page_title: Erich Honecker
section_title: Illness, downfall and resignation
hierarchical_section_title: Erich Honecker / Illness, downfall and resignation
caption_attribution_description: For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. 10. Volkskammertagung, Rede Egon Krenz ADN-ZB Mittelstädt 24.10.89 Berlin: VK-Tagung Die Volkskammer der DDR trat zu ihrer 10. Tagung zusammen. Auf Anfrage der SED-Fraktion erfolgte die Wahl in die höchsten Staatsämter. Nach seiner Wahl zum Vorsitzendes des Staatsrates und des Nationalen Verteidigungsrates der DDR ergriff der Generalsekretär des ZK der SED, Egon Krenz, das Wort zu einer Erklärung. Abgebildete Personen: Krenz, Egon: Generalsekretär des ZK der SED, Staatsratsvorsitzender, DDR
context_page_description: Erich Ernst Paul Honecker was a German politician who was the General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. As party leader he worked closely with Moscow. He controlled the government of the German Democratic Republic from 1971 until he was forced out in the weeks preceding the fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989. From 1976 onward he was also the country's official head of state as Chairman of the State Council of the German Democratic Republic 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 by the Nazi government of Germany. Following World War II, he was freed by the Soviet army and relaunched his political activities, founding the youth organisation the Free German Youth in 1946 and serving as the group's chairman until 1955. As the Security Secretary of the Party's Central Committee in the new East Germany, he was the prime organiser of the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and, in this function, bore responsibility for the "order to fire" along the Inner German border.
context_section_description: In the late 1980s, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced glasnost and perestroika, reforms to liberalise socialist planned economy. Frictions between him and Honecker had grown over these policies and numerous additional issues from 1985 onward. East Germany refused to implement similar reforms, with Honecker reportedly telling Gorbachev: "We have done our perestroika; we have nothing to restructure". Gorbachev grew to dislike Honecker, and by 1988 was lumping him in with Bulgaria's Todor Zhivkov, Czechoslovakia's Gustáv Husák and Romania's Nicolae Ceaușescu as a "Gang of Four": a group of inflexible hardliners unwilling to make reforms.
  According to White House experts Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, Gorbachev looked to Communist leaders in Eastern Europe to follow his example of perestroika and glasnost. They argue:
  Gorbachev himself had no particular sympathy for Erich Honecker, chairman of the East German Communist Party, and his hard-line comrades and the government. As early as 1985... [Gorbachev] had told East German party officials that kindergarten was over; no one would lead them by the hand. They were responsible for their own people. The relations between Gorbachev and Honecker went downhill from there.
  Western analysts, according to Zelikow and Rice, believed in 1989 that Communism was still secure in East Germany:
  Bolstered by relatively greater affluence than his country's Eastern European neighbors enjoyed in a fantastically elaborate system of internal controls, East Germany's longtime leader Eric Honecker seemed secure in his position. His government had long dealt with dissent through a mixture of brutal repression, forced emigration, and the vent of allowing occasional, limited travel to the West for a substantial part of the population.
  Honecker felt betrayed by Gorbachev in his German policy and ensured that official texts of the Soviet Union, especially those concerning perestroika, could no longer be published or sold in East Germany.
  At the Warsaw Pact summit on 7–8 July 1989 in Bucharest, the Soviet Union reaffirmed its shift from the Brezhnev Doctrine of the limited sovereignty of its member states, and announced "freedom of choice". The Bucharest statement prescribed that its nations henceforth developed their "own political line, strategy and tactics without external intervention". This called into question the Soviet guarantee of existence for the Communist states in Europe. Already in May 1989 Hungary had begun dismantling its border with Austria, creating the first gap in the so-called Iron Curtain, through which several thousand East Germans quickly fled in hopes of reaching West Germany by way of Austria. But with the mass exodus at the Pan-European Picnic, the subsequent hesitant behaviour of the Socialist Unity Party of East Germany and the non-intervention of the Soviet Union opened the floodgates. Thus the united front of the Eastern Bloc was broken. The reaction to this from Erich Honecker in the Daily Mirror of August 19, 1989 was too late and showed the current loss of power: “Habsburg distributed leaflets far into Poland, on which the East German holidaymakers were invited to a picnic. When they came to the picnic, they were given gifts, food and Deutsche Mark, and then they were persuaded to come to the West.” Now tens of thousands of media-informed East Germans made their way to Hungary, which was no longer ready to keep its borders completely closed or to oblige its border troops to use force of arms. A 1969 treaty required the Hungarian government to send the East Germans back home; however, starting on 11 September 1989, the Hungarians let them pass into Austria, telling their outraged East German counterparts that they were refugees and that international treaties on refugees took precedence.
  At the time Honecker was sidelined through illness, leaving his colleagues unable to act decisively. He had been taken ill with biliary colic during the Warsaw Pact summit. He was shortly afterwards flown home to East Berlin. After an initial stabilisation in his health, he u
caption: Egon Krenz introduces himself to the People's Chamber as Honecker's replacement for General Secretary
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