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-era Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and later in the early development and establishment of the German Democratic Republic. 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.
Early years
Ulbricht was born on 30 June 1893 in Leipzig, Saxony, into a Protestant family to Pauline Ida (née Rothe) and Ernst August Ulbricht, an impoverished tailor. He spent eight years in primary school (Volksschule) and this constituted all of his formal education since he left school to train as a joiner. Both his parents worked actively for the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which Walter joined in 1912. The young Ulbricht first learned about radical socialism at home in Leipzig's Naundörfchen workers' district before they moved to the Gottschedstrasse.
First World War and the German Revolution Ulbricht served in the Imperial German Army during World War I from 1915 to 1917 in Galicia, on the Eastern Front, and in the Balkans.Frank, Mario, Walter Ulbricht. Eine Deutsche Biographie (Berlin 2001) 52–53. He deserted the Army in 1918, as he had opposed the war from the beginning. For this, he was sentenced to two months in prison. Shortly after his release, while stationed in Brussels, Ulbricht was arrested for having anti-war leaflets. He avoided further prosecution when the November Revolution broke due to collapse of Imperial Germany.Applebaum, Anne, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–56 (USA 2012)Mario Frank: Walter Ulbricht. Siedler, Berlin 2001, S. 52, 53.
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 Spartakusbund.
The Weimar years
Along with the bulk of the USPD, he joined the KPD in 1920 and became one of its active organizers. He rose fast in the ranks of the KPD, becoming a member of the Central Committee in 1923. Ulbricht was an adherent of the Lenin model, which favored a highly centralized party. Ulbricht attended the International Lenin School of the Comintern in Moscow in 1924/1925. He came home in 1926 and went on to assist the newly appointed party chief Ernst Thälmann. The electors subsequently voted him into the regional parliament of Saxony (Sächsischer Landtag) in 1926. He became a Member of the Reichstag for South Westphalia from 1928 to 1933 and served as KPD chairman in Berlin and Brandenburg from 1929 to 1932.
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 SA, 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 Bolshevization 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.
The Bülowplatz murders
During the last days of the Weimar Republic, the KPD had a policy of assassinating two Berlin police officers in retaliation for every KPD member killed by the police.Koehler (1999), page 33.
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 use. Police officers killed on duty in Berlin from 1918 to 2010] (in German). Frankfurt: Verlag für Polizeiwissenschaft. p. 103.
Nazi and war years
The Nazi Party attained power in Germany in January 1933, and very quickly began a purge of Communist and Social Democrat leaders in Germany. Following the arrest of the KPD's leader, Ernst Thälmann, Ulbricht campaigned to be Thälmann's replacement as head of the party.
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. 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, 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.
Post-war political career
Role in communist takeover of East Germany
In April 1945, Ulbricht led a group of party functionaries ("Ulbricht Group") into Germany to begin reconstruction of the communist party along anti-revisionist lines. According to Grieder, "Espousing the motto 'it must look democratic but we must control everything'," he worked to set up an undisguised Communist regime in the Soviet zone. Within the Soviet occupied zone of Germany, the Social Democrats were pressured into merging with the Communists to form the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands or SED), and Ulbricht played a key role in this. The merger was almost entirely on Communist terms, and most of the recalcitrant members of the SPD half were soon pushed out, leaving the SED as a renamed and enlarged KPD.
Rise to power