Friedrich Wilhelm Reinhold Pieck was a German communist politician who served as the chairman of the Socialist Unity Party from 1946 to 1950 and as president of the German Democratic Republic from 1949 to 1960.
Rita Süssmuth is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). She served as the 10th President of the Bundestag.
Claudia Crawford is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU),who became the youngest cabinet minister in German history whilst in office from 1994–98 and was Federal Minister for family,seniors,women and youth affairs and,by virtue of this office,presided over the European Union Council of Ministers. Nolte is a Catholic and is active in the Catholic community. She is married to investigative journalist David Crawford of CORRECT!V. With her marriage in July 2008,she took the name of her husband.
The Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) merged to form the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) on 21 April 1946 in the territory of the Soviet occupation zone. It is considered a forced merger. In the course of the merger,about 5,000 Social Democrats who opposed it were detained and sent to labour camps and jails.
Werner Gustav Schulz was a German politician of Alliance '90/The Greens. Trained in food technology at the Humboldt University of Berlin,he worked as a research assistant. He was an activist for peace ecology and human rights in several oppositional groups from the 1970s. He lost his university job in 1980 when he protested against the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. In the Peaceful Revolution,he was in 1989 a founding member of the New Forum,representing the group at the Round Table. He was elected to the first freely elected Volkskammer. After German reunification,he was a member of the German Bundestag from 1990 to 2005,and a member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 2009 to 2014.
Ernst Melsheimer was a German lawyer.
Rolf Schwanitz is a German politician. From 1998 till 2005,he served under Federal Chancellor Schröder as a Minister of State in the Federal Chancellery. He was then,from 2005 till 2009,Parliamentary State Secretary in the Health ministry under Federal Chancellor Merkel.
Susanne Miller was a Bulgarian-born left wing activist who for reasons of race and politics spent her early adulthood as a refugee in England. After 1945,she became known in West Germany as a historian.
Ehrhart Neubert is a retired German Evangelical minister and theologian.
Ursula Ragwitz is a former senior official of the ruling East German Socialist Unity Party. She started her career as a primary school teacher,and rose to become a member of the powerful Party Central Committee between 1981 and 1989,undertaking various leadership roles in respect of the country's highly politicised culture sector.
Katharine "Ketty" Guttmann was a German communist politician and campaigner for prostitutes' rights.
Christa Schmidt is a retired German politician (CDU). She served as a minister in the last government of East Germany. She had built an earlier career as a teacher and educationalist.
Johannes-Wilhelm Rörig is a German Manager ("Betriebswirt"),Full jurist ("Volljurist"),Labour law judge and Senior Public Administrator ("Ministerialdirigent"). Since December 2011 he has served as the Independent Commission for Dealing with Sexual Abuse of Children.
Käthe Dahlem was a German political activist who,after being forced into exile,became an anti-fascist Resistance activist,participating in the Spanish Civil War and,subsequently,again based in France. After 1945 she became a public official in the Soviet occupation zone. She was retired on health grounds in July 1949 and was subsequently caught up in her husband's difficulties with the ruling party,the party first secretary,Walter Ulbricht and other leading party comrades who had spent the war years in Moscow. By the 1960s,however,the authorities were happy to honour her pre-war and wartime contribution.
Angelika Barbe is a German biologist who became a politician.
Agnes Schmidt was a German activist and politician who served as a member of the Parliament ("Landtag") of Thuringia.
Alexander Schwab was a German political activist. He withdrew from active participation in politics after resigning from the fractious and short-lived Communist Workers' Party in 1922,but continued his contribution as an independent left of centre commentator-journalist. During the twelve Nazi years he was arrested at least twice,spending the final years of his life,between 1936 and 1943,in a succession of jails. Sources may also identify him by the pseudonym under which some of his contributions were published,as Albert Sigrist Sachs.
Katja Isabel Leikert is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) who has been serving as a member of the Bundestag since 2013,representing the Hanau electoral district. Within the CDU/CSU Bundestag Group,parliamentary colleagues elected her one of the alliance's eleven Bundestag deputy chairpersons in January 2018.
Ute Vogt is a German lawyer and politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who served as a member of the Bundestag from 1994 to 2005 and from 2009 to 2021. Since 2021,she has been serving as president of the German Life Saving Association (DLRG).
Hildigund Neubert is the daughter of an East German Pastor-Theologian who became a professional musician. As the pressures for change in the one-party dictatorship intensified,thanks both to the bankruptcy of the state and to the winds of Glasnost blowing across from,of all places,Moscow,she found herself drawn by circumstances into politics. At the time of East Germany's "peaceful revolution" she was in East Berlin,a permanent presence at the control centre of Demokratischer Aufbruch. A feature of those months was the dispersed character of the uprisings that destroyed the dictatorship:it is misleading to think in terms of any sort of central "guiding hand" controlling developments. Nevertheless,DA was one of a number of movements and organisations that became key to focusing the energies of hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy campaigners and demonstrators,in ways that led,in March 1990,to the only free and fair parliamentary election in the history of the "German Democratic Republic" and thereafter,more indirectly,to reunification in October 1990.
