Hans Modrow, the last Communist prime minister of East Germany and the man who presided over the country’s democratic transition, has died at 95.
Modrow took power on November 13, 1989, just four days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when pro-democracy protests inspired by the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union forced out the previous government. Modrow became a Communist after being captured by the Soviet Union during WWII at the age of just 17 and rose through the ranks of the party bureaucracy over the following decades.
As prime minister, he sought to reform the Communist Party from within and held the German Democratic Republic’s only free election ever—which resulted in him losing power. He went on to serve as a minister in the parliament of unified Germany and become leader of the council of elders of Die Linke, Germany’s largest hard-left party. Die Linke mourned his passing on Saturday, saying, “without Hans, the peaceful course of 1989 would not have been possible.
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