Friedrich Wilhelm Reinhold Pieck (; 3 January 1876 – 7 September 1960) was a German communist politician who served as the co-chairman of the Socialist Unity Party from 1946 to 1950 and as the only president of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) from 1949 until his death in 1960.

Pieck had been active in the SPD since the 1890s, breaking from the party in 1917 over his opposition to the First World War. He co-founded the Spartacus League and the KPD, rising to become chairman of the latter organization following the imprisonment of Ernst Thälmann and John Schehr by the Nazis. After the end of the Second World War, he played a key role in the 1946 merger of the KPD and SPD into the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, which served as the ruling party of East Germany from 1949 until 1989.

Early life

thumb|left|upright=0.8|Pieck as a young party activist, 1907

Pieck was born into a Catholic family, as the son of the coachman Friedrich Pieck and his wife Auguste in the eastern part of Guben, in what was then the German Empire and is now Gubin, Poland. Two years later, his mother died. The father soon married the washerwoman Wilhelmine Bahro. After attending elementary school, the young Wilhelm completed a four-year carpentry apprenticeship. As a journeyman, he joined the German Timber Workers Association in 1894.

As a carpenter, in 1894 Pieck joined the wood-workers' federation, which steered him towards joining the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) the following year.

thumb|left|Pieck as a soldier on the [[Western Front (World War I)|Western Front in World War I, July 1917]]

Although the majority of the SPD supported the German government in World War I, Pieck was a member of the party's left wing, which opposed the war. After being released from protective custody he was conscripted into the German Army, serving on the Eastern (at the Neisse River) and Western Fronts (at the Battle of Verdun). Liebknecht and Luxemburg were then killed while "being taken to prison" by a unit of Freikorps. While the two were being murdered, Pieck claimed that he managed to escape. Due to lingering suspicions about Pieck's reported escape, KPD chairman Ernst Thälmann called Pieck before a party court chaired by Hans Kippenberger in 1929. The party court's decision was never published and Kippenberger was executed in Moscow after a secret trial in 1937. According to Waldemar Pabst (the officer who gave the order to kill Liebknecht and Luxemburg), Pieck did not actually escape, but was released in return for providing details about the military plans and hiding places of other KPD members.

During the Ruhr uprising, Pieck was sent by the KPD as a political advisor to the Ruhr Red Army. He was a founding member of the International Red Aid in 1922, serving first on its executive committee then as chairman from 1937 to 1941. In 1924 he became the first chairman of the Rote Hilfe, serving until Clara Zetkin succeeded him the next year. From February 1926 to November 1929 he served as political leader of the KPD's Berlin-Brandenberg district, but was removed from office and replaced by Walter Ulbricht for not supporting Ernst Thälmann during the Wittorf Affair.

thumb|left|Pieck's official [[Reichstag (Weimar Republic)|Reichstag portrait, 1928]]

Pieck held several elected offices in the Weimar Republic. He served in the Landtag of Prussia from 1921 to 1928 and again from 1932 to 1933 (leading the party in that body), the Reichstag from 1928 to 1933, the Berlin City Council from 1929 to 1933, and the Prussian State Council from 1930 to 1932.

Nazi years and Moscow exile

On 4 March 1933, one day before the Reichstag election, Pieck's family left their Steglitz apartment and moved into a cook's room. His son and younger daughter had been in the Soviet Union since 1932 while his eldest daughter Elly was still in Germany. At the beginning of May 1933, he left first to Paris and then to Moscow. A year later, he helped engineer the merger of the eastern branches of the KPD and SPD into the Socialist Unity Party (SED). He was elected as the merged party's co-chairman, alongside former SPD leader Otto Grotewohl. His hand appeared alongside Grotewohl's on the SED's "handshake" logo, derived from the SPD-KPD congress establishing the party where he symbolically shook hands with Grotewohl.

President of East Germany

thumb|right|upright=1.2|[[Walter Ulbricht, Wilhelm Pieck and Otto Grotewohl at the founding ceremony of the German Democratic Republic, 1949]]

In October 1949, on the territory of the Soviet occupation zone the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, was formally established. Pieck was elected president of the new country.

Nominally, for the GDR's first year, Pieck was the number-two man in the government behind Grotewohl, who became the new country's first prime minister. In the East German political hierarchy, the prime minister was the top state official, while the president nominally ranked second.

He lost the co-chairmanship of the ruling SED (which he held with Grotewohl) in 1950, when Walter Ulbricht became the party's General Secretary as the party restructured along more orthodox Soviet lines. Nonetheless, he retained his other posts, including the presidency, due to Joseph Stalin's trust in him.

In August 1960 he moved to a new summer residence, the converted former mansion of the Hermann Göring Leibförsters near "Carinhall".

In March 1956, due to health reasons Pieck was hardly able to fulfill all obligations as Head of State. He attended only a few events such as the Central Committee meeting in January 1957 and the opening of the 5th Party Congress of the SED in July 1958. The last months of his life spent Pieck in his country house in the Schorfheide, where he received the leadership of foreign delegations to the 10th anniversary of the GDR in October 1959.

thumb|right|Pieck's tomb at the Memorial to the Socialists in the [[Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde|Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery]]

Pieck died at Majakowskiring 29, Pankow, East Berlin. He was honoured with a state funeral, cremated and buried at the Memorial to the Socialists () in the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery, Berlin.

Personal life

He was married to Christine Häfker, On the wedding day Christine waited impatiently for Pieck to arrive at the church. At the last minute, he finally did, still carrying communist leaflets. In November 1936, his wife contracted pneumonia for the third time, dying on 1 December of the same year.

The Piecks' daughter, Elly Winter (1898–1987), held various posts in the SED and East German government. Their son Arthur Pieck (1899–1970) served as head of the East German national airline Interflug from 1955 to 1965, after having held various administrative posts in East Germany, for instance at the German Economic Commission. The youngest child, Eleonore Staimer (1906–1998), worked as a party official and, for a time, as a diplomat.

Honours and awards

National honours

  • 60px Hero of Labour (1951)
  • 60px Order of Karl Marx (1953)

<gallery>

File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-08783-0009, Berlin-Friedrichsfelde, Einweihung Gedenkstätte.jpg|Pieck in June 1926, dedicating the memorial statue for the victims of the German November Revolution of 1918

File:Wilhelm Pieck Joseph Stalin 1933.jpg|Pieck (left) standing guard with Joseph Stalin (right) at the urn of Sen Katayama, November 1933

File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-19000-3301, Berlin, DDR-Gründung, Wahl Pieck, Grotewohl.jpg|Pieck (left) and Otto Grotewohl in 1949

File:BM OderNeisse.jpg|1951 East German commemorative stamp of the Treaty of Zgorzelec establishing the Oder-Neisse line as a “border of peace”, with Pieck and President Bolesław Bierut of Poland

File:MajakowskiringPieck.JPG|House of Wilhelm Pieck in Majakowskiring 29, Berlin

</gallery>

Notes

References

  • "Transfer of Julian Marchlewski's urn to the Berlin-Friedrichsfelde Cemetery on 5 April 1925. On the left of the hearse (from front to back): Wilhelm Pieck, Ernst Thälmann, Hugo Eberlein, Ernst Meyer; beside Ernst Thälmann: Ernst Schneller" in Ernst Thälmann: Eine Biographie (1980) and Ernst Thälmann (1986)
  • "Ernst Thälmann and Wilhelm Pieck at the 11th Party Congress of the KPD in Essen, March 1927" in Ernst Thälmann (1986)
  • "7th Congress of the Comintern, 25 July – 20 August 1935. On the Presidium (from left to right): Klement Gottwald, Wilhelm Pieck, Raimond Guyot, Maurice Thorez, Earl Browder, Henri Barbusse, and André Marty" in Ernst Thälmann (1986)
  • Portrait of Pieck in Ernst Thälmann: Eine Biographie (1980) and Ernst Thälmann (1986)
  • Alternate portrait of Pieck in Ernst Thälmann (1986)