A comparison between the governments of The GDR vs West Germany:

The GDR:

Otto Grotowohl became the first prime minister of the GDR and an active proponent of a long-lasting peace settlement in Europe. He was the former leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the Soviet Zone of Occupation. He had been imprisoned by the Nazis several times.

Walter Ulbricht, became the first general secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (SED - formed by a merger between the Communist and the Social Democratic Parties in the Soviet Zone in 1946). He was a former joiner, and spent his years of exile in the USSR.

Ulbricht was replaced by Erich Honecker, a former roofer, who became party and state leader after Ulbricht. Honecker had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1935 and spent the following 10 years in a Nazi prison.

Wilhelm Pieck became the first president of the GDR. He had spent the Nazi period and war years in exile in the USSR together with Walter Ulbricht.

Albert Norden, a member of the SED Central Committee, was the son of a Rabbi and had been arrested for political activities during the Weimar Republic, escaping before the Nazis could arrest him, was to spend his exile years in the USA.

Herman Axen, a member of the Central Committee, came from a Jewish family and survived internment in both Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Klaus Gysi, later Minister of Culture, also came from a Jewish family background and escaped the Nazis to spend his exile working with the resistance in France and Britain.

Markus Wolf, who became the GDR’s head of counter espionage, came from a Jewish background. He was the son of the renowned playwright and medical doctor Friedrich Wolf . He was also in the Soviet Union during the Nazi period.

Rudolph Herrnstadt came from a Jewish family and spent the Nazi and war years in Soviet exile. He became the first chief editor of Neues Deutschland, the national daily newspaper of the SED.

Alexander Abusch, the first Minister of Culture, was born to a Jewish family in Cracow and spent the war years in French exile.

Hilde Benjamin, also from a Jewish background, became the GDR’s first female minister and its second Minister of Justice. Under the Nazis she had been banned from practising law because of her Jewish background. She was the wife of Dr. Georg Benjamin (brother of the writer and cultural critic Walter Benjamin) who was murdered in Mauthausen concentration camp. She was instrumental in bringing in a whole raft of legislation favouring gender equality in the GDR.

West Germany:

In West Germany, Konrad Adenauer became the first post-war Chancellor. He was an arch-conservative, ardent Catholic and pre- war mayor of Cologne as well as President of the Prussian State Council. Before the war he had called for a coalition government with the Nazis, and although never a member of that party himself, he was certainly no anti-fascist.

His first post-war government was packed with other right-wing and Catholic figures as well as high-ranking former Nazis.

Hans Globke was Adenauer’s personal advisor. He had been an active member of the Nazi party, and had served as chief legal advisor to the Office for Jewish Affairs in the Ministry of the Interior, the section headed by Adolf Eichmann that was responsible for the administrative logistics of the Holocaust. It was he who co-wrote the official annotation explaining the implementation of the race laws which legalised the discrimination against the Jews.

West Germany’s second Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, the man credited with the country’s post-war “economic miracle” and dubbed the “father of the social market economy” had previously occupied a leading position in the Nazi Reichsgruppe Industrie and the Institute for Industrial Research financed by the chemical conglomerate IG Farben that supplied Zyklon-B for the gas chambers.

Kurt Kiesinger, who followed Erhard as Chancellor in 1966, joined the Nazi Party in 1933, a few weeks after Hitler came to power. In 1940, he was employed in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ radio propaganda department, rising to become deputy head from 1943 to 1945 and was liaison officer with Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda.

Heinrich Lübke, who became President of the Federal Republic in 1959, was another controversial figure. His signature (which he disputed) was found on the building plans for a concentration camp. He was involved in the setting up of an aircraft factory in an underground chamber and, under his direction, barracks were built to house concentration camp inmates who worked as slave labourers. Lübke was also involved in setting up the army research station at Peenemunde (where the V2 rockets were developed under Werner von Braun) as building director of the Schlemp Group. From 1943-45 he was responsible for the employment of concentration camp inmates as slave labour.

Hans Seidel, Commander-in-Chief of the allied ground forces in Central Europe from 1957 to 1963, served in the Nazi army’s French campaign of 1940 and became Chief of Staff of the military commander in France. In April 1944, Seidel was appointed Chief of Staff to Field Marshall Rommel.

Reinhard Gehlen, President of the BND, the West German secret service until 1968, had been chief of Hitler’s military intelligence unit on the Eastern Front. He had been officially released from American captivity in 1946 and flown back to Germany, where he began his intelligence work once again by setting up an organization of former nazi intelligence officers.

Only when Willi Brandt, who first became Mayor of West Berlin (1957-66), became German Chancellor (1969-74), was there a genuine anti-fascist at the helm of the Federal Republic. He had spent the exile years in Norway working as a journalist and hiding from the Nazis. For many years he was ostracised by establishment figures in West Germany as a ‘traitor’, just as Marlene Dietrich and others who left Germany during the Hitler years were. It was perhaps not surprising that it was only under Brandt’s Chancellorship that a thaw in East-West relations began to take place with a tentative rapprochement between the GDR and FRG (West Germany).