Walter Ulbricht

Ulbricht returned to the destroyed Germany on 30 April 1945 at the head of the party-functionary group named after him, the 'Ulbricht Group', tasked with rebuilding the Communist Party along anti-revisionist lines. His biographer Peter Grieder describes him as working by the motto 'it must look democratic but we must control everything' to construct an undisguised Communist regime in the Soviet zone. The 1946 merger of the KPD and SPD into the SED was carried through 'almost entirely on Communist terms'; recalcitrant Social Democrats were soon pushed out, leaving the SED a renamed and enlarged KPD.

He built a personal power base inside the SED apparatus. His biographer Mario Frank calls him the 'Herr der Verwaltung' (master of the administration) of the central party apparatus, a position won through targeted personnel policy and reorganization of the SED machine. The Small Secretariat, created on his initiative in January 1949, was chaired by him and prepared Politburo agendas and draft resolutions; from 17 October 1949, laws and decrees 'about which the GDR government decides' had to be approved by the SED Politburo or its Small Secretariat before passage. He corresponded with key functionaries such as Erich Mielke while excluding other Politburo members, and had the best Soviet contacts of any Politburo member.

After the GDR's founding on 7 October 1949 he became deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers under Otto Grotewohl, that is, deputy prime minister. When the SED restructured itself along orthodox Soviet lines in 1950, he became General Secretary of its Central Committee, displacing Grotewohl and State President Wilhelm Pieck as co-chairmen; the post was renamed First Secretary in 1953. German Wikipedia adds the First Deputy Chairmanship from 24 November 1955 and, from 1960, the chairmanships of the National Defence Council and the State Council.

From 1949–50 the SED-dominated state dissolved the internment camps and conducted the ensuing Waldheim trials, in which the Central Committee secretariat under Ulbricht's leadership designated the SED functionary responsible for the 'political advice' of judges and prosecutors; he also controlled the strictly secret 1950 inquiry preparing a show trial in the Noel Field affair. In preparing the 1955 show trial of the Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit (KgU), he personally altered the Justice Department's sentencing proposals for Gerhard Benkowitz and Hans-Dietrich Kogel, striking through the proposed penalty and writing 'death penalty' and signing 'Einverstanden/W. Ulbricht'; he did the same with the RIAS trial proposals for Joachim Wiebach, writing 'Vorschlag Todesurteil' (German Wikipedia). Benkowitz and Kogel were executed in Dresden on 29 June 1955 and Wiebach on 14 September 1955.

At the SED's II. Party Conference in July 1952 Ulbricht proclaimed the 'planned construction of socialism' on the Soviet model, having obtained Stalin's approval. The course entailed breaking 'enemy resistance', securing the state through armed forces, collectivizing agriculture on a 'voluntary' basis, and prioritizing heavy industry. In its wake the inner-German border was sealed (decided by the Council of Ministers in late May 1952), the Kasernierte Volkspolizei (later the National People's Army) was founded, the Stasi was expanded, the Länder were abolished in favour of central rule through districts, and nationalization advanced, with some 80% of industry nationalized by 1952. Full agricultural collectivization was completed only in 1960.

After Stalin's death on 5 March 1953 Ulbricht's position was temporarily in danger: he was regarded as an archetypal Stalinist and accused of a personality cult, notably around his planned 60th birthday on 30 June 1953; the festivities were cancelled, and the film 'Baumeister des Sozialismus – Walter Ulbricht' stayed locked away until the end of the GDR. Paradoxically the popular uprising of 17 June 1953, which the forced construction of socialism he had ordered had helped trigger, saved him: Moscow would have read an ouster as a sign of weakness, and the lack of backing for his intra-party rivals Wilhelm Zaisser and Rudolf Herrnstadt strengthened his position, so he won the power struggle within the SED.

The uprising itself began on 16 June 1953 with a protest on East Berlin's Stalin Allee, as enraged workers demanded comprehensive economic reforms. The East German police called in Soviet military units stationed in the city, and order was restored after several dozen deaths and about 1,000 arrests; other accounts, including the Bundesstiftung Aufarbeitung dossier, cite 55 documented deaths, and the German Wikipedia article on the uprising records that over a million people took part. Ulbricht had taken refuge under Soviet protection in the Soviet occupation administration's residence at Karlshorst. Summoned to Moscow in July 1953, he received the Kremlin's full endorsement as leader of East Germany, and his position was now secure.

After 1960 his power was fully consolidated: following State President Wilhelm Pieck's death that year, the SED wrote the presidential office out of the constitution and created the collective Council of State, with Ulbricht as its chairman, a post equivalent to president. From 1957–58 onward he suppressed critics and rivals, branding Karl Schirdewan, Ernst Wollweber, Fritz Selbmann, Fred Oelßner, Gerhart Ziller and others 'factionalists' and eliminating them politically. German Wikipedia adds that the historians Steffen Alisch (2008) and Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk characterize him as a dictator.

The Berlin Wall was the most dramatic decision of Ulbricht's political career and became the defining symbol of the Cold War. From the GDR's founding in 1949 through 1961, some 2.6 million East Germans fled to the West. This 'flight from the Republic' (Republikflucht) bled the economy of skilled workers and professionals. Even after the inner-German border was sealed in 1952, the four-power governance of Berlin left the intra-city sector border open, turning Berlin into the escape hatch. By summer 1961 the exodus exceeded 1,000 persons a day, and Ulbricht urgently appealed to Khrushchev.

After the June 1961 Vienna summit between Khrushchev and Kennedy ended without agreement on Berlin, Ulbricht told a press conference on 15 June: 'Nobody intends to build a wall', a statement that entered history in stark contrast to the order he gave two months later. At a secret SED Central Committee meeting in early July, Ulbricht advanced the border-closure plan in earnest. On 1 August he met Khrushchev alone in Moscow; Khrushchev approved placing 'an iron ring around Berlin' with Soviet forces securing the outer perimeter and East German troops controlling the border. Ulbricht replied that barbed wire had already been stockpiled and the operation could proceed 'very quickly.' The Warsaw Pact Political Advisory Committee, meeting in Moscow on 3–5 August, formally endorsed the closure.

On the evening of 12 August 1961, Ulbricht, acting as chairman of the National Defence Council, signed the Council of Ministers resolution. At 1 a.m. on 13 August, units of the National People's Army, border police, and combat groups began sealing the sector boundary in Berlin. Streets were torn up, barbed-wire barriers went up, and building exits facing West Berlin were bricked shut. Over the following weeks and months, barbed wire gave way to concrete walls, a death strip, and watchtowers. The GDR officially called it the 'Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart' (Antifaschistischer Schutzwall); the West called it the 'Wall of Shame.'

In the short term, the Wall stabilized the GDR regime. Stemming the refugee outflow halted the labour drain and created the political precondition for Ulbricht's New Economic System (NÖS) reforms of 1963. By securing Soviet backing while demonstrating his own capacity to act decisively, Ulbricht emerged as one of the most assertive leaders in the socialist camp. Yet the Wall simultaneously exposed the regime's fundamental vulnerability to the world: a state that had to hold its own citizens at gunpoint to prevent them from seeking freedom and prosperity elsewhere. That contradiction defined the GDR's international image for the next 28 years and remained Ulbricht's legacy until the Wall fell on 9 November 1989.

Ulbricht's most ambitious domestic policy was the 'New Economic System of Planning and Management' (Neues Ökonomisches System der Planung und Leitung, NÖS), unveiled at the Sixth SED Congress in January 1963. The Stalinist five-year plans of the 1950s had repeatedly missed production targets, forced collectivization in 1960 had worsened food shortages, and West Germany's 'economic miracle' was overwhelming the GDR in systemic competition. Only after the Berlin Wall (August 1961) stemmed the mass exodus did political space open for internal reform. The chief architects alongside Ulbricht were State Planning Commission chairman Erich Apel, economic secretary Günter Mittag, and their staff.

The NÖS retained the framework of central planning but introduced three key innovations: evaluating enterprises by profit rather than mere quota fulfillment; building a more realistic price system reflecting raw-material and energy costs; and deploying material incentives and performance bonuses for workers and managers. Associations of publicly owned enterprises (VVB) were transformed from administrative bodies into economically accountable entities, and the influence of technocrats and industry experts grew relative to party ideologues. Ulbricht spoke of 'economic levers' (ökonomische Hebel), attempting to graft efficiency principles onto the planned economy.

Early results were striking. Industrial production grew at over 6% annually from 1964 to 1967, real wages rose, and consumer goods improved. The GDR soon achieved the highest standard of living in the Eastern Bloc, and Ulbricht's slogan 'overtake without catching up' (Überholen ohne einzuholen) captured his confidence that East Germany could surpass the FRG economically. But fundamental contradictions were also evident. Closing unprofitable factories, a logical consequence of profit incentives, ran into resistance from workers and local authorities; consumer prices could not be liberalized for political reasons. As enterprise autonomy expanded, wages outpaced productivity, deepening goods shortages. Khrushchev's fall in 1964 left Soviet backing for reform uncertain and weakened Ulbricht's position.

At the 11th SED Plenum in December 1965, the conservative wing led by Erich Honecker counterattacked by reasserting party control over arts and culture. Planning chairman Apel, crushed by competing pressures, died by suicide on 3 December 1965. In 1968 the NÖS was reorganized into the 'Economic System of Socialism' (ESS), shifting emphasis to high-tech industry while rolling back most market-oriented elements. By late 1970–early 1971 the conservative wing terminated the NÖS reform line entirely, a key economic backdrop to Ulbricht's removal from power in May 1971. Though it ended in retreat, the NÖS is recognized as one of the socialist bloc's first comprehensive attempts to overcome the limits of Stalinist planning from within.