Erich Honecker
Erich Honecker built the Berlin Wall as a young official and was removed six weeks before it opened. He was a roofer's son from the Saarland, a communist youth organiser arrested by the Gestapo in 1935 and imprisoned for a decade. In 1961 he was the security secretary given the job of sealing the border, and he organised the operation that closed Berlin overnight in August that year. He took over from Walter Ulbricht in 1971 and made a bargain with the population that the East German state ran on for eighteen years: consumer goods, housing, creches and cheap rents in exchange for political quiet. The housing programme was real - hundreds of thousands of flats - and it was paid for by borrowing from West Germany, which lent because it wanted the relationship and paid hard currency for political prisoners at a fixed price per head. The Stasi grew into the most thorough surveillance apparatus in the Eastern bloc, with a file for perhaps one adult in three and an informer network that reached into families. He refused Gorbachev's reforms outright, on the argument that a country that had already renovated its house need not repaper it because a neighbour did. When Hungary opened its border in the summer of 1989 East Germans left through it in tens of thousands, the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig grew week by week, and the Politburo removed him in October. The wall opened on 9 November. He was charged over the shoot-to-kill order at the border, released on grounds of illness, and died in Chile.
- Lived: 1912 CE – 1994 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
