Willi Stoph

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Willi Stoph (1976)

Willi Stoph (born July 9, 1914 in Berlin-Schöneberg ; † April 13, 1999 in Berlin ) was a German communist politician of the GDR who belonged to the SED Politburo from 1953 .

From 1952 to 1955 he was Interior Minister and from 1955 to 1960 Defense Minister . When the West German press in May 1960 of Stoph in the era of National Socialism published eulogies to Nazism revealed he was removed as defense minister and deputy prime minister without portfolio .

From 1964 to 1973 he was Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the GDR , then until 1976 as Chairman of the State Council the head of state of the GDR and then until autumn 1989 again Chairman of the Council of Ministers.

From December 1989 to February 1990 he was imprisoned for the first time for abuse of office . From May 1991 he was in custody for 15 months because of the killings at the inner-German border, until the proceedings had to be discontinued in August 1993 due to permanent incapacity to stand trial .

biography

Childhood, education, marriages

Willi Stoph was born on July 9, 1914 in Berlin-Schöneberg as the son of a working-class family. His father died in the First World War in 1915.

After attending elementary school from 1920 to 1928, he completed a three-year mason apprenticeship during the economic crisis in Berlin , which he completed with a journeyman's examination. After his apprenticeship, apart from short-term jobs as a bricklayer and casual worker, he was unemployed until 1934. According to his own information, Stoph claims to have been a member of the Communist Youth Association of Germany (KJVD) in various functions, and in 1931 also a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) . At the end of the 1930s he qualified as a construction technician through a distance learning course. On April 2, 1938, he married Marianne Wiegank. The marriage ended in divorce in 1947. His divorced wife moved to West Berlin. A few months later he married his secretary, with whom he had four children.

Career in the Wehrmacht and NCO in World War II

From 1935 to 1945, Stoph belonged almost entirely to the German Wehrmacht . In October 1935 he was called up to the Brandenburg artillery regiment and in 1937 appointed chief gunner. During the Second World War , Stoph was drafted into the 93rd Artillery Regiment on February 17, 1940. In the same year he was promoted to private . In 1941 he was transferred from Brittany to the Eastern Front . In 1942, as a corporal, he fell ill with dysentery and jaundice . In 1943 he was Corporal and was again jaundiced, which is why abkommandierte him as unfit for front spare military unit to Frankfurt (Oder), where he attested because of a heart failure remained until 1944th In 1944/45 he completed a non-commissioned officer course lasting several weeks. In February 1945 he became a non-commissioned officer in the Wehrmacht. For his services he was honored with the Iron Cross 2nd class. On April 21, 1945, he deserted the troops and was arrested by Red Army soldiers who released him in mid-July after being a prisoner of war in the Wriezen and Küstrin camps . 14 days later he became a member of the KPD . In 1960, an article published by Stoph 20 years earlier in an architecture journal became known in which he raved about Adolf Hitler's birthday parade and praised the community spirit of military maneuvers .

Political career in the GDR

Stoph at a ceremony (1952)
Stoph (right) in uniform as Colonel General of the NVA in 1957

After his ten-year career in the Wehrmacht, Stoph pursued his recognition as a victim of fascism ( OdF ) in 1946 . His request to the OdF committee at the Office for Social Affairs of the Weißensee district office was rejected because Stoph was entangled in contradictions and he could not name any credible witnesses for the alleged illegal resistance against the Nazi regime. When the Ministry for State Security (MfS) researched why Stoph was still awarded the medal for fighters against fascism 1933 to 1945 in 1958 , it turned out that his files in the Berlin magistrate neither his curriculum vitae nor the compulsory questionnaire for recognition as a persecuted person by National Socialism (VdN) included. In 1984 the SED propaganda refrained from celebrating him as a resistance fighter on the occasion of his 70th birthday.

In 1948 Stoph became head of the economic policy department of the SED party executive. In 1950 he was appointed to the Secretariat of the Central Committee (ZK) of the SED and a member of the People's Chamber. After the popular uprising on June 17, 1953 , he was promoted to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the SED .

From 1950 to 1952 Stoph was chairman of the economic committee of the People's Chamber and head of the office for economic issues at the GDR Council of Ministers .

From May 1952 to June 1955 Stoph was Minister of the Interior and from 1954 to 1962 Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers. After Otto Grotewohl's death on September 21, 1964, Stoph was elected by the People's Chamber on September 24, 1964 as his successor as one of the deputy chairmen of the GDR State Council. He was a member of this body until his official recall on November 17, 1989.

From 1955 to 1960, Stoph was Minister for National Defense . Through this office he became a colonel general in 1955 and an army general in 1959. When the West German press in 1960 Stoph eulogies from the era of National Socialism revealed their authenticity Stoph could not deny decided Honecker and Ulbricht his departure from the Ministry of Defense, after which Stoph deputy prime minister without portfolio was. When Otto Grotewohl's health deteriorated, Stoph was first deputy in 1962 and, after his death in 1964, his successor as Prime Minister.

Willi Stoph in conversation with Lotte Ulbricht and Walter Ulbricht (1967)
Meeting with Willy Brandt on March 19, 1970 in Erfurt
Erich Honecker and Willi Stoph next to their GAZ-13 Tschaika limousines at the Leipzig spring fair in 1972

In 1970, he met with Chancellor Willy Brandt in Erfurt ( Erfurt Summit ) and Kassel ( Summit in Kassel 1970 ) German to two peaks, the détente rang. After Walter Ulbricht's death in 1973, Stoph became Chairman of the Council of State and thus, according to protocol, head of state of the GDR. In 1976 Stoph had to cede his post to Erich Honecker , under whose leadership he lost influence. Stoph was again chairman of the Council of Ministers and deputy chairman of the Council of State.

According to the contemporary historian Ulrich Mählert , Stoph was a "reform brakeman" who belonged to the forces that belonged to Brezhnev .

Political end after reunification in the GDR

New Year's Address 1974

On October 18, 1989, Stoph applied to the Politburo to release Honecker from his position as General Secretary. Stoph resigned on November 7th together with the entire government of the GDR.

Until the new government was formed under the former SED district chief of Dresden, Hans Modrow , Stoph remained in office. He confessed to the People's Chamber that the Council of Ministers had failed to exercise its political responsibility under the constitution. On November 8th, the entire Politburo of the SED Central Committee (including Stoph) resigned. On November 17, Stoph was recalled as a member of the State Council and lost his mandate from the People's Chamber. On December 3, he was expelled from the party by the Central Committee of the SED .

Stoph's privilege economy becomes known

After the fall of the Wall , Stoph had to move out of his house in the Waldsiedlung Wandlitz . It became known that Stoph owned a hunting lodge in the middle of a nature reserve on the Müritz , which had cost 8.35 million marks and in size far exceeded all the weekend dwellings of the other Politburo members. The comfortable property had nine garages and a two-kilometer-long waterway dug especially for it from the Müritz to the Specker See . Ten years after the fall of the Wall, Gerd Schmidt, the MfS officer responsible for supplying the Waldsiedlung, described in detail in his memoirs the excessiveness of Stoph's lavish, luxurious lifestyle and the aloof privileges. Stoph had his own extensive family seat built in Birkenheide with large orchards and greenhouses with orange, lemon and mandarin trees, for which additional security and gardening personnel had to be employed.

On December 8, the public prosecutor general of the GDR initiated an investigation against Stoph on suspicion of abuse of office and corruption to the detriment of the national economy and for personal gain. He was detained on December 8, 1989. After Stoph was released in February 1990 for health reasons, he tried to get asylum in the Soviet Union. President Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev let him know that his request was acknowledged, but did not reply.

Charges after the reunification

Than in reunified Germany , the judicial investigation into the killings at the East German border and the deaths at the Berlin Wall took up, Stoph came in May 1991, again in custody , he was released from the 15 months. On November 11, 1992, the Berlin Regional Court opened the proceedings against Stoph, Honecker and Mielke. Stoph was not present at the start of the trial due to illness. The court severed Stoph's case and closed it in August 1993 for incapacity to stand trial.

On October 10, 1994, the Berlin Administrative Court ruled that Stoph would not get back the savings he had confiscated in 1990 in the amount of 200,000  DM .

Stoph died on April 13, 1999 in Berlin and was buried in Wildau .

Fonts

  • For the further development of socialist society in the GDR. Speeches and essays. Dietz-Verlag, Berlin 1974.
  • For the strengthening of our socialist state. Selected speeches and essays. Dietz-Verlag, Berlin 1979.
  • GDR - state of socialism and peace. Selected speeches and essays. Dietz-Verlag, Berlin 1984.
  • Socialism and peace for the benefit of the people. Selected speeches and essays. Dietz-Verlag, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-320-01343-2 .

literature

Web links

Commons : Willi Stoph  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ulrich Mählert In: Hans Ehlert, Armin Wagner (ed. :) Comrade General !: The GDR's military elite in biographical sketches. P. 283, p. 289.
  2. ↑ Ulrich Mählert In: Hans Ehlert, Armin Wagner (ed. :) Comrade General !: The GDR's military elite in biographical sketches. P. 280, p. 284, p. 289.
  3. ↑ Ulrich Mählert In: Hans Ehlert, Armin Wagner (ed. :) Comrade General !: The GDR's military elite in biographical sketches. P. 287.
  4. ↑ Biographies. Willi Stoph (1914-1999). MdI.
  5. ↑ Ulrich Mählert In: Hans Ehlert, Armin Wagner (Ed. :) Comrade General !: The GDR's military elite in biographical sketches , p. 286.
  6. ↑ a b Ulrich Mählert In: Hans Ehlert, Armin Wagner (Ed. :) Comrade General !: The GDR's military elite in biographical sketches. P. 294.
  7. ↑ Ulrich Mählert In: Hans Ehlert, Armin Wagner (ed. :) Comrade General !: The GDR's military elite in biographical sketches. P. 296.
  8. ↑ Ulrich Mählert In: Hans Ehlert, Armin Wagner (ed. :) Comrade General !: The GDR's military elite in biographical sketches. P. 279.
  9. ↑ Ulrich Mählert In: Hans Ehlert, Armin Wagner (ed. :) Comrade General !: The GDR's military elite in biographical sketches. P. 298ff .; On Stophs' economy of privileges: Gerd Schmidt: I was a butler at the Politburo: Protocol of Truth about the Waldsiedlung Wandlitz. Schkeuditz 1999. p. 79 ff .; Ulrich Baron: GDR leadership. Assisted living Wandlitz. The world. 29 May 2004; "I feel like in the hospital" Der Spiegel, November 22, 1999.
  10. ↑ Klaus Behling : Secrets of a Sunken Land , Image and Home, 2015
  11. ↑ Ulrich Mählert In: Hans Ehlert, Armin Wagner (ed. :) Comrade General !: The GDR's military elite in biographical sketches. P. 299.
  12. ↑ knerger.de: Willi Stoph's grave
personal data
SURNAME Stoph, Willi
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (SED), MdV, Prime Minister
DATE OF BIRTH July 9, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Schöneberg
DATE OF DEATH April 13, 1999
Place of death Berlin