Erich Ernst Paul Honecker was a German communist politician who led the German Democratic Republic from 1971 until shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.
51 Facts About Erich Honecker
2.
Erich Honecker held the posts of General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany and Chairman of the National Defence Council; in 1976, he replaced Willi Stoph as Chairman of the State Council, the official head of state.
3.
In 1970, Erich Honecker initiated a political power struggle that led, with support of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, to him replacing Walter Ulbricht as General Secretary of the SED and chairman of the National Defence Council.
4.
Erich Honecker cited the continual hardliner attitudes of Kim Il Sung, Fidel Castro and Nicolae Ceausescu whose respective governments of North Korea, Cuba and Romania had been critical of reforms.
5.
Erich Honecker was forced to resign by the SED Politburo in October 1989 in a bid to improve the government's image in the eyes of the public; the effort was unsuccessful, and the regime would collapse entirely the following month.
6.
However, the proceedings were abandoned, as Erich Honecker was suffering from terminal liver cancer.
7.
Erich Honecker was freed from custody to join his family in exile in Chile, where he died in May 1994.
8.
Erich Honecker was born in Neunkirchen, in what is Saarland, to Wilhelm Erich Honecker, a coal miner and political activist, and his wife Caroline Catharine Weidenhof.
9.
Erich Honecker did not find an apprenticeship immediately after leaving school, but instead worked for a farmer in Pomerania for almost two years.
10.
In 1930, aged 18, Erich Honecker entered the KPD, the Communist Party of Germany.
11.
Erich Honecker returned to the Saar in 1934 and worked alongside Johannes Hoffmann on the campaign against the region's re-incorporation into Germany.
12.
On 4 December 1935 Erich Honecker was detained by the Gestapo and until 1937 remanded in Berlin's Moabit detention centre.
13.
Erich Honecker spent the majority of his incarceration in the Brandenburg-Gorden Prison, where he carried out tasks as a handyman.
14.
Erich Honecker spent most of his time in prison under solitary confinement.
15.
Erich Honecker's "escape" from prison and his relationships during his captivity later led to him experiencing difficulties within the Socialist Unity Party, as well as straining his relations with his former inmates.
16.
In later interviews and in his personal memoirs, Erich Honecker falsified many of the details of his life during this period.
17.
Material from the East German State Security Service has been used to allege that, to be released from prison, Erich Honecker offered the Gestapo evidence incriminating fellow imprisoned Communists, claimed he had renounced Communism "for good", and was willing to serve in the German army.
18.
In May 1945 Erich Honecker was "picked up" by chance in Berlin by Hans Mahle and taken to the Ulbricht Group, a collective of exiled German communists that had returned from the Soviet Union to Germany after the end of the Nazi regime.
19.
In 1946, Erich Honecker became the co-founder of the Free German Youth, whose chairmanship he undertook.
20.
Erich Honecker played up the thawing East-West German relationship as Ulbricht's strategy, to win the support of the Soviet leadership under Leonid Brezhnev.
21.
Alongside him, Erich Honecker held daily meetings concerning the party's media representation in which the layout of the party's own newspaper Neues Deutschland, as well as the sequencing of news items in the national news bulletin Aktuelle Kamera, were determined.
22.
Erich Honecker's policies were initially marked by a liberalisation toward culture and art.
23.
Erich Honecker remained committed to the expansion of the Inner German border and the "order to fire" policy along it.
24.
Erich Honecker received additional high-profile personal recognitions including honorary doctorates of business administration from East Berlin's Humboldt University in 1976, Tokyo's Nihon University in 1981 and the London School of Economics in 1984 and the Olympic Order from the IOC in 1985.
25.
Frictions between him and Erich Honecker had grown over these policies and numerous additional issues from 1985 onward.
26.
East Germany refused to implement similar reforms, with Erich Honecker reportedly telling Gorbachev: "We have done our perestroika; we have nothing to restructure".
27.
Erich Honecker felt betrayed by Gorbachev in his German policy and ensured that official texts of the Soviet Union, especially those concerning perestroika, could no longer be published or sold in East Germany.
28.
At the time, Erich Honecker was sidelined through illness, leaving his colleagues unable to act decisively.
29.
Erich Honecker had been taken ill with biliary colic during the Warsaw Pact summit.
30.
Erich Honecker was shortly afterwards flown home to East Berlin.
31.
Back in office, Erich Honecker had to contend with the rising number and strength of demonstrations across East Germany that had first been sparked by reports in the West German media of fraudulent results in local elections on 7 May 1989, the same results he had labelled a "convincing reflection" of the populace's faith in his leadership.
32.
Erich Honecker had to deal with a new refugee problem.
33.
Gunter Schabowski even extended the dismissal of Erich Honecker to include his posts in the State Council and as Chairman of the National Defence Council while childhood friend Gunter Mittag moved away from Erich Honecker.
34.
Three weeks after Erich Honecker's ousting the Berlin Wall fell, and the SED swiftly lost control of the country.
35.
Erich Honecker went on to join the newly founded Communist Party of Germany in 1990, remaining a member until his death.
36.
However, this warrant was not enforceable because Erich Honecker lay under the protection of Soviet authorities in Beelitz.
37.
The initial Soviet reaction was that Erich Honecker was now too ill to travel and was receiving medical treatment after a deterioration of his health.
38.
In June 1992, Chilean President Patricio Aylwin, leader of a center-left coalition, finally assured German Chancellor Helmut Kohl that Erich Honecker would be leaving the embassy in Moscow.
39.
Reportedly against his will, Erich Honecker was ejected from the embassy on 29 July 1992 and flown to Berlin's Tegel Airport, where he was arrested and detained in Moabit Prison.
40.
Erich Honecker blamed the escalation of the Cold War for the building of the Berlin Wall, saying the decision had not been taken solely by the East German leadership but all the Warsaw Pact nations that had collectively concluded in 1961 that a "Third World War with millions dead" would be unavoidable without this action.
41.
Erich Honecker quoted several West German politicians who had opined that the wall had indeed reduced and stabilised the two factions.
42.
Erich Honecker stated that he had always regretted every death, both from a human point of view and due to the political damage they caused.
43.
Erich Honecker stated that no court lying in the territory of West Germany had the legal right to place him, his co-defendants or any East German citizen on trial, and that the portrayal of East Germany as an was contradictory to its recognition by over one hundred other nations and the UN Security Council.
44.
Erich Honecker dismissed public criticism of the Stasi, arguing that journalists in Western countries were praised for denouncing others.
45.
Erich Honecker lodged a constitutional complaint to the recently created Constitutional Court of the State of Berlin, stating that the decision to proceed violated his fundamental right to human dignity, which was an overriding principle in the Constitution of Berlin, above even the state penal system and criminal justice.
46.
On 12 January 1993, Erich Honecker's complaint was upheld and the Berlin District Court therefore abandoned the case and withdrew their arrest warrant.
47.
Erich Honecker flew via Brazil to Santiago, Chile, to reunite with his wife and his daughter Sonja, who lived there with her son Roberto.
48.
Erich Honecker died on 29 May 1994 of liver cancer at the age of 81 in a terraced house in the La Reina district of Santiago.
49.
Erich Honecker's funeral, arranged by the Communist Party of Chile, was conducted the following day at central cemetery in Santiago.
50.
Erich Honecker died suddenly from a brain tumour in June 1947.
51.
For more than twenty years, Margot Erich Honecker served as Minister of National Education.