Erich Honecker

• 1. Introduction

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  Erich Honecker stood at a podium in Saarland in September 1987 and spoke of a day when Germans would no longer be separated by borders. The crowd listening to him knew that this man, born in their region three-quarters of a century earlier, had personally ordered the construction of the very wall that divided his nation. He had signed orders that led to the deaths of around 125 people who tried to cross it. And yet here he was, the first East German head of state ever to set foot in West Germany, received by Chancellor Helmut Kohl with full state honours. How does a coal miner's son from the Saar become the iron-fisted ruler of a state? How does a man imprisoned by the Nazis become the builder of a new prison for an entire people? And how does a communist true believer end his days in a terraced house in Santiago, Chile, railing against the court that tried to hold him accountable? The answers run from the back streets of Wiebelskirchen through the dungeons of Brandenburg-Gorgen Prison, through the blood-soaked border of a divided nation, and finally to a cemetery in Santiago where the Communist Party of Chile buried him in May 1994.

• 2. A Saarland Childhood

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  Wilhelm Honecker, a coal miner and political activist, and his wife Caroline Catharine Weidenhof married in 1905 and eventually had six children. Erich, the fourth, was born on the 25th of August 1912 in Neunkirchen, in what is now Saarland. The family later settled on Kuchenbergstrasse 88 in the Wiebelskirchen district of Neunkirchen, and it was there that the political atmosphere of the age began shaping the boy.

  After World War I, the Territory of the Saar Basin passed under French military occupation, replacing the strict rule of Ferdinand Eduard von Stumm. For Wilhelm Honecker, this shift crystallised what he understood as proletarian exploitation, and he passed that reading of the world to his son. By the time Erich turned ten in 1922, he had joined the Spartacus League's children's group in Wiebelskirchen. At fourteen he entered the Young Communist League of Germany, the KJVD.

  Honecker did not find immediate work after school. He spent almost two years labouring for a farmer in Pomerania, then returned to Wiebelskirchen in 1928 to begin a traineeship as a roofer with his uncle. The KJVD then singled him out for something more ambitious: a course of study at the International Lenin School in Moscow and Magnitogorsk. He attended under the cover name "Fritz Malter", sharing a room with Anton Ackermann. By 1931, back in the Saar region after his studies, he was serving as the KJVD's regional leader for Saarland, aged eighteen.

• 3. Prison and the Nazi Years

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  On the 4th of December 1935, the Gestapo detained Honecker in Berlin. He had travelled there illegally on the 28th of August 1935 under the alias "Marten Tjaden", carrying a printing press, to work alongside KPD official Herbert Wehner in resistance to the Nazi state. The arrest came just months after he had been active in the campaign against the Saar region's reabsorption into Germany, a referendum that returned 90.73% in favour of reunification, scattering Honecker and thousands of others into exile.

  Held first at the Moabit detention centre in Berlin until 1937, Honecker was then sentenced on the 3rd of July 1937 to ten years imprisonment for the "preparation of high treason alongside the severe falsification of documents". He served most of that sentence at Brandenburg-Gorgen Prison, working as a handyman. In early 1945, because of both good behaviour and his trade as a roofer, he was transferred to the Barnimstrasse women's prison in Berlin to repair bomb-damaged buildings.

  On the 6th of March 1945, during an Allied bombing raid, Honecker escaped and hid at the apartment of a prison guard named Lotte Grund. After several days she persuaded him to turn himself in, and the escape was quietly covered up. Soviet troops liberated the prisons on the 27th of April 1945. But the circumstances of his escape, and his conduct during captivity, would trail him for the rest of his political life. Material from the East German State Security Service later alleged that Honecker had offered the Gestapo evidence against fellow imprisoned communists, claimed he had renounced communism "for good", and signalled willingness to serve in the German army. In his personal memoirs, Honecker falsified many of the details of this period.

• 4. Building the Wall

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  In May 1945 Hans Mahle encountered Honecker by chance in Berlin and brought him into the Ulbricht Group, a collective of exiled German communists returning from the Soviet Union. Through Waldemar Schmidt, Honecker met Walter Ulbricht, who had not previously been aware of him. A party reprimand followed, targeting his "undisciplined conduct" in fleeing prison, but it did not derail his rehabilitation.

  By 1946 Honecker had co-founded the Free German Youth, the FDJ, and taken on its chairmanship. He organised the inaugural Deutschlandtreffen der Jugend in East Berlin in May 1950 and the 3rd World Festival of Youth and Students in 1951. In 1958, after two years of study in Moscow where he personally witnessed Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, he returned to the Politburo as a full member responsible for military and security affairs.

  As Party Security Secretary, Honecker was the prime organiser of the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. He also bore administrative responsibility for the "order to fire" along the Inner German border, a standing instruction that authorised border guards to shoot at anyone attempting to cross. Around 125 people died under that order during his time in office. Years later, at his trial in December 1992, Honecker delivered a 70-minute statement accepting political responsibility for those deaths while insisting he was "without juridical, legal or moral guilt". He attributed the Wall to a collective Warsaw Pact decision made to prevent what he described as a "Third World War with millions dead".

• 5. Consumer Socialism

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  Honecker's removal of Ulbricht was itself a study in the politics of a one-party state. Ulbricht had first removed Honecker from the post of Second Secretary in July 1970, only for the Soviet leadership to swiftly reinstate him. Honecker then played up East-West German thaw as Ulbricht's own strategy, winning Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev to his side. On the 3rd of May 1971, with Soviet backing, Honecker became First Secretary of the Central Committee after the Soviets pressured Ulbricht to stand aside "for health reasons". On the 29th of October 1976, Honecker added the Chairmanship of the State Council, the equivalent of the presidency, completing his grip on power.

  From those positions Honecker, along with Economic Secretary Gunter Mittag and Minister of State Security Erich Mielke, made all key government decisions. He declared the core objective of his New System of Economic Socialism to be the "unity of economic and social politics", trading improved living standards and more consumer goods for political loyalty. East Germany's standard of living was already the highest among Eastern Bloc countries, though still far behind West Germany, and Honecker promised to "settle the housing problem as an issue of social relevance".

  On the diplomatic front, the Basic Treaty between East and West Germany in 1972 normalised contacts between the two governments. East Germany participated in the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in Helsinki in 1975 and joined the United Nations. Honecker collected honorary doctorates from Humboldt University in 1976, Tokyo's Nihon University in 1981, and the London School of Economics in 1984, along with the Olympic Order from the IOC in 1985. His cultural liberalisation did not last: dissident artists such as Wolf Biermann were expelled, and the Ministry for State Security intensified its suppression of political resistance.

• 6. The Regime Collapses

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  From 1985 onward, frictions between Honecker and Mikhail Gorbachev grew over glasnost and perestroika. Honecker reportedly told Gorbachev: "We have done our perestroika; we have nothing to restructure". By 1988, Gorbachev was grouping Honecker with Bulgaria's Todor Zhivkov, Czechoslovakia's Gustav Husak, and Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu as a "Gang of Four". When Gorbachev attended the 40th anniversary celebrations of East Germany on the 6th-the 7th of October 1989, members of the Free German Youth chanted "Gorby, help us! Gorby, save us!" In private, Gorbachev warned Honecker that "He who is too late is punished by life".

  Honecker was physically absent for much of the crisis. He had fallen ill with biliary colic at the Warsaw Pact summit in July 1989. On the 18th of August 1989 he underwent surgery to remove his gallbladder and part of his colon. A suspected carcinogenic nodule in his right kidney was left in place without the patient being informed. He returned to his office only in late September, by which point Hungary had been allowing East Germans to pass into Austria since the 11th of September, and tens of thousands had already fled. Earlier, in the Daily Mirror of the 19th of August 1989, Honecker had issued a statement blaming Otto von Habsburg for distributing leaflets luring East Germans to a picnic at which they were given food, gifts, and Deutsche Marks before being persuaded to go West. Later, after his fall, Honecker said of von Habsburg: "That this Habsburg drove the nail into my coffin".

  The Politburo met on the 10th-the 11th of October 1989. Honecker's state visit to Denmark was cancelled. On the 17th of October, Willi Stoph opened the session by proposing the replacement of Honecker with Egon Krenz. Honecker calmly replied: "Well, then I open the debate". Not one person in the room spoke in his favour. Erich Mielke, hollering and pounding the table, threatened to publish compromising information from a large red briefcase unless Honecker resigned. After three hours, the Politburo voted him out. Following established practice, Honecker voted for his own removal. Three weeks later, the Berlin Wall fell.

• 7. Trial and Exile

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  On the 13th of March 1991 the Honeckers fled Germany from the Soviet-controlled Sperenberg Airfield to Moscow on a military jet, aided by Soviet hardliners. The German Chancellery was given only one hour's notice. On the 11th of December 1991, Honecker and his wife sought refuge in the Chilean Embassy in Moscow, despite an offer of help from North Korea. His case for asylum in Chile rested partly on a personal connection: under his rule, East Germany had granted exile to many Chileans following Augusto Pinochet's 1973 coup, and his daughter Sonja was married to a Chilean. After Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union on the 25th of December 1991, the new Russian government demanded Honecker leave or face deportation.

  On the 29th of July 1992, reportedly against his will, Honecker was ejected from the embassy and flown to Berlin Tegel Airport, where he was arrested and taken to Moabit Prison. The indictment, running to 783 pages, charged him along with co-defendants including Erich Mielke, Willi Stoph, Heinz Kessler, Fritz Streletz, and Hans Albrecht with involvement in the "collective manslaughter" of 68 people attempting to flee East Germany.

  By January 1993, with medical evidence showing a malignant tumour in the right lobe of his liver and a life expectancy estimated at three to six months, the Constitutional Court of the State of Berlin upheld his complaint that continuing the trial violated his fundamental right to human dignity. After 169 days in custody, Honecker was released, drawing protests from victims' groups and political figures alike. He flew via Brazil to Santiago to rejoin his wife and daughter. His co-defendants Heinz Kessler, Fritz Streletz, and Hans Albrecht were sentenced on the 16th of September 1993 to terms of between four and seven-and-a-half years. On the 66th birthday of his wife Margot, Honecker gave a final public speech ending with the declaration that the German Democratic Republic stood as "testimony of a new and just society". He died on the 29th of May 1994 in the La Reina district of Santiago, and was buried the following day at the central cemetery there.