The Russians' New Man in East Berlin

The Russian's New Man in East Berlin

WHEN Soviet troops swept into Berlin in 1945, they battered down the doors of the Brandenburg Prison. Among the prisoners freed was Erich Honecker, a tall, gaunt Communist who had spent most of the past ten years in solitary confinement. Upon his release, Honecker lost no time in joining the Ulbricht Group, a band of Moscow-trained Communists who had been flown to Germany by the Russians to organize a government.

Honecker's record obviously impressed Walter Ulbricht, who had met the young man briefly in Paris in the 1930s. The son of an impoverished Saar miner who was also a dedicated Communist, young Honecker was handing out political pamphlets at eight and was a full-fledged party member at 18. Two years after the Nazis came to power in 1933, he was arrested and later sentenced to ten years in prison for preparing to commit high treason.

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Ulbricht put Honecker to work organizing young East Germans into the Communist-run Free German Youth. Honecker built a movement that embraced every young person from age 14. He also gave it a paramilitary character by introducing flying, parachuting and weapons practice, much like the Hitler Youth.

Shortly after the war, Honecker married Edith Baumann, an old-line Communist official, three years his senior. In 1953, he divorced her and took as his wife Margot Feist, then 20, a beautiful and talented youth leader from Halle. Appointed Minister of Education in 1963, she helped turn East Germany's schools into model institutions; many West Germans readily concede that education is one area where the Communist half of Germany has outperformed their own part of the country. There is talk that she may be elevated to the Politburo when the Party Congress meets in June, and even cynics grant that the promotion would be well deserved.

In 1957, Honecker supported Ulbricht against critics who had sought intellectual and cultural freedom in the wake of Nikita Khrushchev's destalinization campaign. As a reward, Honecker was named to full Politburo membership and given the country's second most important post: Central Committee Secretary in charge of the armed forces and internal security. In 1961, he supervised the building of the Wall.

Honecker proved a dutiful deputy to Ulbricht, affecting the same wide-brimmed Panama hats and gray suits that are the old man's trademarks. Politically, Honecker, now 58, is, if anything, even more doctrinaire and rigid than Ulbricht. "Honecker is a stubborn dogmatist," says Werner Baum, a former East German official who defected two years ago. The years of solitary confinement left their mark on Honecker, an obsessively neat man who wears heavy hornrimmed spectacles and is known as "Granite Face" among East Europeans. "If he were not so utterly dedicated to orthodoxy, one could say he was totally passionless," says one Communist diplomat. "He is fussy to the point of absurdity," reports another. Before his aides dust his desk, they make a diagram showing precisely where everything is placed. After dusting, everything is returned to its proper spot.

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As the country's former top cop, Honecker enjoys strong support from the East German security services--and from the Soviets, who maintain 20 combat-ready divisions in East Germany. The Russians, in fact, call him "nash chelovyek" (our man). Honecker's only known diversion is hunting, which he does alone. He lives outside Berlin in a villa in the heavily guarded government complex at Wandlitz with Margot and their teen-age son. A Communist diplomat who has visited the Honecker home describes it as "spotless, functional, unimaginative and stiff--just like Honecker."

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