His short passage to the head of a RDA in agony in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall was marked by an unprecedented political opening. He died on February 11, at the age of 95.
by Thomas Wieder (Berlin, correspondent)
He was for five months the most powerful man of a regime in agony. Last communist head of government of the German Democratic Republic (RDA), whom he led from November 1989 to April 1990, Hans Modrow died on Saturday February 11 in Berlin. He was 95 years old.
Born January 27, 1928 in the small Prussian town of Jasenitz – today Jasienica, Poland, on the banks of the Baltic -, this sailor’s son was still a teenager when he was caught up in the great history. At the beginning of 1945, he was 17 years old when he was incorporated into the Volkssturm, this mass lifting proclaimed in the fall of 1944 to defend the III e reich in the face of the advance of Soviet troops. Caught by the Red Army during the German defeat, he was sent to a camp near Moscow, before joining one of the “anti -fascist schools” created in the USSR to “denazify” German prisoners.
Four years later, it was as a fervent communist that Hans Modrow returned to the brand new RDA, instituted by the Soviets, on October 7, 1949, four months after the proclamation of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), under Western protection. In this “popular democracy” where everything is to be built, he begins by earning his living as a mechanic in the rail industry, before being caught up in militant life, first within the FDJ, the youth organization of the regime, then within the Unified Socialist Party (SED), whose central committee he joined in 1967, as responsible for the very sensitive sector “agitation and propaganda”, before becoming the regional secretary in Dresden, third city of country, in 1973.
at the center of the game
In this position, Hans Modrow forges a reputation as a simple and accessible man, who has given up the villa to which he was entitled to settle on the tenth floor of a “Plattenbau”, these large sets of Collective habitat typical of the GDR. A modern apparatchik, in short, whose sense of dialogue contrasts with the sclerotic image of the nomenklatura in power in East Berlin. Cultivating a certain distance from Erich Honecker, at the head of the regime since 1971, this position will distance him from the very first circle of power for fifteen years. But it will allow him to return to the center of the game in 1989, when the shaking which then seizes the Eastern Europe will make the need to renew the leader staff.
spotted in 1987 by the number one Soviet Mikhail Gorbachev, who sees in him a man capable of applying the reforms that he himself decided to implement in the USSR, Hans Modrow still believes, at the beginning of ‘Fall 1989, to firmness policy. On October 3, while thousands of East German nationals were massaged at Dresden station in an attempt to take a train towards the GDR, he made the state of emergency decree and intervene the army. There are several injured.
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