People of the Revolution and the USSR

Communist Party of Germany (KPD) Communism 1887–1941 ✕ Shot

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.

East Germany state institutions Communism 1892–1973 ○ Natural death

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.

Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) Communism 1893–1971 ○ Natural death

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.

Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) 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.

East Germany state institutions Communism 1894–1964 ○ Natural causes

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.

Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) Communism 1894–1979 ○ Natural causes

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.

Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) Communism 1895–1964 ○ Heart attack

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.