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.

Early life and career 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.

In 1983, almost at retirement age, he surprisingly became the First Secretary of the SED in Bezirk Magdeburg, and held this position until 1989. Additionally, he was elected to the National Defence Council of the GDR in 1984. succeeding the retiring 79-year-old longtime chairman Erich Mückenberger. The Bezirk Magdeburg SED chose reformer 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 while rehabilitating Robert Havemann and Rudolf Herrnstadt.

Later life and death Reunified Germany After the Wende, he was a member of the Elder Council of the PDS. However, the proceedings were abandoned, Eberlein being seriously ill.

He was interviewed in the 1994 documentary Der kalte Patriarch about Ulbricht and the 1999 documentary Die Sekretäre 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.