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Walter Ulbricht
Walter Ernst Paul Ulbricht (; 30 June 18931 August 1973) was a German communist politician. Ulbricht played a leading role in the creation of the Weimar-era Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and later (after spending the years of Nazi rule in exile in France and the Soviet Union) in the early development and establishment of the German Democratic Republic. As the First Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party from 1950 to 1971, he was the chief decision-maker in East Germany. From President Wilhelm Pieck's death in 1960 on, he was also the East German head of state until his own death in 1973. As the leader of a significant Communist satellite, Ulbricht had a degree of bargaining power with the Kremlin that he used effectively. For example, he demanded the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 when the Kremlin was reluctant. Ulbricht began his political life during the German Empire, when he joined first the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1912, the anti-World War I In ...
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Leipzig
Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as well as the second most populous city in the area of the former East Germany after (East) Berlin. Together with Halle (Saale), the city forms the polycentric Leipzig-Halle Conurbation. Between the two cities (in Schkeuditz) lies Leipzig/Halle Airport. Leipzig is located about southwest of Berlin, in the southernmost part of the North German Plain (known as Leipzig Bay), at the confluence of the White Elster River (progression: ) and two of its tributaries: the Pleiße and the Parthe. The name of the city and those of many of its boroughs are of Slavic origin. Leipzig has been a trade city since at least the time of the Holy Roman Empire. The city sits at the intersection of the Via Regia and the Via Imperii, two important medieval trad ...
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State Council Of East Germany
The State Council of East Germany (German: ''Staatsrat der DDR'') was the collective head of state of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) from 1960 to 1990. Origins When the German Democratic Republic was founded in October 1949, its constitution in its formal structure resembled a bourgeois, federalist democratic system in order to portray the GDR as the legitimate continuation of the prewar Weimar Republic in opposition to the separatist Federal Republic. One of the "bourgeois" features of the constitution (in Article 66) was the office of President, which was filled by Wilhelm Pieck, formerly the leader of the eastern branch of the Communist Party of Germany and now one of the two chairmen of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). However, from the start, the East German government was completely controlled by the SED, and over time its actual power structure grew closer to the model of the Stalinist USSR. When Pieck died on 7 September 1960, the SED opted aga ...
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Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national republics; in practice, both its government and its economy were highly centralized until its final years. It was a one-party state governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with the city of Moscow serving as its capital as well as that of its largest and most populous republic: the Russian SFSR. Other major cities included Leningrad (Russian SFSR), Kiev (Ukrainian SSR), Minsk ( Byelorussian SSR), Tashkent (Uzbek SSR), Alma-Ata (Kazakh SSR), and Novosibirsk (Russian SFSR). It was the largest country in the world, covering over and spanning eleven time zones. The country's roots lay in the October Revolution of 1917, when the Bolsheviks, under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Russian Provisional Government ...
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Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was the German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a dictatorship. Under Hitler's rule, Germany quickly became a totalitarian state where nearly all aspects of life were controlled by the government. The Third Reich, meaning "Third Realm" or "Third Empire", alluded to the Nazi claim that Nazi Germany was the successor to the earlier Holy Roman Empire (800–1806) and German Empire (1871–1918). The Third Reich, which Hitler and the Nazis referred to as the Thousand-Year Reich, ended in May 1945 after just 12 years when the Allies defeated Germany, ending World War II in Europe. On 30 January 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany, the head of gove ...
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Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic (german: link=no, Weimarer Republik ), officially named the German Reich, was the government of Germany from 1918 to 1933, during which it was a constitutional federal republic for the first time in history; hence it is also referred to, and unofficially proclaimed itself, as the German Republic (german: Deutsche Republik, link=no, label=none). The state's informal name is derived from the city of Weimar, which hosted the constituent assembly that established its government. In English, the republic was usually simply called "Germany", with "Weimar Republic" (a term introduced by Adolf Hitler in 1929) not commonly used until the 1930s. Following the devastation of the First World War (1914–1918), Germany was exhausted and sued for peace in desperate circumstances. Awareness of imminent defeat sparked a revolution, the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, formal surrender to the Allies, and the proclamation of the Weimar Republic on 9 November 1918. In its i ...
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Communist
Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange which allocates products to everyone in the society.: "One widespread distinction was that socialism socialised production only while communism socialised production and consumption." Communist society also involves the absence of private property, social classes, money, and the state. Communists often seek a voluntary state of self-governance, but disagree on the means to this end. This reflects a distinction between a more libertarian approach of communization, revolutionary spontaneity, and workers' self-management, and a more vanguardist or communist party-driven approach through the development of a constitutional socialist state ...
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Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde
The Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery (german: Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde) is a cemetery in the borough of Lichtenberg in Berlin. It was the cemetery used for many of Berlin's Socialists, Communists, and anti-fascist fighters. History When the cemetery was founded in 1881 it was called the Friedrichsfelde Municipal Cemetery Berlin (german: Berliner Gemeindefriedhof Friedrichsfelde). In 1900, with the burial of Wilhelm Liebknecht, founder of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the cemetery became the resting place for many of the leaders and activists of Germany's social democratic, socialist and communist movements. In 1919, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, co-founders of the Communist Party of Germany were buried there. A 2009 Charité autopsy report however cast doubt on whether Rosa Luxemberg was ever buried there. The division of Berlin following the Second World War caused the cemetery to be within the borders of East Berlin, where it was used to bury East German ...
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Western Front (World War I)
The Western Front was one of the main theatres of war during the First World War. Following the outbreak of war in August 1914, the German Army opened the Western Front by invading Luxembourg and Belgium, then gaining military control of important industrial regions in France. The German advance was halted with the Battle of the Marne. Following the Race to the Sea, both sides dug in along a meandering line of fortified trenches, stretching from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier with France, which changed little except during early 1917 and in 1918. Between 1915 and 1917 there were several offensives along this front. The attacks employed massive artillery bombardments and massed infantry advances. Entrenchments, machine gun emplacements, barbed wire and artillery repeatedly inflicted severe casualties during attacks and counter-attacks and no significant advances were made. Among the most costly of these offensives were the Battle of Verdun, in 1916, with a combined 700,000 ...
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Macedonian Front
The Macedonian front, also known as the Salonica front (after Thessaloniki), was a military theatre of World War I formed as a result of an attempt by the Allied Powers to aid Serbia, in the autumn of 1915, against the combined attack of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria during World War I, Bulgaria. The expedition came too late and in insufficient force to prevent the fall of Serbia, and was complicated by the internal political crisis in Kingdom of Greece, Greece (the "National Schism"). Eventually, a stable front was established, running from the Albanian Adriatic Sea, Adriatic coast to the Struma River, pitting a Allied Army of the Orient, multinational Allied force against the Bulgarian Army, which was at various times bolstered with smaller units from the other Central Powers. The Macedonian front remained quite stable, despite local actions, Vardar offensive, until the great Allied offensive in September 1918, which resulted in the capitulation of Bulgaria and the libe ...
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Eastern Front (World War I)
The Eastern Front or Eastern Theater of World War I (german: Ostfront; ro, Frontul de răsărit; russian: Восточный фронт, Vostochny front) was a theater (warfare), theater of operations that encompassed at its greatest extent the entire frontier between Russian Empire, Russia and Kingdom of Romania, Romania on one side and Austria-Hungary, Kingdom of Bulgaria, Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman Empire, and German Empire, Germany on the other. It stretched from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, involved most of Eastern Europe, and stretched deep into Central Europe as well. The term contrasts with "Western Front (World War I), Western Front", which was being fought in Belgium and French Third Republic, France. During 1910, Russian General Yuri Danilov developed "Plan 19" under which four armies would invade East Prussia. This plan was criticised as Austria-Hungary could be a greater threat than the German Empire. So instead of four arm ...
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World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fighting occurring throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Pacific, and parts of Asia. An estimated 9 million soldiers were killed in combat, plus another 23 million wounded, while 5 million civilians died as a result of military action, hunger, and disease. Millions more died in genocides within the Ottoman Empire and in the 1918 influenza pandemic, which was exacerbated by the movement of combatants during the war. Prior to 1914, the European great powers were divided between the Triple Entente (comprising France, Russia, and Britain) and the Triple Alliance (containing Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy). Tensions in the Balkans came to a head on 28 June 1914, following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdin ...
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Gefreiter
Gefreiter (, abbr. Gefr.; plural ''Gefreite'') is a German, Swiss and Austrian military rank that has existed since the 16th century. It is usually the second rank or grade to which an enlisted soldier, airman or sailor could be promoted.Duden; Definition of Gefreiter, in German/ref>Official Website (Bundeswehr): Dienstgrade und Uniformen der Bundeswehr (Service Ranks and Uniforms of the German Federal Defence Forces), in German/ref> Within the combined Ranks and insignia of NATO, NATO rank scale, the modern-day rank of ''Gefreiter'' is usually equivalent to the NATO-standard rank scale OR-2. The word has also been lent into the Russian language (''russian: yefreytor/ефрейтор''), and is in use in several Russian and post-Soviet militaries. History Historically the military rank of ''Gefreiter'' (female and plural form: ''Gefreite'') emerged in 16th-century Europe for the German ''Landsknechte'' foot soldiers,Duden; Origin and meaning of "Landsknecht", in German/ref> p ...
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