Wilhelm Pieck

After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Wilhelm Pieck chaired an illegal KPD Central Committee meeting on the outskirts of Berlin before escaping to Paris and then Moscow. Following the murder of John Schehr by the Gestapo in 1934, Pieck assumed the party chairmanship. At the 7th Comintern Congress in 1935 he delivered the ECCI report and was elected Comintern secretary; that same year the 'Brussels' party conference, actually held near Moscow, confirmed him as KPD Central Committee chairman. At this conference Pieck jettisoned the 'social fascism' thesis and anchored the anti-fascist Popular Front line in German communist policy.

At the 'Bern' conference held near Paris in January–February 1939, Pieck outlined a programme for establishing a 'new democratic republic' in Germany after the overthrow of the Nazi regime. This was a tactical shift: rather than calling for an immediate dictatorship of the proletariat, it envisioned a transitional democratic government that could include anti-Nazi bourgeois forces. After the war broke out, Pieck remained in Moscow and, as Comintern secretary (1935–1943), coordinated the anti-fascist resistance of communist parties across Europe. In 1943 he co-founded the National Committee for a Free Germany (NKFD), drawing German officers from Soviet POW camps into the anti-Nazi front. Erich Honecker later recorded in his diary that 'only Pieck could talk to Stalin and contradict him.' In July 1945 Pieck returned to Berlin with the Red Army to direct political reconstruction in the Soviet occupation zone.

Returning to Berlin in July 1945, Wilhelm Pieck linked the political reconstruction of the ruins left by fascism to the organizational problem of the German workers’ movement. He regarded the division between communists and social democrats as a source of working-class weakness and, in 1946, helped create the Socialist Unity Party (SED) through the merger of the KPD and SPD in the Soviet occupation zone, becoming its co-chairman with Otto Grotewohl. The merger remained confined to that zone and did not take place between the parties in the western occupation zones.

In a 1946 address to repatriated prisoners of war, Pieck presented the SED not as claiming a party monopoly but as the most reliable force for anti-fascist and democratic reconstruction. He called for punishing war criminals and Nazi leaders, breaking the power of large landowners and war capitalists, carrying out land reform, and converting industry to peaceful production; workers, unions, and works councils, he argued, had to exercise decisive influence over reconstruction. The programme showed the party’s public turn toward a democratic postwar republic while revealing Pieck’s role in joining working-class unity to state reconstruction under occupation and division.