Friedrich Wilhelm Reinhold Pieck (; 3 January 1876 – 7 September 1960) was a German communist politician who served as the co-chairman of the Socialist Unity Party from 1946 to 1950 and as the only president of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) from 1949 until his death in 1960.[Rolf Badstübner and Wilfried Loth (eds) Wilhelm Pieck – Aufzeichnungen zur Deutschlandpolitik 1945–1953, Berlin: Wiley-VCH, 1994]
Pieck had been active in the SPD since the 1890s, breaking from the party in 1917 over his opposition to the First World War. He co-founded the Spartacus League and the KPD, rising to become chairman of the latter organization following the imprisonment of Ernst Thälmann and John Schehr by the Nazis. After the end of the Second World War, he played a key role in the 1946 merger of the KPD and SPD into the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, which served as the ruling party of East Germany from 1949 until 1989.
Provenance and early years
Pieck was born into a Catholic family,
[ Pieck, Friedrich Wilhelm Reinhold. In: Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Hrsg.): Biographisches Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933. Band 1: Politik, Wirtschaft, Öffentliches Leben. Saur, München u. a. 1980] as the son of the
coachman Friedrich Pieck and his wife Auguste in the eastern part of
Guben, in what was then the
German Empire[ Wilhelm Pieck timeline Retrieved 10 June 2010 ] and is now Gubin,
Poland. Two years later, his mother died. The father soon married the washerwoman Wilhelmine Bahro. After attending elementary school, the young Wilhelm completed a four-year carpentry apprenticeship. As a journeyman, he joined the German Timber Workers Association in 1894.
As a carpenter, in 1894 Pieck joined the wood-workers' federation, which steered him towards joining the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) the following year.
Although the majority of the SPD supported the German government in World War I, Pieck was a member of the party's left wing, which opposed the war. Pieck's openness in doing so led to his arrest and detention in a military prison. After being released, Pieck briefly lived in exile in Amsterdam.
Weimar years
On 16 January 1919 Pieck, along with
Rosa Luxemburg and
Karl Liebknecht, was arrested in Berlin's
Wilmersdorf district and taken to the Eden Hotel.
Liebknecht and Luxemburg were then killed while "being taken to prison" by a unit of
Freikorps.
[Bertram Wolfe in introduction to "The Russian Revolution" Luxemburg p. 18 1967.] While the two were being murdered, Pieck claimed that he managed to escape. Due to lingering suspicions about Pieck's reported escape, KPD chairman Ernst Thälmann called Pieck before a party court chaired by Hans Kippenberger in 1929. The party court's decision was never published and Kippenberger was executed in Moscow after a secret trial in 1937.
[Peter Nettl: Rosa Luxemburg. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln, Berlin 1969, S. 547 f., Nettl refers to Erich Wollenberg, who in 1951 speculatively attributed the killing of Kippenberger to an intrigue by Pieck (in: Der Apparat. Stalins Fünfte Kolonne. Ost-Probleme, Jg. 3, Nr. 19, 12. Mai 1951, S. 576–578).] According to
Waldemar Pabst (the officer who gave the order to kill Liebknecht and Luxemburg), Pieck did not actually escape, but was released in return for providing details about the military plans and hiding places of other KPD members.
[Günther Nollau: Die Internationale. Wurzeln und Erscheinungsformen des proletarischen Internationalismus. Verlag für Politik und Wirtschaft, Köln 1959, S. 381 f. (Anhang III. Die Rolle Wilhelm Piecks bei der Festnahme von Rosa Luxemburg und Karl Liebknecht).][ „Ich ließ Rosa Luxemburg richten.“ In: Der Spiegel, Nr. 16/1962, S. 38–44 (Interview mit Pabst).]
In 1922, he became a founding member of the International Red Aid, serving first on the executive committee. In May 1925, he became the chairman of the Rote Hilfe.
Pieck held several elected offices in the Weimar Republic. He served in the Landtag of Prussia from 1921 to 1928 and again from 1932 to 1933, the Reichstag from 1928 to 1933, the Berlin City Council from 1929 to 1933, and the Prussian State Council from 1930 to 1932.
Nazi years and Moscow exile
On 4 March 1933, one day before the Reichstag election, Pieck's family left their
Steglitz apartment and moved into a cook's room. His son and daughter had been in the Soviet Union since 1932 while
Elly Winter was still in Germany. At the beginning of May 1933, he left first to Paris and then to Moscow.
In Moscow, Pieck served the Communist Party in a variety of capacities. From 1935 until 1943, he held the position of Secretary of the Communist International. In 1943 Pieck was among the founders of the National Committee for a Free Germany, an anti-Nazi organisation created by the Soviets aimed at Germans.
On 22 June 1941, Pieck and his family were in their country house on the outskirts of Moscow. Pieck came downstairs at six o'clock to his children's bedroom and said: "Children, get up, it was announced on the radio that war is over. Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, but that will be the end". In March 1942, the family was able to return home after the Soviet Armed Forces won the Battle of Moscow.
Soviet occupation zone
At the conclusion of the war in 1945 Pieck returned to Germany with the victorious
Red Army.
[Eric D. Weitz, Creating German Communism, 1890–1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997] A year later, he helped engineer the merger of the eastern branches of the KPD and SPD into the Socialist Unity Party (SED). He was elected as the merged party's co-chairman, alongside former SPD leader
Otto Grotewohl. His hand appeared alongside Grotewohl's on the SED's "handshake" logo, derived from the SPD-KPD congress establishing the party where he symbolically shook hands with Grotewohl.
President of East Germany
In October 1949, on the territory of the Soviet occupation zone the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany was formally established. Pieck was elected president of the new country.
He served as East Germany's first (and last) president until his death in 1960.
[David Priestand, Red Flag: A History of Communism," New York: Grove Press, 2009]
Nominally, for the GDR's first year, Pieck was the number-two man in the government behind Grotewohl, who became the new country's first prime minister. In the East German political hierarchy, the prime minister was the top state official, while the president nominally ranked second.
He lost the co-chairmanship of the ruling SED (which he held with Grotewohl) in 1950, when Walter Ulbricht became the party's first secretary as the party restructured along more orthodox Soviet lines. Nonetheless, he retained his other posts, including the presidency, due to Joseph Stalin's trust in him.
Last years
Pieck was already 73 years old at the time of his initial election as president. He nominally held the second highest state post in the GDR (behind Prime Minister Grotewohl) and served as SED co-chairman for the first four years of the party's existence. He was also a member of the SED's Politburo, the highest authority in the party. Despite this, he played a mostly minor role in the party, particularly after 1950.
On 13 July 1953, he suffered a second stroke. He also had progressive Cirrhosis and existing ascites. A detailed medical report composed before the second stroke mentioned "mild paralysis on the right, a slight drooping of the corner of the mouth, breathing wheezing or snoring, slowed down pulse, tone of the limb musculature lowered ...".[Der Spiegel, 22 July 1953]
In August 1960 he moved to a new summer residence, the converted former mansion of the Hermann Göring Leibförsters near "Karinhall".[DER SPIEGEL – Personalien – 24 August 1960]
Pieck died at Majakowskiring 29, Pankow, East Berlin. He was honoured with a state funeral, cremated and buried at the Memorial to the Socialists () in the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery, Berlin.
Personal life
He was married to Christine Häfker,
[ a garments worker whom he met in a large dance hall in Bremen. At first, her parents did not want her to go out with a "red", but once she was pregnant, she was allowed to marry Wilhelm on 28 May 1898, on the condition that a traditional wedding in a church would still take place.]
The Piecks' daughter, Elly Winter (1898–1987), held various posts in the SED and East German government.
Honours and awards
National honours
-
Hero of Labour (1951)
-
Order of Karl Marx (1953)
-
Patriotic Order of Merit in Gold (1954)
-
Banner of Labour (1960)
Foreign honours
-
Grand Cross of the Order of the White Lion (1956)
== Photo gallery ==
in 1949]]
as a “border of peace”, with Pieck and President Bolesław Bierut of Poland]]
