Honecker was born in Neunkirchen, in what is now Saarland, to Wilhelm Honecker (1881–1969), a coal miner and political activist, and his wife Caroline Catharine Weidenhof (1883–1963). The couple, married in 1905, had six

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In 1930, aged 18, Honecker entered the KPD, the Communist Party of Germany. His political mentor was Otto Niebergall, who later represented the KPD

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In May 1945 Honecker was "picked up" by chance in Berlin by Hans Mahle and taken to the Ulbricht Group, a collective of exiled German communists that had returned from the Soviet Union to

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In the late 1980s, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced glasnost and perestroika, reforms to liberalise socialist planned economy. Frictions between him and Honecker had grown

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Communist rule in East Germany survived Honecker's removal by only two months. Three weeks after Honecker's ousting the Berlin Wall fell, and the SED swiftly lost control of the country. On

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On 12 May 1992, while under protection in the Chilean embassy in Moscow, Honecker, along with several co-defendants, including Erich Mielke, Willi Stoph,

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While Ulbricht had replaced the state's command economy with, firstly the "New Economic System", then the Economic System of Socialism,

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