Former leader of East Germany, General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (1976-1989)
People connected to Erich Honecker
He ran East Germany for eighteen years and built the Wall. When the Soviet wind shifted in the late 1980s, Honecker refused to bend — citing hardliners in Pyongyang, Havana, Bucharest — and was shoved aside weeks before the whole structure came down.
Erich Honecker joined the German Communist Party in the 1930s, spent years in Nazi prisons, and emerged after the war to help found the Free German Youth in 1946. As Security Secretary in 1961, he organised the construction of the Berlin Wall and bore administrative responsibility for the shoot-to-kill orders along it. With Soviet backing, he ousted Walter Ulbricht in 1971 and led East Germany into a phase of "consumer socialism" and international normalisation, including UN membership and détente with Bonn. When Gorbachev's reforms swept through Moscow in the late 1980s, Honecker dug in and r…
Sourced, dated quotes from Erich Honecker
Nobody in (unified Germany) has the right . . . to charge me, let alone sentence me, for things I did to fulfill my responsibilities to the East German state.
I bear the main political responsibility . . . for the fact that people trying to cross the border without authorization were shot.
Without the wall through Berlin there could have been a nuclear war with thousands or millions of dead.
The all-European Conference of States has no precedent in the changeful history of the European continent.
The States assembled in Helsinki confirm the turn from "cold war" to détente in Europe.
The six component signals behind the Fame score, and their ranks across the leaderboards.
Similar profiles worth watching
Germany
_(cropped)(2).jpg?width=1200)
