Egon Krenz

Biography

Egon Krenz was born in 1937 in Kolberg, then in Germany and now Kołobrzeg in Poland, and his family resettled in Damgarten at the end of the Second World War. Trained as a teacher, he joined the Free German Youth in 1953 and the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) in 1955, served in the National People's Army from 1959 to 1961, and later spent three years at the Communist Party's higher school in Moscow.

He rose through the party's youth apparatus, heading the Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation from 1971 and the Free German Youth from 1974 to 1983, and sat in the Volkskammer from 1971. He entered the Central Committee in 1973 and the Politburo in 1983 as secretary for security, youth and sport, and in 1984 became Erich Honecker's deputy on the Council of State, widely seen as his heir.

On 18 October 1989, amid mass protests, the Politburo replaced Honecker with Krenz as general secretary, and he soon also took the chair of the Council of State and the National Defence Council. His promises of reform convinced few people, and on 9 November a botched announcement of new travel rules led crowds to open the Berlin Wall. He resigned his party post on 3 December and his state posts on 6 December, and was expelled from the SED's successor party in January 1990.

In 1997 a Berlin court sentenced him to six and a half years for manslaughter over killings at the inner German border; the verdict was upheld in 1999. He served almost four years before his release in December 2003, then retired to Dierhagen on the Baltic coast, where he has continued to defend the East German state.