For five months he was the most powerful man in a dying regime. Last communist head of government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which he led from November 1989 to April 1990, Hans Modrow died on Saturday February 11 in Berlin. He was 95 years old.
Born on January 27, 1928 in the small Prussian town of Jasenitz – today Jasienica, in Poland, on the Baltic coast – this son of a sailor was still a teenager when he was overtaken by great history. At the beginning of 1945, he was 17 when he was incorporated into the Volkssturm, this mass levy proclaimed in the fall of 1944 to defend the IIIe Reich in the face of advancing Soviet troops. Taken prisoner by the Red Army during the German defeat, he was sent to a camp near Moscow, before joining one of the “anti-fascist schools” created in the USSR to “denazify” German prisoners of war.
Four years later, it was as a fervent communist that Hans Modrow returned to the brand new GDR, established by the Soviets, on October 7, 1949, four months after the proclamation of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), under the protection of the Westerners. In this “popular democracy” where everything was to be built, he began by earning his living as a mechanic in the railway industry, before being caught up in militant life, first within the FDJ, the youth organization of the regime, then within the Unified Socialist Party (SED), whose central committee he joined in 1967, as head of the very sensitive “agitation and propaganda” sector, before becoming its regional secretary in Dresden, the third largest city in the country in 1973.
At the center of the game
In this position, Hans Modrow forged a reputation as a simple and accessible man, who gave up the villa to which he was entitled to settle on the tenth floor of a “Plattenbau”, these large sets of collective housing typical of the GDR. A modern apparatchik, in short, whose sense of dialogue contrasts with the ossified image of the nomenklatura in power in East Berlin. Cultivating a certain distance with Erich Honecker, at the head of the regime since 1971, this position will keep him away from the very first circle of power for fifteen years. But it will allow him to return to the center of the game in 1989, when the shock which then seizes Eastern Europe will make the need to renew the management personnel urgent.
Spotted in 1987 by the number one Soviet Mikhail Gorbachev, who saw in him a man capable of applying in the GDR the reforms that he himself had decided to implement in the USSR, Hans Modrow still believed, at the beginning of the autumn of 1989 , to the policy of firmness. On October 3, while thousands of East German nationals gathered at Dresden station to try to catch a train to the GDR, he had a state of emergency declared and the army intervened. There are several injured.
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