Word: ulbricht
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Died. Otto Winzer, 72, former East German Foreign Minister; of heart disease; in East Berlin. A Communist from his youth, Winzer was a close aide of the late East German leader Walter Ulbricht. When Winzer took command of the foreign ministry in 1965, only the Communist bloc and a few Third World countries recognized East Germany as a sovereign state. Winzer shepherded his country into the international arena, and in 1973 East Germany (along with her neighbor to the west) was admitted to the United Nations. Poor health forced Winzer's resignation in January...
...symbolism was unintended, but powerful nonetheless. A little more than six weeks after his death, the government of East Germany laid to final rest the ashes of Walter Ulbricht, who for more than a generation was the country's stern, Stalin-like dictator. The very next day East Germany was admitted to the United Nations, receiving the universal legitimacy and recognition that Ulbricht had both sought and feared...
...Plan money into the West, the Russians siphoned off any spare cash from the East. All told, the East Germans paid Moscow an estimated $15 billion in direct reparations and untold amounts under extortionist trade agreements. When the Russians were finished the East Germans were left with only "Walter Ulbricht and some potatoes," as one East German bitterly puts...
After the war, Honecker was put in charge of East Germany's Communist Youth Movement, which he turned into a paramilitary organization. By 1950 he was recognized as one of Walter Ulbricht's chosen few. A few years later he took command of the secret police, and in 1961 he was given the responsibility of building the Berlin Wall...
Clearly the No. 2 man in East Germany by the early '60s, he was Ulbricht's obvious successor in 1971, when the Russians needed someone more pliable to further the policy of détente. In the two years since he took power, he has loosened a few of Ulbricht's moralistic dictums-rules against long hair and mod clothes, for instance-but in every important way he has remained as rigid as his master...