Title: Erich Honecker
Content: Erich Honecker Erich Honecker (; 25 August 1912 – 29 May 1994) was a German politician who, as the General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party, led the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) from 1971 until the weeks preceding the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. From 1976 onward he was also the country's official head of state as chairman of the State Council following Willi Stoph's relinquishment of the post. Honecker's political career began in the 1930s when he became an official of the Communist Party of Germany, a position for which he was imprisoned during the Nazi

Title: Manfred Gerlach
Content: few days later, on 18 October, SED leader Erich Honecker was finally deposed by his own Politburo. After the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gerlach was elected Chairman of the Council of State and thus the first non-communist head of state of the GDR who was not a caretaker. He held this post until April 1990, when the State Council was abolished in a prelude to reunification with West Germany. In March 1990, Gerlach's party and two other liberal parties merged into the new Association of Free Democrats, which merged into the West German FDP after reunification. In November 1993,

Title: Erich Honecker
Content: Central Committee and as chairman of the state's National Defense Council. Under his command, the country adopted a programme of "consumer socialism" and moved toward the international community by normalising relations with West Germany and also becoming a full member of the UN, in what is considered one of his greatest political successes. As Cold War tensions eased in the late 1980s under perestroika and glasnost, the liberal reforms of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Honecker refused all but cosmetic changes to the East German political system, citing the continual hardliner attitudes of Kim Il-sung and Fidel Castro, whose respective regimes

Title: Erich Honecker
Content: of North Korea and Cuba had been critical of reforms. As anticommunist protests grew, Honecker begged the USSR to intervene and suppress the protests to maintain communist rule in East Germany like the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956; Gorbachev refused. Honecker was forced to resign by his party in October 1989 in a bid to improve the government's image before the public. Honecker's eighteen years at the helm of the soon-to-collapse German Democratic Republic came to an end. Following German reunification, he sought asylum in the Chilean embassy in Moscow in 1991 but was extradited

Title: Alexanderplatz demonstration
Content: German embassies in Prague and Warsaw. On 18 October, reformist members of the Politburo forced Erich Honecker to resign as the chair of the council of state and general secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (SED). He was replaced by the slightly less hardline Egon Krenz, who became the new party leader and the chair of the council of state a few days later. In his inaugural address, he used the term Die Wende (lit. turnaround) and promised political reforms. He later ordered the cessation of all police actions against protesters and reopened the previously closed border to Czechoslovakia. A

Question: Who replaced Erich Honecker as GDR head of state?
Answer: Egon Krenz