Werner Eberlein

Werner Eberlein (9 November 1919 – 11 October 2002) was a German politician and high-ranking party functionary of the Socialist Unity Party (SED).

Rising to prominence as Russian interpreter to state and party leader Walter Ulbricht, he served as the First Secretary of the SED in Bezirk Magdeburg and as a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the SED in the 80s.

Soviet Union exile
His father, Hugo Eberlein, was one of the founding members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) at the end of 1918. After being imprisoned in France, Hugo Eberlein was in exile in Moscow in Hotel Lux from autumn 1936 and, like many other German emigrants in the Soviet Union, became a victim of Stalin's Great Terror.

Werner Eberlein had to emigrate to the Soviet Union to live with his stepmother Inna Armand in 1934. After his father death, he was exiled from the Lux, spending eight years in Siberia - known as "Wolodja" - and only returning to Germany in 1948.

He worked as press officer for the SED party executive committee and, after attending the CPSU's Moscow Higher Party School from 1951 to 1954, as a journalist for the SED Zentralorgan newspaper Neues Deutschland.

Chief Interpreter
In the German Democratic Republic, under state and party leader Walter Ulbricht, he became the chief Russian interpreter, gaining widespread recognition through numerous television appearances ("Khrushchev's Voice") as he conveyed the emotional style of the Soviet party leader into German. "The Tall One", as he was called, was hard to miss due to his height, and his lively humor was also well known.

Reunified Germany
He was interviewed in the 1994 documentary Der kalte Patriarch (The cold patriarch) about Ulbricht and the 1999 documentary Die Sekretäre (The secretaries) about Ulbricht and Honecker.

In 2002, Eberlein died of a heart attack while lawn mowing. His urn was interred in the grave complex for victims of fascism and those persecuted by the Nazi regime at the Berlin Central Cemetery Friedrichsfelde, where his father Hugo Eberlein is also commemorated.

He was a half-brother of the journalist Klaus Huhn.

SED Central Committee
Since 1960, Eberlein worked at the Central Committee of the SED, serving as deputy head of its powerful Party Organs Department from 1964 to 1983.

In 1983, almost at retirement age, he surprisingly became the First Secretary of the SED in Bezirk Magdeburg, succeeding Kurt Tiedke, who became principal of the Karl Marx Party Academy, and held this position until 1989. Additionally, he was elected to the National Defence Council of the GDR in 1984. He became known as a reformer.

From 1985 to 1986, he was a candidate member and since 21 April 1986 (XI. Party Congress) a full member of the Politburo of the SED, the de facto highest leadership body in East Germany. This was likely due to his friendship with General Secretary Erich Honecker and the political significance of the Bezirk Magdeburg because of its long western border with West Germany.

Peaceful Revolution
During the Wende in late 1989, he briefly served as the chairman of the powerful Central Party Control Commission (ZPKK), succeeding the retiring 79-year-old longtime chairman Erich Mückenberger. The Bezirk Magdeburg SED choose reformer Wolfgang Pohl as his successor as First Secretary.

Though in office for less than a month, the Central Party Control Commission made numerous crucial decisions in that time, among other things expelling Honecker and Günter Mittag while rehabilitating Robert Havemann and Rudolf Herrnstadt.

Reunified Germany
After the Wende, he was a member of the Elder Council of the PDS. He is one of the few high-ranking former SED officials to not have been expelled.

Like other former Politburo members, Eberlein was charged with "complicity in manslaughter" (political responsibility for the fatal shootings at the Berlin Wall) by the Berlin Regional Court in the Berlin Wall shooting trials. However, the proceedings were abandoned, Eberlein being seriously ill.