Hans Modrow (; 27 January 1928 – 10 February 2023) was a German politician best known as the last communist premier of East Germany.
Coming into office amidst the Peaceful Revolution, he was the de facto leader of East Germany through the winter of 1989–90. He presided over a transitional government, paving the way to the first and only free elections in East Germany. His cabinet was the last over which the Socialist Unity Party (SED) presided, as well as the first to include opposition members.
After the end of Communist rule and reunification of Germany, he was convicted of electoral fraud and perjury by the Dresden District Court in 1995, on the basis that he had been the SED official nominally in charge of the electoral process. He was later convicted of the first charge and was given a nine-month suspended sentence. He was one of the few high-ranking former SED officials retained by its successor, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), of which he became honorary chairman. He was the president of the "council of elders" of the PDS' successor, the Left Party, from 2007.
Early life and education
Modrow was born on 27 January 1928 in Jasenitz, Province of Pomerania<!-- DO NOT LINK, see MOS:GEOLINK for further guidance -->, German Reich<!-- DO NOT LINK, see MOS:GEOLINK for further guidance -->, now Jasienica, part of the town of Police in Poland. As a child he was a Hitler Youth leader and attended a Volksschule. He trained as a machinist from 1942 to 1945 when he was filled with intense hatred of the Bolsheviks, whom he deemed as subhumans, inferior to Germans physically and morally. For six months during the Allied bombing of Stettin he served as a volunteer firefighter.
Communist party career
thumb|left|upright=1.2|Modrow (center) rides through [[Dresden in a motorcade with cosmonauts Sigmund Jähn (left) and Valery Bykovsky (right), 25 September 1978]]
Modrow had a long political career in East Germany, serving as a member of the Volkskammer from 1957 to 1990 and in the SED's Central Committee (ZK) from 1967 to 1989, having previously been a candidate for the ZK from 1958 to 1967. which is based in the Köpenick district. From 1971 to 1973 he worked as the head of the SED's Department for Agitation. and received the award of the Order of Karl Marx in 1978.
From 1973 onward, he was the SED's first secretary in Bezirk Dresden, making him the top official in East Germany's third-largest district. From 1988 to 1989, the Stasi, under the orders of Honecker and Erich Mielke, vigorously investigated Modrow to attempt to frame him for high treason.
Peaceful Revolution and premiership
During the Peaceful Revolution of 1989, Modrow ordered thousands of Volkspolizei, Stasi, Combat Groups of the Working Class, and National People's Army troops to crush a demonstration at the Dresden Hauptbahnhof on 4–5 October. Some 1,300 people were arrested. In a top secret and encrypted telex to Honecker on 9 October, Modrow reported: "With the determined commitment of the comrades of the security organs, anti-state terrorist riots were suppressed".
When Honecker was toppled on 18 October, Gorbachev hoped that Modrow would replace him; Egon Krenz was selected instead. <!--According to Modrow, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev asked Krenz to bring Modrow into the government. -->Following Willi Stoph's resignation on 13 November, four days after fall of the Berlin Wall, Modrow became Chairman of the Council of Ministers (Premier). On 1 December, the SED gave up its "leading role," formally ending communist rule in East Germany. Krenz resigned two days later. With the SED having given up its monopoly of power, Modrow, as Premier and the top state (rather than party) official, became leader of the country more or less by default. In any event, the SED Politburo, until then the top leadership body, was in disarray, leaving Modrow as the only person with a viable claim to power outside the imploding SED structure.
Seeking to defuse growing pressure to dissolve the Ministry of State Security, Modrow arranged for its renaming to the "Office for National Security" (Amt für Nationale Sicherheit – AfNS) on 17 November. A second rebranding as the "Office for the Protection of the Constitution of the GDR" (Verfassungsschutz der DDR) failed due to public and opposition pressure; the AfNS/Stasi was disbanded on 13 January 1990. The Modrow government gave orders to destroy incriminating Stasi files. Modrow remained premier until the formation of the De Maizière cabinet in April following elections in which the PDS placed third.
<gallery widths="190px" heights="135px">
File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-1989-1117-018, Hans Modrow.jpg|Modrow addressing the Volkskammer, 17 November 1989
File:KohlModrowMomperBrandenburgerTor.jpg|Modrow with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl during the opening of the Brandenburg Gate, 22 December 1989
File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-1990-0313-021, Demmin, PDS-Wahlkampfauftritt Hans Modrow.jpg|Modrow giving a speech at a rally in Demmin, 13 March 1990
File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-1990-0412-024, Berlin, Lothar de Maiziere und Modrow.jpg|Modrow congratulating his successor, Lothar de Maizière, on his election as Minister-President, 12 April 1990
</gallery>
Criminal sentence
thumb|left|upright=0.8|Modrow in 1999
On 27 May 1993, the Dresden District Court found Modrow guilty of electoral fraud committed in the May 1989 Dresden local elections, specifically, understating the percentage of voters who refused to vote for the official slate. The Dresden District Court revoked the decision in August 1995 and Modrow was sentenced to nine months on probation. Modrow did not directly deny the charges, but argued that the trial was politically motivated and that the court lacked jurisdiction for crimes committed in East Germany. "We were all members of a political system," he said, speaking to the court in Dresden. "Some perhaps had the good fortune not to come into contact with manipulation, while others could not or were not allowed to turn away." After leaving office, he wrote a number of books on his political experiences, his continued Marxist political views, and his disappointment at the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc. Although a supporter of Gorbachev's reforms in the 1980s, after the fall of Communism he criticised them for weakening the Eastern Bloc's economy. He also called East Germany an "effective democracy". He was criticised for maintaining contacts with Neo-Stalinist groups. In 2018, he sued the Federal Intelligence Service for access to West German intelligence files on him from the Cold War. In 2019 he criticised the enlargement of NATO, which he also opposed reunified Germany's membership in. He is buried at Dorotheenstadt Cemetery.