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Walter Ernst Paul Ulbricht (; ; 30 June 18931 August 1973) was a German communist politician. Ulbricht played a leading role in the creation of the Weimar republic-era Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and later in the early development and establishment of the East Germany. As the First Secretary of the Communist Socialist Unity Party from 1950 to 1971, he was the chief decision-maker in East Germany. From President Wilhelm Pieck's death in 1960, he was also the East German head of state until his own death in 1973. As the leader of a significant Communist satellite, Ulbricht had a degree of bargaining power with the Kremlin that he used effectively. For example, he demanded the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 when the Kremlin was reluctant.Hope M. Harrison, Driving the Soviets Up the Wall: Soviet–East German Relations, 1953–1961. (2003) ch 4.
Ulbricht began his political life during the German Empire, when he joined first the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1912 later joining the anti-World War I Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) in 1917. The following year, he deserted the Imperial German Army and took part in the German Revolution of 1918. He joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1920 and became a leading party functionary, serving in its Central Committee from 1923 onward. After the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933 and the Nazi-led investigation into his role in ordering the 1931 murder of police captains Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck, Ulbricht lived in Paris and Prague from 1933 to 1937 and in the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1945.
After the end of World War II, Ulbricht re-organized the German Communist Party in the Soviet occupation zone along Stalinist lines. He played a key role in the forcible merger of the KPD and SPD into the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in 1946. He became the First Secretary of the SED and effective leader of the recently established East Germany in 1950. The Soviet Army occupation force violently suppressed the uprising of 1953 in East Germany on 17 June 1953, while Ulbricht hid in the Soviet Army headquarters in Berlin-Karlshorst. East Germany joined the Soviet-controlled Warsaw Pact upon its founding in 1955. Ulbricht presided over the total suppression of civil and political rights in the East German state, which functioned as a communist-ruled dictatorship from its founding in 1949 onward.
The nationalization of East German industry under Ulbricht failed to raise the standard of living to a level comparable to that of West Germany. The result was massive emigration, with hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the country to the west every year in the 1950s. When Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev gave permission for a wall to stop the outflow in Berlin, Ulbricht had the Berlin Wall built in 1961, which triggered a diplomatic crisis but succeeded in curtailing emigration. The failures of Ulbricht's New Economic System and Economic System of Socialism from 1963 to 1970 led to his forcible retirement for "health reasons" and replacement as First Secretary in 1971 by Erich Honecker with Soviet approval. Ulbricht remained the symbolic head of state for two more years, suffering from declining health until dying of a stroke in August 1973.
In 1917 he became a member of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) after it split off from the Social Democratic Party over support of Germany's participation in World War I.
During the German Revolution of 1918, Ulbricht became a member of the soldier's soviet of his army corps. In 1919, he joined the Spartacus League.
In the years before the 1933 Nazi election to power, paramilitary wings of Marxist and extreme nationalist parties provoked massive riots connected with demonstrations. Besides the Berlin Police, the KPD's arch-enemies were street-fighters like the Nazi Party's Sturmabteilung, the monarchist German National People's Party's Stahlhelm, and Stormtroopers affiliated with "radical nationalist parties". The Social Democratic Party of Germany and its paramilitary Reichsbanner forces, which dominated local and national politics from 1918 to 1931 and which the KPD accused of "social fascism", were their most detested foe. Ulbricht quickly became a KPD functionary and this was attributed to the Bolsheviks of the party.
At an event arranged by the Nazi Party on 22 January 1931, Ulbricht was allowed by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Party's Gauleiter of Berlin and Brandenburg, to give a speech. Subsequently, Goebbels delivered his own speech. The attempt at a friendly discussion turned hostile and became a debate. A struggle between Nazis and Communists began: police officers divided them. Both sides had tried to use this event for their election propaganda. Was geschah in Friedrichshain, Die Zeit, 1969/40 The brawl took two hours to disperse and over a hundred were injured in the melee.
On 2 August 1931, KPD members of the Reichstag Heinz Neumann and Hans Kippenberger received a dressing down from Ulbricht, who was the party's leader in the Berlin-Brandenburg region. According to John Koehler, enraged by police interference and by Neumann and Kippenberger's failure to follow the policy, Ulbricht snarled, "At home in Saxony we would have done something about the police a long time ago. Here in Berlin we will not fool around much longer. Soon we will hit the police in the head."John Koehler, The Stasi, p. 36.
Kippenberger and Neumann decided to assassinate Paul Anlauf, the captain of the Berlin Police's Seventh Precinct. Captain Anlauf had been nicknamed Schweinebacke, or "Pig Face" by the KPD. Anlauf was notorious for his brutal methods in breaking up Communist-led demonstrations at the time.
According to John Koehler, "Of all the policemen in strife-torn Berlin, the reds hated Anlauf the most. His precinct included the area around KPD headquarters, which made it the most dangerous in the city. The captain almost always led the riot squads that broke up illegal rallies of the Communist Party." The Stasi, p. 36.
In 1934, the Nazi government erected a memorial to Anlauf and Lenck at the square where they were killed, then renamed Horst-Wessel-Platz after a Nazi martyr. In 1950 the socialist German government destroyed the monument and the square was renamed Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz.Stricker, Michael (2010). Letzter Einsatz. Im Dienst getötete Polizisten in Berlin von 1918 bis 2010 ''Last (in German). Frankfurt: Verlag für Polizeiwissenschaft. p. 103.
Ulbricht lived in exile in Paris and Prague from 1933 to 1937. The German Popular Front under the leadership of Heinrich Mann in Paris was dissolved after a campaign of behind-the-scenes jockeying by Ulbricht to place the organization under the control of the Comintern. Ulbricht tried to persuade the KPD founder Willi Münzenberg to go to the Soviet Union, allegedly so that Ulbricht could have "them take care of him". Münzenberg refused. He would have been in jeopardy of arrest and purge by the NKVD, a prospect in both Münzenberg's and Ulbricht's minds.Frank, Mario, Walter Ulbricht. Eine deutsche Biographie (Berlin 2001), 124–139. Ulbricht spent some time in Spain during the Civil War, as a Comintern representative, ensuring the murder of Germans serving on the Republican side who were regarded as not sufficiently loyal to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin; some were sent to Moscow for trial, others were executed on the spot.Robert Solomon Wistrich, Who's Who in Nazi Germany, Routledge, 2001; John Fuegi, Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics and the Making of the Modern Drama, Grove Press, 2002, p.354; Noel Annan, Changing Enemies: The Defeat and Regeneration of Germany, Cornell University Press, 1997, p.176 Ulbricht lived in the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1945, leaving from Hotel Lux to return to Germany on 30 April 1945.
At the time of the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, in August 1939, Ulbricht and the rest of the German Communist Party had supported the treaty.
Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Ulbricht was active in a group of German communists under NKVD supervision called the National Committee for a Free Germany (a group including, among others, the poet Erich Weinert and the writer Willi Bredel) which, among other things, translated propaganda material into German, (2026). 9781473833869, Pen and Sword Books Ltd.. ISBN 9781473833869 prepared broadcasts directed at the invaders, and interrogated captured German officers. In February 1943, following the surrender of the German Sixth Army at the close of the Battle of Stalingrad, Ulbricht, Weinert and Wilhelm Pieck conducted a Communist political rally in the center of Stalingrad which many German prisoners were forced to attend.
The June 1953 East German uprising forced Moscow to turn to a hardliner, and his reputation as an archetypal Stalinist helped Ulbricht. On 16 June 1953, a protest erupted at East Berlin's Karl-Marx-Allee as enraged workers demanded comprehensive economic reforms. The East German police had to call in Soviet military units stationed in the city to help suppress the demonstration and communist rule was restored after several dozen deaths and 1,000 arrests. He was summoned to Moscow in July 1953, where he received the Kremlin's full endorsement as leader of East Germany. He returned to Berlin and he took the lead in calling in Soviet troops to suppress the widespread unrest with full backing from Moscow and its large army stationed inside the GDR. His position as leader of the GDR was now secure.Jonathan R. Zatlin, "The vehicle of desire: The Trabant, the Wartburg, and the end of the GDR." German History 15.3 (1997): 358–380. The frustrations led many to flee to the West: over 360,000 did so in 1952 and the early part of 1953.Martin Kitchen, A History Of Modern Germany 1800–2000, Blackwell, 2006, p.329
Ulbricht managed to rise to power despite having a peculiarly squeaky falsetto voice, the result of a bout of diphtheria in his youth. His Upper Saxon accent, combined with the high register of his voice, made his speeches sound incomprehensible at times.
The Council of Ministers of East Germany decided to close the Inner German Border in May 1952. The National People's Army (NVA) was established in March 1956, an expansion of the Kasernierte Volkspolizei which been set up already in June 1952. The Stasi (MfS) was founded in 1950, rapidly expanded and employed to intensify the regime's repression of the people. The states ( Länder) were effectively abolished in July 1952 and the country was governed centrally through districts.
Ulbricht uncritically followed the orthodox Stalinist model of industrialization: concentration on the development of heavy industry.
In 1957, Ulbricht arranged a visit to an East German collective farm at Trinwillershagen in order to demonstrate the GDR's modern agricultural industry to the visiting Soviet Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan. The collectivization of agriculture was completed in 1960, later than Ulbricht had expected. Following the death of President Wilhelm Pieck in 1960, the SED wrote the president's post out of the constitution. Taking its place was a collective head of state, the Council of State. Ulbricht was named its chairman, a post equivalent to that of president. His power consolidated, Ulbricht suppressed critics such as Karl Schirdewan, Ernst Wollweber, Fritz Selbmann, Fred Oelssner, Gerhart Ziller and others from 1957 onward, designated them as "factionalists" and eliminated them politically.
The 1968 invasion by Warsaw Pact troops of Czechoslovakia and the suppression of the Prague Spring were also applauded by Ulbricht. East German soldiers were among those massed on the border but did not cross over, probably due to Czech sensitivities about German troops on their soil during World War II. It earned him a reputation as a staunch Soviet ally, in contrast to Romanian leader Nicolae Ceaușescu, who condemned the invasion.
The New Economic System, which involved measures to end price hikes and increase access to consumer goods, was not very popular within the party, however, and from 1965 onwards opposition grew, mainly under the direction of Erich Honecker and with tacit support of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Ulbricht's preoccupation with science meant that more and more control of the economy was being relegated from the party to specialists. The ideological hardliners of the party also accused Ulbricht of having motivations that were at odds with the communist ideals.
Ulbricht attempted to shield the GDR from the cultural and social influences of the capitalist parts of the Western world, particularly its youth culture. He intended to create the most comprehensive youth culture of the GDR, which should be largely independent of capitalist influences.
In 1965 at the 11th Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee of the SED, he made a critical speech about copying culture from the Western world by referring to the "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah" of the Beatles song: "Is it truly the case that we have to copy every dirt that comes from the West? I think, comrades, with the monotony of the yeah, yeah, yeah and whatever it is all called, yes, we should put an end to it".
During his later years, Ulbricht became increasingly stubborn and tried to assert dominance vis-a-vis other Eastern bloc countries, and even the Soviet Union. He declared at economic conferences that post-war times when East Germany had to offer other socialist countries free patents, were over once and for all and everything actually had to be paid for. Ulbricht began to believe that he had achieved something special, like Lenin and Stalin had. At the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution in Moscow, he untactfully boasted about having personally known Vladimir Lenin and having been an active communist in the USSR already 45 years ago. In 1969 Ulbricht's Soviet guests at the State Council ( Staatsrat) showed clear signs of dissatisfaction when he lectured them heavily on East Germany's supposed economic successes.Mario Frank "Walter Ulbricht: Eine deutsche Biografie", 2001. S. 447
On 3 May 1971 Ulbricht was forced to resign from virtually all of his public functions "due to reasons of poor health" and was replaced, with the consent of the Soviets,"Walter Ulbricht: Herausgegeben von Egon Krenz," Publisher Das Neue Berlin (The New Berlin), 2013. by Erich Honecker. Ulbricht was allowed to remain as Chairman of the State Council, the effective head of state, and held on to this post for the rest of his life. Additionally, the honorary position of Chairman of the SED was created especially for him. Ulbricht died at a government Guest house in Groß Dölln near Templin, north of East Berlin, on 1 August 1973, during the World Festival of Youth and Students, having suffered a stroke two weeks earlier. He was honoured with a state funeral, cremated and buried at the Memorial to the Socialists () in the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery, Berlin.
Despite stabilising the GDR to some extent, and making improvements in the national economy which were unimaginable in many other Warsaw Pact states, he never succeeded in raising East Germany's standard of living to a level comparable to that in the West. Nikita Khrushchev observed, "A disparity quickly developed between the living conditions of Germans in East Germany and those in West Germany."
German historian Jürgen Kocka in 2010 summarized the consensus of scholars about the state that Ulbricht headed for its first two decades:
In the 1950s, several industrial plants, institutions and sport facilities were named after Ulbricht, for example the German Academy for State and Legal Sciences. The East German Postal Office replaced its stamp series of the deceased president Pieck with one bearing the portrait of Ulbricht. His images were hung in schools, residencies, and industrial facilities. In 1956, when Destalinisation started both in the Soviet Union as well as the Eastern Bloc countries, the newspaper Neues Deutschland published an article titled: "With Walter Ulbricht for the fortune of humanity."
Especially at Ulbricht's round birthdays in 1958, 1963 and 1968, the cult of personality around him was extended. The festivities around his 60th birthday in 1953 were however cut short because of the crisis developing into the 1953 East German uprising: An already finished propaganda movie about him was not published and a stamp with his image was not publicised either. Geplante Briefmarke. On other dates, the official East German propaganda followed the standards set by the personality cults of Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union. On these occasions, Ulbricht's origin from a working-class family was emphasised, he was hailed as the "foundation of a new life" (by Johannes R. Becher) as well as a "worker genius" and "master of the times":
Ulbricht was accused of building a cult of personality around himself, with an elaborate jubilee planned for his 60th birthday on 30 June 1953, which Ulbricht later cancelled. The propaganda film Baumeister des Sozialismus – Walter Ulbricht, was not screened until the fall of the GDR. On the occasion of his 70th birthday on 30 June 1963, the East German regime organised grand festivities, to which Nikita Khrushchev was also invited in order to meet and honour the "creator of the socialist German miracle". On the occasion of those festivities and in several biographies published throughout the 1960s, Ulbricht was portrayed as a warrior against fascism, a good German and overall a good person. Special emphasis was put on his supposed closeness to the people, who supposedly trusted him in all aspects. From this, he formulated his motto: "From the people, with the people, for the people". Erich Honecker brought this identification of the dictator and the state together with the motto: "Ulbricht will win. And Ulbricht – that is all of us."Rainer Gries: „Walter Ulbricht – das sind wir alle!" Inszenierungsstrategien einer charismatischen Kommunikation. In: Frank Möller (Hrsg.): Charismatische Führer der deutschen Nation. Oldenbourg, München 2004, , S. 193–218, hier S. 193 ff. und 197 f. (retrieved via De Gruyter Online).
Ulbricht was awarded all civil medals of East Germany, in addition to several Soviet honours.Monika Kaiser, Helmut Müller-Enbergs: Ulbricht, Walter Ernst Paul. In: Wer war wer in der DDR? 5. Ausgabe. Band 2. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, . Retrieved 3 June 2020.
Publicly, the effect of such propaganda remained limited. Ulbricht's dialect, his falsetto voice and his crampness lent several enemies the opportunity to create caricatures of him. For instance, he was called a "grey, whistling mouse" by Gerhard Zwerenz. Using the term "Spitzbart", referring to Ulbricht's beard and using the adjective "all-knowing" for Ulbricht constituted defamation of the state in the eye of the judicial system of East Germany.Mario Frank: Walter Ulbricht. 2001, S. 328f.
A tape containing a recitation of Goethe's Faust by a parodist imitating Ulbricht was in wide circulation in East Germany, eventually causing the Stasi secret police to intervene on the charge of defamation of the state.Joachim Walther: Sicherungsbereich Literatur. Schriftsteller und Staatssicherheit in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik. Ullstein, Berlin 1999, , S. 93 ff.
His marriage with Lotte Kühn, his partner for most of his life (they had been together since 1935), remained childless. The couple adopted a daughter whom they named Beate Ulbricht. She was born in 1944 to a Ukrainian forced laborer in Leipzig. Although Beate Ulbricht remembered her father warmly, she referred to her mother in an extensive interview given to a tabloid in 1991 as "the hag", adding that she was "cold-hearted and egoistic". She also said that Walter Ulbricht was ordered to marry Lotte by Stalin. (2026). 9781551642918, Black Rose Books. ISBN 9781551642918
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