36 Facts About Heinrich Rau

Shortly afterward Heinrich Rau was thrown in jail for two years.

Heinrich Rau was a leading economic politician and diplomat of East Germany and led various ministries at different times.

Heinrich Rau was born in Feuerbach, now a part of Stuttgart, in the German Kingdom of Wurttemberg, the son of a peasant who later became a factory worker.

Heinrich Rau grew up in the adjacent city of Zuffenhausen, now a part of Stuttgart.

In 1916, Heinrich Rau joined the Spartacists as well and became a co-founder of their youth organisation.

Heinrich Rau's action led to a reprimand from his employer, and may have hastened his conscription into the army in August 1917.

Heinrich Rau took active part in the events in Stuttgart's streets on this and the following day.

Heinrich Rau was elected leader of the military police in his home city of Zuffenhausen, a part of Stuttgart's urban area.

At the time of these events, Heinrich Rau used his position as chief of the military police in Zuffenhausen to shut down companies that remained operational while the strike was ongoing.

However, when the strike collapsed, Heinrich Rau was removed from office by the government.

From 1919 until 1920 Heinrich Rau was head of the local KPD group in Zuffenhausen, and chaired the KPD organisation in Stuttgart.

Heinrich Rau was a founding member of the Second International, about whom Friedrich Engels once had written, that he liked her very much, while emperor Wilhelm II is said to have referred to her as the "worst witch in Germany".

Heinrich Rau had been living in a Stuttgart suburb since 1891 and, since then, been gathering a circle of Wurttemberg Marxists around her, among them Rau's friend Hoernle, who had been editing with her the magazine Die Gleichheit.

Heinrich Rau's house, built in 1903 in Sillenbuch, had become a meeting place of leading national and local left-wing and communist activists.

In 1920, when Zetkin was elected to the Reichstag in Berlin, Hoernle and Heinrich Rau moved to Berlin as well.

In November 1920 Heinrich Rau became a full-time party functionary and the secretary of the agricultural division of the Central Committee of the KPD in Berlin.

The head of the Central Committee's Division for Agriculture initially was Edwin Hoernle, with whom Heinrich Rau had come from Stuttgart.

Hoernle had been elected to the Executive Committee of the Comintern in November 1922 and Heinrich Rau succeeded him as division chief the following year.

Heinrich Rau's brigade saw combat in the battles of Brunete, Belchite, Teruel and the Aragon Offensive, where Heinrich Rau was wounded.

When Heinrich Rau took charge of the XI Brigade, he might have been at odds with his predecessor, Richard Staimer, the future son-in-law of KPD leader Wilhelm Pieck.

Heinrich Rau was released from prison and expelled from Spain.

At the beginning of 1939 Heinrich Rau crossed the border to Spain again and subsequently led, together with Ludwig Renn, the remainders of the XI Brigade.

Heinrich Rau was arrested by the French authorities in September 1939 and sent to Camp Vernet, an internment centre in France, and in November 1941 to a secret prison in Castres.

Heinrich Rau left Vienna in July 1945, when he led a car convoy with 120 former Mauthausen inmates to the Soviet occupied part of Berlin.

In March 1948 Heinrich Rau became chairman of the German Economic Commission, which during this period became the centralised administrative organisation for the Soviet Occupation Zone and the predecessor of the future East German government.

One of Heinrich Rau's aims during the meetings with the SMAD was, to come to agreements, which obliged the Soviet side, including subordinate Soviet authorities, who still engaged in wild confiscations for reparation purposes.

The West Berlin SPD newspaper Sozialdemokrat reported in April 1949, how Heinrich Rau clearly criticized the blockade in a meeting of SED apparatchiks and there is reason to believe that he did the same in the meetings with the SMAD.

Heinrich Rau thereupon became a delegate of the People's Chamber representing East Berlin, the newly established parliament of the GDR and joined the new government.

Likewise in 1949, the ruling SED implemented traditional leadership structures of communist parties and Heinrich Rau became a member of the newly established Central Committee of the SED and candidate member of its Politburo; in 1950 he became a full member of the Politburo as well as deputy chairman of the East German Council of Ministers.

Unlike some other rebels in the leadership, Heinrich Rau kept most of his positions.

Heinrich Rau remained a member of the Politburo and deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers.

In 1954, Heinrich Rau received in the Order of Merit for the Fatherland in gold.

Between 1955 and 1961 Heinrich Rau served as Minister for Foreign Trade and Inter-German Trade.

Heinrich Rau was cremated and honoured with burial at the Memorial to the Socialists in the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery, Berlin.

Heinrich Rau was married twice and had three sons and a daughter.

Thereupon Johannes Rau ironically commented on this lapse by observing that Heinrich Rau was a "Minister of Trade, a Swabian and a communist" and he was none of the three.