brother of Walter Benjamin, in 1926 and joined the KPD in 1927. Barred from practising law under the Nazis, she lost her husband in Mauthausen in 1942. After the war she worked in the justice administration of the Soviet zone, and as vice-president of the GDR Supreme Court presided over show trials of political undesirables and Jehovah’s Witnesses. On 15 July 1953 she succeeded Max Fechner, who had opposed prosecuting the striking workers, as minister of justice, and her heavy sentences against those arrested in June earned her the names “Red Hilde” and “the Red Freisler”. Ulbricht forced her to resign in 1967. She died in East Berlin in 1989.
Editor of Neues Deutschland who helped draft the 1953 New Course, moved against Ulbricht and was purged as a “faction”
Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Gleiwitz, he became a correspondent for the Berliner Tageblatt and an agent of Soviet military intelligence (GRU). Exiled in the Soviet Union from 1939, he edited the newspaper of the National Committee for a Free Germany. Back in Berlin in 1945 he ran the Berliner Zeitung and helped found Neues Deutschland, whose editor always followed Moscow’s line. In June 1953 he and Zaisser set themselves against Ulbricht, and he helped formulate the New Course approved by the Central Committee. After the uprising he proposed a collective leadership, but in July he was removed from the Central Committee for “anti-party factionalism” and in January 1954 expelled from the SED. He worked at the Central Archives in Merseburg, died in 1966 and was rehabilitated only in 1989.
Career timeline
1930Recruited as a GRU agent
1943Editor-in-chief of Freies Deutschland
1945Editor-in-chief of the Berliner Zeitung
1950–1953SED Central Committee member and Politburo candidate
1953Removed from the Central Committee for “anti-party factionalism”
Economist and the SED’s chief ideologue until 1958, when he was expelled from the Politburo in the Schirdewan affair
Born in Leipzig, he joined the USPD in 1919 and the KPD in 1920 and worked as an editor on party papers. From 1926 he studied in Moscow at the International Lenin School and the Institute of Red Professors. In exile from 1933 he was Ulbricht’s secretary in Paris; in Moscow he lost his teaching posts in 1936 for alleged deviations, and in the war became chief editor of Moscow Radio’s German service. Returning with the Ackermann Group in 1945, he ran the party’s propaganda and education work, joined the Politburo in 1950 and was Central Committee secretary for propaganda from 1950 to 1955, effectively the party’s chief ideologue. In June 1953 he set up the command in Halle that put down the uprising. After 1956 he opposed the complete collectivisation of agriculture, and in 1958 he was expelled from the Politburo. He then directed the Institute of Economics of the Academy of Sciences.
Career timeline
1920Joined the KPD
1926–1932International Lenin School and Institute of Red Professors, Moscow
1941–1944Chief editor of Moscow Radio’s German service
1950–1958SED Politburo member
1950–1955Central Committee secretary for propaganda
1958–1969Director of the Institute of Economics, Academy of Sciences
The SS general who commanded the repression of the Warsaw Uprising
In a report during the Warsaw Uprising, Reinefarth wrote: “We have more prisoners than ammunition to kill them.”
Heinz Reinefarth was a lawyer who joined the Nazi Party and the SS before becoming a commander in Germany's occupation war. During the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, he led a battle group combining combat, police, and security units, playing a central role in the command structure of the 5 August assault on Wola and the mass killing of civilians. Despite Polish demands for his extradition, he escaped prosecution and conviction after the war and served as a mayor and state legislator in West Germany. His career links command responsibility for war crimes with postwar impunity in a single life.
Career timeline
1927Completed his law training in Jena and began working in the legal profession.
1932Joined the Nazi Party and the SS.
1942Served as SS general inspector of civil administration in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
1944Became Higher SS and Police Leader in Wartheland.
1944-08Commanded Kampfgruppe Reinefarth in the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising.
1945Commanded the fortress of Küstrin and was captured by U.S. forces.
1951–1964Served as mayor of Westerland.
1962–1967Served in the Schleswig-Holstein Landtag.
Nazi official who led SS intelligence and police agencies in implementing the Holocaust.
At the 1942 Wannsee Conference, Heydrich coordinated German state agencies for the murder of Europe’s Jews.
Heydrich joined the SS in 1931 and built and led its Security Service (SD); in 1936 he took command of the Security Police, including the Gestapo and criminal police. When the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) was established in 1939, he became its chief, unifying the Security Police and SD under an agency central to Nazi persecution and mass murder of Jews and political opponents. Appointed acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia in 1941, he oversaw executions of resistance figures and the ghettoization and deportation of Jews. He chaired the January 1942 Wannsee Conference to coordinate ministries in the murder of European Jews; wounded in an attack by Czech resistance agents in May, he died on June 4.
Career timeline
1931–1942Chief of the SS Security Service (SD)
1936–1942Chief of the Security Police, titled Chief of the Security Police Main Office, 1936–1939
1939–1942Chief of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA)
1941–1942Acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia
SS diplomat who, as Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary in 1944, pressed the Hungarian government to deport its Jews to Auschwitz
Born in Bad Kissingen, the son of a schoolteacher, he studied political science in Munich and took his doctorate in 1928. He joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and took part in forcing the resignation of Austria’s Chancellor Schuschnigg, the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1939 and the proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia in 1941. Promoted to SS-Brigadeführer, he became Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary when Germany occupied it in March 1944, with authority over all occupying forces except the Wehrmacht, chiefly the Gestapo, and pressed the Hungarian government to deport its Jews to Auschwitz. In June he cabled Ribbentrop that some 340,000 Jews had been delivered to the Reich, and in October he helped the Arrow Cross take power. Sentenced to 20 years at the Ministries Trial in 1949, he was released in 1951 and died in Darmstadt in 1977.
Career timeline
1928Doctorate in political science, Munich
1932Joined the Nazi Party
1939Worked on dismembering Czechoslovakia
1941Arranged the proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia in Zagreb
1944Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary
1949–1951Sentenced to 20 years at the Ministries Trial; released 1951
German communist who drafted the KPD’s 1945 appeal and argued for a “special German road to socialism”
The son of a hosier from Thalheim in Saxony, he joined the KPD in 1926 and attended the International Lenin School in Moscow. After underground work and exile under the Nazis he directed a political school of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, and in Moscow ran the “Free Germany” radio station. In 1945 he led the KPD group sent to Saxony and drafted the party’s appeal of 11 June 1945. In 1946 he argued that socialism could be built in Germany without a preceding dictatorship of the proletariat, a “special German road to socialism” he had to recant after Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948. He served as deputy foreign minister and first head of the GDR’s foreign intelligence service, and in 1953 was stripped of all posts for supporting Zaisser. Gravely ill with cancer, he took his own life in 1973.
Career timeline
1926Joined the KPD
1935KPD Central Committee member and Politburo candidate
1945Head of the KPD group in Saxony; drafted the 11 June appeal
Exiled writer who recorded children’s experiences of the Spanish war
She drew on children she met at an International Brigades home, seeking to represent their memories and emotions rather than treating them only as an audience for propaganda.
German Jewish writer for children and young readers. After fleeing Nazi Germany for France, she worked at the Ernst Thälmann children’s home established by the International Brigades in Spain. Children’s experiences informed her novel Vier spanische Jungen. Deported to Auschwitz in 1942, she is believed to have been murdered there; the exact date of her death is unknown.
Career timeline
1925–1929Studied law in Berlin and Heidelberg but left without a degree.
1931Published her first stories in the children's book series Sonne und Regen im Kinderland.
1932Published Müllerstraße, Jungens von heute, about the lives of working-class children in Berlin.
1934Her youth novel Janko, der Junge aus Mexiko, written in Parisian exile, was published in Strasbourg.
1937Tsao und Jing-Ling, Kinderleben in China appeared in a Swiss trade-union newspaper through Lisa Tetzner's advocacy.
1937–1938Travelled in Spain to research a children's book on the civil war on the side of the International Brigades.
1938Completed Vier spanische Jungen at the end of the year; the novel was published only in 1987.
SS officer who ran the deportation of Europe’s Jews to the death camps and in 1944 oversaw that of Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz
Born to a Calvinist family in Solingen, Germany, he grew up in Austria, where the family moved in 1914, and joined the Nazi Party and the SS in 1932. In 1938 he was posted to Vienna to organise Jewish emigration from Austria. Head of RSHA Sub-Department IV B4 from December 1939, he attended the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 and prepared its minutes, after which he and his staff were responsible for deporting Jews to the extermination camps. After Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944 he oversaw the deportation of Hungary’s Jews; by the time the transports stopped in July, 437,000 of its 725,000 Jews had been deported. Captured by US forces after the war, he escaped from a detention camp and reached Argentina in 1950, but in 1960 Israel’s Mossad abducted him; tried in Jerusalem, he was hanged in 1962.
Career timeline
1932Joined the Austrian Nazi Party and the SS
1933–1938Jewish affairs, SS Security Service
1938–1939Central Agency for Jewish Emigration, Vienna
1939–1945Head of RSHA Sub-Department IV B4
1944Oversaw the deportation of Hungary’s Jews
1950–1960In hiding in Argentina
1960–1962Abducted by Mossad, tried in Jerusalem, executed
East Germany's 'Master of Fear': the Stasi chief who ruled state security for 32 years
“All this blithering over to execute or not to execute, for the death penalty or against — all rot, Comrades. Execute! And, when necessary, without a court judgment.” — to senior Stasi officers, 1982
A communist militant from Berlin's Wedding district, Mielke fled to the USSR after the 1931 killing of two Berlin policemen and was trained by the NKVD. After the Spanish Civil War he returned in 1945 to help build the GDR's state security apparatus, leading the Stasi from 1957 to 1989 and expanding it into a 90,000-strong surveillance network. The Stasi controlled all of East German society while training armed groups across the Third World and Western Europe, extending socialist-bloc security architecture. He fell with the regime in 1989 and was convicted after reunification for the 1931 murders.
Career timeline
1925Joined the KPD
1931Fled to USSR after Bülowplatz police murders
1936–1939Served in International Brigades, Spain (Captain)
1945Returned to Berlin, Police Inspector Lichtenberg
1950Deputy Minister of State Security, State Secretary
1957–1989Minister for State Security (Stasi chief)
The West German journalist whose question drew Ulbricht's 'No one intends to build a wall'
'I would like to ask a supplementary question: does the formation of a free city mean, in your opinion, that the state border will be erected at the Brandenburg Gate?'
A German journalist who studied law in Hamburg without finishing her degree and went into the press. After the war she worked for the Soviet-controlled Berliner Rundfunk, then moved to West Berlin in 1949 as the Frankfurter Rundschau correspondent, where on 15 June 1961 her question to Ulbricht about whether the state border would run at the Brandenburg Gate elicited his famous 'No one has the intention to erect a wall.'
Career timeline
1929Began studying law at the University of Hamburg
1934Volunteer at the Institute for Foreign Policy in Hamburg
1936Worked at the Hamburg World Economic Archive
1942Moved to Berlin as editor of Wirtschafts-Ring
1943Editor at the controlled Transocean-Europapress central desk
1945Joined the Soviet-controlled Berliner Rundfunk
1946Editor of the Berliner Rundfunk's 'Zeitecho'
1949West Berlin correspondent of the Frankfurter Rundschau
East German planner who ran planning in the German Economic Commission and then chaired the State Planning Commission
A shoemaker’s son from Rixdorf, Berlin, he worked as a clerk, studied economics at night and joined the KPD in 1931. Under the Nazis he worked for the illegal paper “Der Rote Wedding” and the party’s military intelligence apparatus until his arrest in 1936; sentenced to six years in prison, he was then held in Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen until 1945. After the war he built up and headed the KPD’s economic department, and from 1947 played a major part in creating the German Economic Commission, where he took charge of planning and drew up the half-year plan of 1948 and the two-year plan of 1949/50. He succeeded Heinrich Rau as chairman of the State Planning Commission (1952–1961), joined the Politburo in 1958 and was deputy premier from 1955 to 1965. Removed as planning chief in 1961, he became the GDR’s permanent representative to Comecon. He died in East Berlin in 1965.
Career timeline
1931Joined the KPD
1936–1945Imprisoned; held in Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen
1947–1949In charge of planning at the German Economic Commission
1952–1961Chairman of the State Planning Commission
East German chemist who survived a Nazi death sentence and later, expelled from the SED, became a dissident under house arrest
Born in Munich, he studied chemistry in Munich and Berlin and took a doctorate in physical chemistry at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. A founder of the resistance group European Union, he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and sentenced to death, but his execution was repeatedly postponed on the grounds that his research was needed, and he survived. After the war he headed Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes until the Americans dismissed him; in 1950 he became professor of physical chemistry at the Humboldt University, a member of the Volkskammer and of the German Peace Committee. On 16 June 1953 he faced the crowd outside the House of Ministries with Fritz Selbmann. His 1963–64 lectures, published as “Dialectics without Dogma”, cost him his party membership and his chair. After protesting Wolf Biermann’s expatriation in 1976 he was put under house arrest. He died in Grünheide in 1982.
Career timeline
1932Joined the KPD
1943Arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced to death
1950Professor of physical chemistry at the Humboldt University
The long-serving East German leader of the walled republic
His removal in October 1989 showed that the GDR's collapse could no longer be contained even within its leadership.
A German communist trained at Moscow's International Lenin School, he rose through East Germany's youth organization and party leadership. He led the Socialist Unity Party from 1971 to 1989 as the GDR's long-serving ruler.
Career timeline
1930–1931Studies at Moscow's International Lenin School
The Nazi Gestapo chief who made Lyon a center of terror
At his 1987 Lyon trial, he denied the Izieu roundup and said: “I fought the Resistance. It was war.”
Klaus Barbie was an SS and Sicherheitsdienst officer who commanded the Gestapo in occupied Lyon, organizing systematic persecution of the French Resistance and Jews. He arrested and tortured Jean Moulin at Caluire and was responsible for deporting 44 Jewish children and their teachers from Izieu to Auschwitz. After the war, U.S. intelligence used him in anti-communist operations and helped him escape to Bolivia, where he avoided justice for decades before his 1987 Lyon trial and life sentence for crimes against humanity. His case exposes both the continuity of Nazi criminal networks and the impunity produced by Cold War anti-communism.
Career timeline
1935Joined the SS and began service in the Sicherheitsdienst
1940–1941SD service in Amsterdam, targeting Jews and communists
1942Assigned to Dijon for security work in occupied France
1942–1944Head of the Lyon Gestapo, repressing the Resistance and deporting Jews
1947–1951Agent of the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps
1951–1983Lived in Bolivia as Klaus Altmann
1987Lyon trial, convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life
A social democrat who made reconciliation a politics of divided cities
After the Wall was built, he said: “The Wall must go, but until it goes, the city must live.”
Willy Brandt was a German social-democratic politician shaped by exile and resistance to the Nazi dictatorship. As Governing Mayor of West Berlin, he defended the city’s morale after the Wall was built and pressed the West to honor its responsibilities, helping popularize the name “Wall of Shame.” As chancellor, he pursued Ostpolitik and “change through rapprochement,” easing Cold War confrontation and earning the 1971 Nobel Peace Prize.
Career timeline
1933–1945Exile and resistance activist against the Nazi dictatorship
1948–1953SPD representative in Berlin
1957–1966Governing Mayor of West Berlin
1964–1987Chairman of the SPD
1966–1969Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor
1969–1974Federal Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany
Soviet Union
Soviet communism
1915–2001
○ Natural causes
From labor camp to Vostok: pioneer of spaceflight control and guidance
In my life I had only two bosses — Korolev and Keldysh. Both were people of high integrity. That's what matters.
A physicist and rocket engineer who laid the foundations of Soviet spaceflight guidance. At Korolev's OKB-1, Rauschenbach designed the orientation and control systems that made the Luna 3 far-side lunar photography (1959) and Gagarin's Vostok 1 flight (1961) technically possible. Born to Volga German heritage, he was interned in a labor camp in 1942 solely on ethnic grounds yet continued his calculations from captivity; Keldysh secured his return, and he became a core designer of the space program. In his later years he turned to the mathematical study of perspective in painting and Orthodox theology, producing original interdisciplinary work.
Career timeline
1932–1937Studied at Leningrad Institute of Civil Air Fleet; glider stability research
1937–1941Engineer at RNII under Korolev; winged missile flight control automation
1942–1946Interned in Tagillag camp; performed calculations for Bolkhovitinov's bureau
1946–1948Exile in Nizhny Tagil; worked for Keldysh's calculation bureau
1948–1954Researcher at NII-1 under Keldysh; vibration combustion theory
1955–1959OKB-1 under Korolev; pioneering spacecraft orientation systems
1960–1973Department Chief at OKB-1; guidance systems for Luna, Vostok, Mars, Venera, Soyuz
1959–1978Professor and Chair of Theoretical Mechanics, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology
1978–2001Chair, Academy of Sciences Commission on Space Pioneers' Legacy; art theory and theology
Soviet Union
Soviet communism
1916–1981
○ Natural causes
From Peenemünde to Gorodomlya, the German rocket engineer who designed the conceptual ancestor of the R-7
'If we abandon the old conservative form of the V-2, it may be quite possible to reach nearly two thousand miles. The conical shape is, fundamentally, the only possible solution.' to his wife Irmgard, 1949
A German applied physicist and rocket guidance specialist. At Peenemünde under Wernher von Braun, he developed the V-2's guidance and control systems; in 1944 the Gestapo arrested him for expressing defeatist views about the war. Forcibly relocated to the USSR in 1946, he led over 170 German specialists on Gorodomlya Island, where his team designed the G-4 (conical single-stage) and G-5 (packet of clustered G-4s). These concepts directly shaped Korolev's R-7 ICBM; in 1949 a Soviet commission rated G-4 superior to the rival R-3. After returning to West Germany in 1953, he left rocketry, invented the smart card, and coined the German term 'Informatik.'
Career timeline
1939–1945V-2 guidance and control department, Peenemünde Army Research Center
1945–1946Head of Büro Gröttrup, Bleicherode (Soviet occupation zone)
1946German head of Institut Nordhausen, then General Manager of Zentralwerke
1946–1950Head of Branch 1, NII-88, Gorodomlya Island
1954–1958Engineer, Standard Elektrik Lorenz, Pforzheim
Youngest member of the Ulbricht Group who fled to Yugoslavia in 1949 and became a leading Western scholar of Soviet communism
Born Vladimir Leonhard in Vienna, he went into Soviet exile with his Communist mother in 1935; she was arrested in 1936 and spent twelve years in the Vorkuta camps. After the Comintern school he became an announcer for Radio Free Germany, and on 30 April 1945 he returned to Berlin as a member of the Ulbricht Group. He worked in the agitation and propaganda department of the KPD and then SED Central Committee and from 1947 lectured at the party college. Convinced that Germany would replicate the Soviet system, he fled via Czechoslovakia to Yugoslavia in March 1949 and moved to West Germany in 1950. His 1955 memoir Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder became an international bestseller, and from 1966 to 1987 he taught Soviet history at Yale.
At the August 1984 RYaN meeting, he stressed the need to establish the “actual situation” rather than mistake indicators for a Western nuclear attack.
Markus Wolf was a communist official and intelligence chief who, after fleeing Nazi persecution to the Soviet Union, led the foreign intelligence service of East Germany. From 1952 to 1986 he directed the Stasi’s Main Directorate for Reconnaissance, organizing espionage and active measures aimed at West German political, military, and economic institutions. When Soviet leaders expanded Operation RYaN amid fears of a pre-emptive nuclear attack in the early 1980s, Wolf maintained cooperation while exposing a tension between alarmist indicators and the need to establish the actual situation. After German reunification he passed through exile and trial, and used memoirs and public interventions to address responsibility for state security work and the possibility of reforming socialism.
Career timeline
1923–1933Grew up in Stuttgart
1933–1943Exile in the Soviet Union; studied in Moscow and at the Comintern school
1943–1945Editor and announcer for the German-language Moscow radio
1949–1951First counsellor at the East German embassy in Moscow
1952–1986Head of the foreign intelligence services IWF and HVA
1953–1986First deputy minister for state security
1986–1990After retirement, wrote memoirs and joined debates on reform
The architect of détente who used 'linkage' to build the first framework for superpower arms control, the face of American realism
In his notorious 1972 interview with Oriana Fallaci, he declared: 'Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse. This amazing, romantic character suits me precisely.' The comment infuriated Nixon.
A Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany at fifteen, Kissinger rose through Harvard's academic ranks to become the most consequential American foreign-policy maker of the Cold War. As National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under Nixon and Ford, he pioneered détente with the Soviet Union, devising the 'linkage' strategy that tied arms control and trade to Soviet restraint and conducting the secret backchannel with Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that broke the deadlock over SALT I and the ABM Treaty at the 1972 Moscow Summit. He opened relations with Mao's China through clandestine diplomacy, mediated the Paris Peace Accords to win the Nobel Peace Prize, but also presided over the bombing of Cambodia and covert interventions that earned him lasting accusations of war crimes.
Career timeline
1938–1943Fled Nazi Germany for the U.S.; studied accounting at CCNY, then drafted into the U.S. Army
1943–1949Served in U.S. Army intelligence in Europe, Battle of the Bulge; CIC agent tracking Gestapo and administering denazification
1950–1969Harvard professor of government, director of the Defense Studies Program; foreign-policy advisor to Rockefeller and Nixon campaigns
1969–1975National Security Advisor: led détente, China opening, SALT I negotiations; managed the secret Dobrynin backchannel
1971–1972Secret trips to Beijing, meeting Zhou Enlai; paved the way for Nixon's 1972 China visit
1973–1977Secretary of State: Paris Peace Accords, Nobel Peace Prize (1973), Middle East shuttle diplomacy; implicated in 1973 Chilean coup
1977–2023Founded Kissinger Associates; authored books and advised twelve U.S. presidents
East Germany
Communism
1929–2015
○ Convicted for border deaths; pardoned
The East German Politburo spokesman whose mistake brought down the Berlin Wall
Asked 'When does it take effect?' at the press conference, he shuffled through his papers and replied: 'As far as I know… immediately, without delay.'
The GDR's leading propagandist, he rose from editor-in-chief of Neues Deutschland to SED Politburo member and First Secretary of East Berlin. On 9 November 1989, asked at a press conference when new travel regulations would take effect, he answered 'immediately, without delay,' triggering the rush that breached the Berlin Wall that night. He later called his mistake 'the final nail in the coffin' of the regime; after reunification he was convicted for the border deaths, but his public acceptance of moral guilt earned him a reduced sentence.
Career timeline
1947Began journalism career as editor at FDGB paper Tribüne
1952Joined the SED
1967–1968Studied at the CPSU party academy in Moscow
1978–1985Editor-in-chief of Neues Deutschland, the SED central organ
1981–1989SED Central Committee member and Politburo candidate, full member from 1984
1985–1989First Secretary of the SED East Berlin district
1989.11.09Triggered the Wall's fall by announcing travel rules effective immediately
1997–2000Sentenced to 3 years for border deaths; pardoned after serving one
The chancellor who seized the initiative on the German question with a ten-point unification plan days before Malta
On 28 November 1989, Kohl rose in the Bundestag without having told his allies, or even his own foreign minister. President Bush received Kohl's letter summarizing the Ten-Point Plan just as the chancellor was already speaking in Bonn.
A Christian Democratic Union (CDU) politician who served sixteen years as chancellor of West Germany and reunified Germany, leading both European integration and German reunification. On 28 November 1989, without consulting his allies, he presented a 'Ten-Point Plan' for German unity to the Bundestag; days later, at the Malta summit, the German question dominated the proceedings on his terms. The following year, on 3 October 1990, Germany was reunified; together with French president François Mitterrand, Kohl drove the Maastricht Treaty and the introduction of the euro. He achieved reunification by extending the West German system into the former East, and after his long tenure ended with electoral defeat in 1998, he resigned as CDU honorary chairman amid a party donations scandal.
Career timeline
1959Elected to the Landtag of Rhineland-Palatinate (youngest member)
1969–1976Minister-President of Rhineland-Palatinate
1973–1998Chairman of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU)
1976–1982Leader of the CDU/CSU opposition in the Bundestag
1982–1998Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany
1989.11.28Presented the Ten-Point Plan for German unity to the Bundestag
1990.10.03Presided over German reunification
1998Defeated in federal elections; resigned as CDU chairman
The last communist leader of East Germany, who succeeded Honecker, opened the Wall, and fell in 50 days
On 9 November 1989, Krenz read the travel regulation draft to the Central Committee, handed the note to Schabowski saying "Here, explain this to the journalists," and hours later the Berlin Wall was open.
Designated as Erich Honecker's successor, Egon Krenz was the last communist leader of East Germany, becoming SED General Secretary after Honecker was ousted in October 1989. Just three weeks into his tenure, he approved the draft travel regulations, read them to the Central Committee on 9 November, and handed the note to Günter Schabowski for announcement at a press conference; that night the Berlin Wall was opened. He promised reforms but never gained public trust, and resigned all his posts by early December. After reunification, he was convicted of manslaughter for the border deaths and served nearly four years of a six-and-a-half-year sentence.
Career timeline
1955Joined the Socialist Unity Party (SED)
1971–1974Chairman of the Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation
1974–1983First Secretary of the FDJ Central Council
1983–1989SED Politburo member, CC Secretary for Security, Youth and Sport
1984–1989Deputy Chairman of the State Council
1989.10–12SED General Secretary
1989.10–12Chairman of the State Council and National Defence Council
Balkan historian whose Albania at War brought Albania's wartime experience into European historiography
Albania at War recast the occupation as fragmentation and internal division, a power struggle ending in the communists' rise and Enver Hoxha's regime; the war, he concluded, pulled Albania out of one isolation only to push it into another.
Historian of the Balkans and Albania, born 27 January 1952. He took his Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1982, was professor of history and chair of the Department of History at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, and is now professor emeritus there. He is a foreign member of the Albanian Academy of Sciences. Neither his citizenship nor his national origin is documented. His books include King Zog and the Struggle for Stability in Albania (1984), Albania at War, 1939–1945 (1999) and Balkan Strongmen (2006); he co-edited Albanian Identities (2002) with Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and co-wrote A Concise History of Albania (2022) with Oliver Jens Schmitt.
Career timeline
1982Receives Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara
1984Publishes King Zog and the Struggle for Stability in Albania
1999Publishes Albania at War, 1939–1945, drawing on Italian, German, British and American archives
2002Co-edits Albanian Identities with Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers
2006Publishes Balkan Strongmen; elected to the Albanian Academy of Science
2022Co-writes A Concise History of Albania with Oliver Jens Schmitt
In his Berlin 1961, Kempe records General Lucius Clay's retort to President Kennedy at the height of the Checkpoint Charlie tank standoff: "Mr. President, we're not worried about our nerves. We're worrying about those of you people in Washington."
Frederick Kempe is an American journalist and author whose German family background and European reporting shaped his work on Cold War politics and transatlantic affairs. His major book, Berlin 1961, combines newly declassified American, Soviet, and German documents with interviews to reconstruct the building of the Berlin Wall and the October tank confrontation at Checkpoint Charlie. The book interprets Kennedy's crisis management as weakness and places Khrushchev's decisions within their political constraints, an asymmetry that an independent review challenged and made part of the work's historiographical significance.
Career timeline
1977Graduated from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism
1981Joined The Wall Street Journal as a London correspondent
1984Opened The Wall Street Journal's Vienna bureau
1990Became The Wall Street Journal's Berlin bureau chief
1992–1997Senior editor at The Wall Street Journal; founded Central European Economic Review
2002–2005European editor of the global Wall Street Journal
2007–President and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council
