Walter Ulbricht

Walter Ernst Paul Ulbricht was born June 30, 1893, in Leipzig, Germany, into a working-class family. He joined the Social Democratic Party as a young man and moved to the KPD following the 1917 Russian Revolution. He rose through Communist Party structures, spent years in exile in the Soviet Union during the Nazi period, and returned to Germany with Soviet forces in 1945 as a leading figure in the Soviet occupation zone's political apparatus. He died August 1, 1973, at his residence at the Döllnsee near Berlin.¹

Role in East Germany's Founding

Following Germany's defeat in 1945, Ulbricht was among the KPD leaders the Soviet Union returned to Germany to build a Communist government in the Soviet occupation zone. The forced merger of the KPD and SPD in the Soviet zone in 1946, creating the Socialist Unity Party (SED), installed Ulbricht and fellow Moscow-trained Communists in effective control of the party. When East Germany was formally established on October 7, 1949, Ulbricht was Deputy Prime Minister; by 1950 he had consolidated his position as SED First Secretary and effective ruler of the GDR.¹

The Berlin Wall Decision

The most consequential decision of Ulbricht's leadership was the construction of the Berlin Wall beginning August 13, 1961. Mass emigration from East Germany through the open Berlin crossing points - approximately three million people since 1949, disproportionately young, educated, and professionally skilled - threatened the GDR's labor force and political legitimacy. Ulbricht had long sought Soviet authorization to seal the border; Nikita Khrushchev, though ambivalent about the diplomatic costs, provided authorization in the summer of 1961 as the flow of emigrants accelerated to tens of thousands per month.

The Wall sealed East Germany's population within its borders and halted the emigration crisis. It also defined the Cold War's physical geography for the following twenty-eight years. The construction was operationally managed by Erich Honecker, then a senior SED official.¹

De-Stalinization and Removal

Ulbricht was a committed Stalinist who resisted the de-Stalinization policies Khrushchev pursued after 1956. He suppressed the workers' uprising of June 17, 1953, with Soviet military assistance - the same uprising that the Stasi was created partly to prevent recurrence of. His political rigidity and his insistence on maintaining hardline positions even when they complicated Soviet foreign policy objectives created tensions with Moscow throughout the 1960s.

By 1971, Ulbricht's insistence on conditions for inter-German normalization that conflicted with the broader Soviet-West Germany detente process led to his removal. The Soviet Union backed Honecker, who had managed the Berlin Wall's construction logistics in 1961, as Ulbricht's successor. Ulbricht retired with nominal honors and died in 1973.¹