Werner Walde

Werner Walde (12 February 1926 – 26 June 2010) was a German politician and party functionary of the Socialist Unity Party (SED).

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he served as First Secretary of the SED in Bezirk Cottbus, the GDR's coal and energy Bezirk, and eventually became a candidate member of the SED Politburo.

Life and career Walde came from a working-class family.

After his release, he worked as a farm laborer for a farmer in Westerode until August 1945. He subsequently worked as an employee of the Social Security Fund in Döbeln until December 1950. Albert Stief, who was ill at the time, the de facto highest leadership body in East Germany, the Bezirk Cottbus being an important centre for coal and energy. then the southeast.

Walde's twenty-year rule of Bezirk Cottbus was viewed was viewed ambivalently. While he lived a modest lifestyle for a top SED functionary and was viewed as sticking up for the districts in his Bezirk, he was known for being a hardliner when it came to military service and those refusing to do so. When it came to art and culture, he was orthodox and clueless, something he later admitted.

Peaceful Revolution On 8 November 1989, on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Böhme was reelected to the Politburo at the 9th Meeting of the Central Committee. Only a day later, he agreed to step down amidst pressure. The Bezirk Cottbus SED installed reformer Wolfgang Thiel as his successor.

On 20 January 1990, he was expelled from the now-renamed SED-PDS party in a unanimous vote, Nevertheless, Walde was contrite that he can no longer be "useful to the party of the working class".

After the Peaceful Revolution, Walde retired, dying in Cottbus on 26 June 2010.