People of the Revolution and the USSR

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.

East Germany state institutions Communism 1899–1975 ○ Natural death

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.

Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) Communism 1903–1977 ○ Natural death

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.

East Germany state institutions Communism 1910–1965 ○ Natural death

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.