Walter Ulbricht
Leader of East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party (1950–1971), who built a Soviet-style state and the Berlin Wall in 1961
Born to a tailor’s family in Leipzig, he became a Communist Party functionary and spent the Nazi years in exile, much of it in Moscow. In April 1945 he returned with the Red Army at the head of the “Ulbricht Group”, organized the administration of the Soviet zone and engineered the founding of the SED. As its general secretary from 1950 he drove through a Soviet-style planned economy and the collectivization of farming, and survived the 1953 uprising with Soviet tanks. In June 1961 he declared that “nobody intends to build a wall”; two months later he built it. Resisting Brandt’s Ostpolitik, he lost Moscow’s backing and was pushed aside by Honecker in 1971.