42 Facts About Otto Grotewohl

Otto Grotewohl led the SPD's merger with the Communist Party to form the Socialist Unity Party of Germany in 1946 and served as co-chairman of the party with KPD leader Wilhelm Pieck until 1950.

Otto Grotewohl chaired the Council of Ministers after the establishment of the GDR in 1949 and served as the de jure head of government under First Secretary Walter Ulbricht until his death in 1964.

Otto Grotewohl was born on 11 March 1894 in Braunschweig to a middle-class Protestant family, the son of a master tailor, and was apprenticed to a printer.

Otto Grotewohl served in the German Army during World War I, and started his political career after the war as a leader of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, and in 1920 was elected to the Landtag of the Free State of Brunswick in the Weimar Republic.

Otto Grotewohl served as a minister in numerous cabinets of the Brunswick state government, including Minister of Justice and Education from March to May 1922, and Minister of Justice from February 1923.

Otto Grotewohl was elected to the Reichstag in his own right in the September 1930 election and re-elected in the July 1932, November 1932, and March 1933 elections.

Otto Grotewohl was eventually dismissed as a representative in the Reichstag after the Machtergreifung, the establishment of Nazi Germany, and like other SPD members was subject to discrimination.

On 23 March 1933, Otto Grotewohl had voted against Chancellor Adolf Hitler's Enabling Act, a constitutional amendment allowing Hitler to enact laws without the Reichstag's approval, which passed.

Otto Grotewohl was brutally beaten, arrested and imprisoned several times by Nazi police and subsequently forced to leave Braunschweig, first moving to Hamburg then from 1938 to Berlin, where he worked as a greengrocer and industrial representative.

Otto Grotewohl joined a resistance group centered around Erich Gniffke, an SPD politician he knew from Braunschweig, but the group ended up ensuring the contact and economic survival of its members rather than resisting Nazi rule.

On 4 March 1939, Otto Grotewohl was released from pre-trial detention and the court's procedure against him was discontinued after seven months.

Otto Grotewohl was again brutally beaten and arrested by Nazi police after Georg Elser's attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis on 8 November 1939, spending about eight weeks in custody before being released.

Otto Grotewohl worked as a clerk in Berlin after his release and increasingly devoted his time to painting.

Otto Grotewohl had been scheduled for arrest again on 20 July 1944, but the Gestapo was unable to locate him because he was now living off-the-grid.

Otto Grotewohl initially opposed the merger, but under duress from Ulbricht and SVAG soon yielded and became a proponent of a quick unification.

Otto Grotewohl's hand appeared alongside Pieck's on the SED's "handshake" logo derived from the SPD-KPD congress establishing the party where he symbolically shook hands with Pieck.

Otto Grotewohl's position allowed him to avoid the systematic sidelining and exclusion of former SPD members that began soon after the merger.

In 1948, Otto Grotewohl became Chairman of the constitutional committee of the German People's Council, the predecessor of the Volkskammer.

On 12 October 1949, Otto Grotewohl became the first prime minister of the German Democratic Republic, five days after its establishment from the Soviet Occupation Zone with the SED as the ruling party.

Otto Grotewohl was appointed Chairman of the Council of Ministers, the de jure government of the GDR, while Pieck served as State President.

Otto Grotewohl's power was significantly reduced in July 1950, when the SED restructured along more orthodox Soviet lines.

Otto Grotewohl remained as Chairman of the Council of Ministers and the official head of government without challenge from the SED.

Otto Grotewohl was thus left as mostly a figurehead without any real influence on state affairs.

Otto Grotewohl was a member of the delegation that signed the Treaty of Zgorzelec on the recognition of the Oder-Neisse border as a border between the GDR and the People's Republic of Poland.

In 1957, Otto Grotewohl advocated for the Rapacki Plan for a nuclear weapon-free zone in Central Europe.

Unlike Ulbricht and most of his other SED colleagues, Otto Grotewohl was known to openly favour a more humane way of governing.

Otto Grotewohl condemned abuses in the legal system in a major speech at the SED party conference on 28 March 1956.

Otto Grotewohl denounced illegal arrests, called for more respect for civil rights, and even called for lively debate in the Volkskammer.

Otto Grotewohl made a veiled criticism of Justice Minister Hilde Benjamin's notoriously high-handed handling of political trials.

Otto Grotewohl, who was 55 years old upon coming to power, faced rapidly declining health during his premiership.

Otto Grotewohl was repeatedly taken to a government hospital during the 1950s, typically minor examinations in which he was released on the same day, but multi-day stays.

However, Otto Grotewohl was not only examined by specialist physicians in the GDR, who identified arteriosclerosis and incipient calcification of the coronary system in his heart in 1953, but took advantage of the medical care of top Soviet politicians in Moscow.

On 12 November 1953, Otto Grotewohl visited the Kremlin Polyclinic in Moscow.

Otto Grotewohl reportedly took advantage of these unofficial stays in Moscow to conduct political talks with the Kremlin, but there are no official records.

From 1955, Otto Grotewohl's doctors were worried about the condition of his cardiovascular system.

In 1960, Otto Grotewohl was diagnosed with leukemia, and the course of the year saw his health deteriorate rapidly to the point he was barely able to participate in daily political business.

On 4 April 1960, Otto Grotewohl traveled to a four-week relaxing holiday on the Black Sea; eight months later, he arrived again for several weeks in the Soviet sanatorium in Barvikha.

Otto Grotewohl died on 21 September 1964, at 12:35 noon, in the Niederschonhausen area of Pankow, East Berlin, from the complications of a brain haemorrhage.

The GDR Council of Ministers ordered 3-day mourning period and Otto Grotewohl was lying in state in the SED Headquarters.

Otto Grotewohl was married to Marie Martha Louise from 1919 until 1949.

Hans Otto Grotewohl, was an architect who was sent by his father to lead a German Work Team for rebuilding Hamhung, North Korea, in 1954 after the Korean War.

Otto Grotewohl married his secretary, Johanna Schumann the same year as his divorce from Ohst.