Otto Emil Franz Grotewohl (; 11 March 1894 – 21 September 1964) was a German politician who served as the first prime minister of the German Democratic Republic (GDR/East Germany) from its foundation in October 1949 until his death in September 1964.
Grotewohl was a Social Democratic Party (SPD) politician in the Free State of Brunswick during the Weimar Republic and leader of the party branch in the Soviet Occupation Zone after World War II. Grotewohl led the SPD's merger with the Communist Party (KPD) to form the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in 1946 and served as co-chairman of the party with KPD leader Wilhelm Pieck until 1950. Grotewohl chaired the Council of Ministers after the establishment of the GDR in 1949 and served as the de jure head of government under First Secretary Walter Ulbricht until his death in 1964.
Biography
Early years
Grotewohl was born on 11 March 1894 in Braunschweig to a middle-class Protestant family, the son of a master tailor, and was apprenticed to a printer. At the age of 16 he joined the youth wing of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Grotewohl served in the German Army during World War I, and started his political career after the war as a leader of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), and in 1920 was elected to the Landtag of the Free State of Brunswick in the Weimar Republic. Grotewohl served as a minister in numerous cabinets of the Brunswick state government, including Minister of Justice and Education from March to May 1922, and Minister of Justice from February 1923.
In 1922, Grotewohl and the majority of the USPD members joined the Social Democratic Party, and on 31 October 1925 he became a member of parliament in the national Reichstag to replace the SPD representative Elise Bartels after her death. Grotewohl was elected to the Reichstag in his own right in the September 1930 election and re-elected in the July 1932, November 1932, and March 1933 elections.
Nazi era
Grotewohl was eventually dismissed as a representative in the Reichstag after the Machtergreifung, the establishment of Nazi Germany, and like other SPD members was subject to discrimination. On 23 March 1933, Grotewohl had voted against Chancellor Adolf Hitler's Enabling Act, a constitutional amendment allowing Hitler to enact laws without the Reichstag's approval, which passed. Grotewohl was brutally beaten, arrested and imprisoned several times by Nazi police and subsequently forced to leave Braunschweig, first moving to Hamburg then from 1938 to Berlin, where he worked as a greengrocer and industrial representative. Grotewohl joined a resistance group centered around Erich Gniffke, an SPD politician he knew from Braunschweig, but the group ended up ensuring the contact and economic survival of its members rather than resisting Nazi rule. In August 1938, Grotewohl was again brutally beaten, arrested and charged by Nazi police with treason before the People's Court. On 4 March 1939, Grotewohl was released from pre-trial detention and the court's procedure against him was discontinued after seven months. Grotewohl was again brutally beaten and arrested by Nazi police after Georg Elser's attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis on 8 November 1939, spending about eight weeks in custody before being released. Grotewohl worked as a clerk in Berlin after his release and increasingly devoted his time to painting. Grotewohl had been scheduled for arrest again on 20 July 1944, but the Gestapo was unable to locate him because he was now living off-the-grid. According to Heinz Voßke's 1979 biography of Grotewohl, this lifestyle allowed him to avoid being conscripted into the Volkssturm during the closing months of World War II.