The trained roofer who organised the Berlin Wall and later ruled East Germany
Erich Honecker, a miner's son who once trained as a roofer, spent almost a decade in Nazi prisons, was released by Soviet troops in 1945, and sixteen years later organised the building of the Berlin Wall. He led East Germany from 1971 until the final weeks before the Wall came down in 1989.
Born in 1912 in Neunkirchen, in today's Saarland, he joined a communist children's group at ten and the Young Communist League at 14. He abandoned a roofing traineeship with his uncle to study at the International Lenin School in Moscow. After the Nazis took power he worked underground, then smuggled a printing press into Berlin under a false name in 1935. The Gestapo caught him that December, and in 1937 he was sentenced to ten years.
His prison years were messier than his later memoirs admitted. Sent in early 1945 to repair a bomb-damaged women's prison because of his roofing skills, he slipped away during an air raid and hid with a guard, who talked him into returning and covered up the escape. The episode earned him a party reprimand for undisciplined conduct. Files from East Germany's own secret police were later used to allege that he had offered the Gestapo evidence against fellow communists.
After the war he co-founded the Free German Youth and rose through the ruling Socialist Unity Party under Walter Ulbricht. As security secretary he was the chief organiser of the Wall in August 1961 and backed the order to shoot at people crossing the border. In 1971, with support from Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, he displaced Ulbricht. His consumer socialism promised more goods in return for political loyalty, and his government normalised relations with West Germany and joined the UN, often counted his biggest success.
He refused Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms in the late 1980s beyond cosmetic changes. After reunification he fled to the Chilean embassy in Moscow, was returned to Germany in 1992 to face trial over the regime's abuses, and was released because of terminal cancer. He died in Chile in 1994.
Source: Erich Honecker
