People of the Revolution and the USSR

East Germany Communism 1893–1958 ○ Natural death

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.

East Germany Communism 1899–1961 ○ Heart attack

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.