But
World War I caused a schism in the party, and radical, anti-war members broke
off to found what became the German Communist Party. When the SPD took power at
the end of the war, it collaborated with far-right paramilitaries to hunt down
renegade communists, including the new party’s leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl
Liebknecht, who were both murdered on January 15, 1919. While the communist
party survived through the years of the Weimar Republic, the SPD remained
mortally hostile to it. And when the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, its
first order of business was rounding up communists, sending them to
purpose-built concentration camps, where many of them perished. The lucky ones
fled Germany, crossing the border before they could be arrested. Some went
West. But many traveled East, to Moscow, where what would become the core of
the East German government waited out the war.
In
the cauldron of Stalin’s Great Terror, which lasted from 1936 to 1938 and
claimed around one million lives, Hoyer begins her story. Many of the German
communists who had sought safety in the USSR were purged: arrested, tortured,
sent to the Gulag, or even murdered. Those who survived were a Stalinist core,
including Wilhelm Pieck, who would go on to become the GDR’s first president,
and Walter Ulbricht, who would become the First Secretary of the East German
Socialist Unity Party.
Berlin
fell on May 2, 1945, the remains of the Thousand Year Reich six days later. The
Red Army occupied Germany’s eastern reaches. The western parts were divided
among France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Governance of the
Soviet zone soon fell into the hands of German communists. Ulbricht, who
arrived in Berlin with his Soviet patrons, remarked to an associate, “it must
look democratic, but we must control everything.” Hoping to capitalize on the
postwar popularity of the SPD, the Soviets forced a merger with the communist
party, creating the Socialist Unity Party (SED) that would govern East Germany
for forty years. But when the SED suffered humiliating results in the 1946 polls,
winning less than 50 percent of the vote, leaders resolved never again to hold
free elections.