Hans Modrow (; 27 January 1928 – 10 February 2023) was a German politician best known as the last communist premier of East Germany.
Coming into office amidst the Peaceful Revolution, he was the de facto leader of East Germany through the winter of 1989-90. He presided over a transitional government, paving the way to the first and only free elections in East Germany. His cabinet was the last over which the SED presided, as well as the first to include opposition members.
After the end of Communist rule and reunification of Germany, he was convicted of electoral fraud and perjury by the Dresden District Court in 1995, on the basis that he had been the Socialist Unity Party (SED) official nominally in charge of the electoral process. He was later convicted of the first charge and was given a nine-month suspended sentence. One of the few high-ranking former SED officials to not have been expelled, he was the honorary chairman of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS)
Early life and education
Modrow was born on 27 January 1928 in Jasenitz, Province of Pomerania, German Reich, now Jasienica, part of the town of Police in Poland.
As a child he was a
Hitler Youth leader and attended a
Volksschule. He trained as a
machinist from 1942 to 1945 when he was filled with intense hatred of the
Bolsheviks, whom he deemed as
Untermensch, inferior to Germans physically and morally.
For six months during the Allied bombing of
Szczecin he served as a volunteer firefighter.
He later served briefly in the
Volkssturm in January 1945,
and was subsequently captured as a prisoner of war by the Soviet
Red Army in
Stralsund in May 1945. He and other German prisoners were sent to a farm in
Hinterpommern to work. Upon arrival, his backpack was stolen, making him begin to rethink the Germans' so-called camaraderie. Days later, he was appointed a driver to a Soviet captain, who asked him about
Heinrich Heine, a German poet. Modrow had never heard of him and felt embarrassed that the people he thought of as "subhumans" knew more about
German culture than he. Transported to a POW camp near Moscow, he joined a National Committee for a Free Germany anti-fascist school run by future SED Politburo member Alfred Neumann for
Wehrmacht members and received training in Marxism–Leninism, which he embraced.
Upon release in 1949 he worked as a machinist for
LEW Hennigsdorf.
That same year he joined the Socialist Unity Party (SED).
From 1949 to 1961, Modrow worked in various functions for the Free German Youth (FDJ) in Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, and Berlin and in 1952 and 1953 studied at the Komsomol college in Moscow.
Communist party career
Modrow had a long political career in East Germany, serving as a member of the
Volkskammer from 1957 to 1990 and in the SED's Central Committee (ZK) from 1967 to 1989, having previously been a candidate for the ZK from 1958 to 1967.
From 1961 to 1967 he was first secretary of the district administration of the SED in Berlin-Köpenick and secretary for
Agitprop from 1967 to 1971 in the SED's district leadership in Berlin.
During this time he was involved in the formation of the Union Berlin football club,
which is based in the Köpenick district. From 1971 to 1973 he worked as the head of the SED's Department for Agitation.
In 1975 he was awarded the GDR's Patriotic Order of Merit in gold
and received the award of the Order of Karl Marx in 1978.
From 1973 onward, he was the SED's first secretary in Bezirk Dresden, making him the top official in East Germany's third-largest district.
Peaceful Revolution and premiership
During the Peaceful Revolution of 1989, Modrow ordered thousands of
Volkspolizei, Stasi, Combat Groups of the Working Class, and National People's Army troops to crush a demonstration at the Dresden Hauptbahnhof on 4–5 October. Some 1,300 people were arrested. In a top secret and encrypted
telex to Honecker on 9 October, Modrow reported: "With the determined commitment of the comrades of the security organs, anti-state terrorist riots were suppressed".
When Honecker was toppled on 18 October, Gorbachev hoped that Modrow would replace him; Egon Krenz was selected instead.
Seeking to defuse growing pressure to dissolve the Ministry of State Security, Modrow arranged for its renaming to the "Office for National Security" (Amt für Nationale Sicherheit – AfNS) on 17 November. A second rebranding as the "Office for the Protection of the Constitution of the GDR" (Verfassungsschutz der DDR) failed due to public and opposition pressure; the AfNS/Stasi was disbanded on 13 January 1990. The Modrow government gave orders to destroy incriminating Stasi files.
On 7 December, Modrow's government agreed at the Round Table to hold free elections in May 1990. Modrow and the Round Table agreed on 28 January to bring the elections forward to 18 March. By this time, the SED had added "Party of Democratic Socialism" to its name; this became its sole name in February. Some of the left-wing Round Table groups opposed Helmut Kohl's conservative government in the West, and worked with Modrow to arrest the pace of unification with West Germany. With his authority as head of the regime rapidly waning, in February, he proposed a three-stage process that would create a neutral German Confederation and continued to oppose "rapid" reunification. Nonetheless, popular support was with the opposition in favor of merger with the West and Modrow's stance quickly became untenable.
On 5 February, Modrow appointed eight opposition ministers without portfolio to his cabinet. On 13 February, Modrow met with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, asking for an emergency loan of 15 billion Deutsche Mark to stabilize the collapsing Eastern economy, which was rejected by Kohl.
File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-1989-1117-018, Hans Modrow.jpg|Modrow addressing the Volkskammer on 17 November 1989
File:KohlModrowMomperBrandenburgerTor.jpg|Modrow with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl during the opening of the Brandenburg Gate on 22 December 1989
File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-1990-0313-021, Demmin, PDS-Wahlkampfauftritt Hans Modrow.jpg|Modrow giving a speech at a rally on 13 March 1990
File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-1990-0412-024, Berlin, Lothar de Maiziere und Modrow.jpg|Modrow congratulating his successor, Lothar de Maizière, on his election as Minister-President
Criminal sentence
On 27 May 1993, the Dresden District Court found Modrow guilty of
electoral fraud committed in the May 1989 Dresden local elections, specifically, understating the percentage of voters who refused to vote for the official slate.
[ The judge declined to impose a prison sentence or a fine.][ Urteil: Bewährungsstrafe für Hans Modrow Mitteldeutsche Zeitung. 10 May 2009. Retrieved 11 February 2014.][ Modrow, Hans Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk. Retrieved 11 February 2014.] Modrow did not directly deny the charges, but argued that the trial was politically motivated and that the court lacked jurisdiction for crimes committed in East Germany. "We were all members of a political system," he said, speaking to the court in Dresden. "Some perhaps had the good fortune not to come into contact with manipulation, while others could not or were not allowed to turn away."[
]
Later life and death
After German reunification, Modrow served as a member of the Bundestag (1990–1994)[ Programm der Trauerfeier für Hans Modrow auf www.youtube.com, retrieved 18 March 2023.]
Citations
