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.
Early political career
Walde came from a working-class family.[1][2] After attending elementary school in Döbeln-Großbauchlitz, he completed training as an administrative employee from 1940 to 1943. He held leadership positions in the German Youth and the Hitler Youth. From June 1943 to April 1945, he was deployed in the Reich Labor Service in Poland, France, and the Netherlands, ultimately as the head foreman. In April 1945, he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht as a soldier and was captured in early May 1945 in Hagenow, initially by American forces, later ending up in British captivity from June to July 1945 in Eutin.[2]
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.[2] In 1945, he became a member of the Free German Trade Union Federation (FDGB) and was a member of the trade union leadership at his workplace from 1946.[2]
In 1950, he attended the local SED Party School in Meißen. Afterward, Walde became a full-time SED party functionary, initially as assistant and teacher at the Meißen Party School, moving up to become deputy principal of the Bezirk Cottbus SED Party School in 1953, briefly serving as acting principal.[2]
He stepped down in February 1964 to study at the University of Economics in Berlin, earning a degree in economics (Dipl.-Ök.) in 1966. Walde subsequently rose to the Bezirk Cottbus SED Secretariat, being made Second Secretary, also responsible for Organization and Cadre Affairs, in April.[2]
Walde (right) and SED Agriculture Secretary Werner Felfe (right of center) visiting farmers in Schwarze Pumpe in July 1988
On 1 June 1969, Walde rose to the position of the First Secretary of the Bezirk Cottbus SED.[2][3][4][5] Albert Stief, who was ill at the time,[3] was transferred to the Council of Ministers of East Germany as Minister for the Guidance and Control of Bezirk and District Councils.
He additionally became a member of the Volkskammer in 1971,[2] nominally representing rural constituencies in his Bezirk, first the west,[7] then the southeast.[8]
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.[3]
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.[2][10] Only a day later, he agreed to step down amidst pressure.[11] The Bezirk Cottbus SED installed reformer Wolfgang Thiel as his successor.[4][11] Walde consequently resigned from the Politburo he had just been reelected to.[2] He was removed by his party from the Volkskammer a week later, on 16 November 1989.[12]
On 20 January 1990, he was expelled from the now-renamed SED-PDS party in a unanimous vote,[2][13] the party Central Arbitration Commission citing personal enrichment and his energy policy mismanagement.[13] Nevertheless, Walde was contrite that he can no longer be "useful to the party of the working class".[14]
