Historian and witness Wolfgang Leonhard died – Neue Westfälische

Manderscheid -. Historian and expert on Russia Wolfgang Leonhard is dead He died on Sunday morning at the age of 93 after a long illness in a hospital in Daun in the Eifel, his wife Elke Leonhard told the news agency dpa

Leonhard was the last surviving witness from the innermost control loop, the German Communists, who prepared the founding of the GDR after 1945. His transformation from enthusiastic Communists to Soviet critics he described in 1955 in the bestselling book “The Revolution dismisses their children”
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“It was a long struggle, “Elke Leonhard said. Her husband had his serious illness for months “stoically endure” and spent the last 100 days only in hospitals. A date for the commemoration will later set to allow colleagues and former students to participate. Leonhard had for 21 years taught until 1987 as a professor at the American elite Yale University about the Soviet Union and communism

Leonhard was in 1945 as a member of the “group Ulbricht.” – So named for the later GDR State Council Chairman Walter Ulbricht – from Moscow returned to Germany. He had been in 1935 fled with his enthusiastic mother of communism in the USSR and later formed the leadership cadre. In the Soviet occupation zone of his opposition to Stalinism grew. In 1949 he escaped to Yugoslavia and a little later in the Federal Republic.

As a recognized expert in Soviet and important witness Leonhard was in high demand well into old age. He spent the last years, especially in his home in the Eifel town of Manderscheid – surrounded by more than 6,000 books about the USSR and the GDR, with the analysis of actually existing communism

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