Walter Ulbricht
German communist politician and dictator (1893-1973) · Politicians · Died at 80
He demanded the Berlin Wall when Moscow hesitated. For two decades Walter Ulbricht ran East Germany as a Stalinist state where hundreds of thousands fled west until concrete and barbed wire stopped them in 1961.
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Bundesarchiv Bild 183-J1231-1002-002 Walter Ulbricht, Neujahrsansprache
Ehrenpatenschafts-Geschenk - des Vorsitzenden des STAATSRATES der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik - Walter Ulbricht - Bild 001
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Walter Ulbricht joined the Social Democratic Party in 1912, deserted the Imperial German Army during the revolution of 1918, and rose through the Communist Party ranks to its Central Committee by 1923. After the Nazis investigated his role in ordering the 1931 murder of two police captains, he fled to Paris, Prague, and finally the Soviet Union until 1945. He returned to reorganize the communist party in occupied Germany, forced the merger that created the Socialist Unity Party in 1946, and became East Germany's effective leader by 1950. When his economic policies failed to match West German living standards and mass emigration drained the country through the 1950s, he pressed Khrushchev for permission and built the Berlin Wall in 1961. After his economic reforms collapsed, the Soviets forced him out in 1971 for "health reasons," leaving him a symbolic head of state until a stroke killed him in 1973.
