Berlin, February 11 The last Communist Prime Minister of the GDR, Hans Modrow, has died at the age of 95, the Left Party parliamentary group reported on Saturday.
Modrow, nicknamed the “Gorbachev of the GDR”, served as head of government between November 1989 and April 1990.
“The peaceful development of the process that led to the reunification of Germany is its merit,” La Izquierda said in a statement signed by party co-chairman Dietmar Barsch and his predecessor Gregor Gysi.
Modrow was born on January 27, 1928 in Jasenitz, in what was then East Prussia, now part of Polish territory.
At the end of World War II, he was taken prisoner by Soviet forces and entered a re-education camp for German soldiers.
Already in the GDR, he began his career in the youth organizations of the Unified Socialist Party (SED), the result of a merger between the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party imposed by the former.
For 32 years he belonged to the Volkskammer (Parliament) and for 20 years he was a member of the Central Committee of the SED.
However, his promotion to the Politburo, the party’s highest authority, only came in 1989 after the resignation of Erich Honnecker.
Having become head of government, he was responsible for organizing the transition to democracy. At first he defended independence from the GDR, but later he was in favor of reunification in the form of a reunification of the two German states.
During the first and last free elections in the GDR, on March 18, 1990, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) won over the SPD and the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), heir to the SED.
In mid-April, Modrow gave way to Christian Democrat Lothar de Maizière who, at the head of a coalition government with the SPD, was responsible for negotiating German reunification.
After reunification, Modrow served as a Member of the Bundestag and Member of the European Parliament until 2004.
After the PDS merged with dissident social democratic groups, giving rise to The Left, Modrow criticized the party which he said was increasingly in the hands of the western part of Germany. ECE
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