Lotte Ulbricht

Lotte Ulbricht (19 April 1903 – 27 March 2002) was a Socialist Unity Party of Germany official and the second wife of the East German leader Walter Ulbricht.

Charlotte Kühn was born in Rixdorf in 1903 as a daughter of an unskilled labourer and a homeworker in Berlin. She had an older brother, Bruno. After attending primary and middle school she worked as an office worker and a shorthand typist. In 1919 she joined the Free Socialist Youth movement, and in 1921 the Communist Party (KPD). She worked for the Party's central committee, and in was 1922-23 shorthand typist with the Communist Youth International (KJI) in Moscow, thereafter member of the central committee of the KPD and the KPD Reichtag group, in 1926-27 she was archivist with the KJI and then until 1931 secretary and shorthand typist at the commercial bureau of the USSR in Berlin. 1931 she emigrated with her first husband, Erich Wendt, to Moscow. She became an instructor with the Comintern and completed a distance learning study at the Academy of Marxism-Leninism and an evening course at Moscow State University. After the arrest of her husband in 1936 in the Stalinist purges, she divorced him in the same year, and had to submit to an investigation. She was subject to an official Party reprimand until 1938. She worked 1939-41 as a compositor in a foreign language printer, and later for the Comintern again until 1945.

Until 1947 she was a member of the central committee of the Communist Party, then as a personal employee of Walter Ulbricht, whom she already knew from their time in Moscow. After her marriage in 1953 to Ulbricht she gave up her job working for him and began studying at the Institute for Social Sciences, which awarded her a Social Sciences Diploma in 1959. In 1959-73 she was employed by the Institute for Marxism-Leninism, where, among other things, she was responsible for editing the speeches and writings of Walter Ulbricht published by the Institute.

In addition, she was a member of the Women's Commission of the Secretariat of the Central Committee and of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the SED. She retired in July 1973, a few weeks before the death of her husband. Lotte Ulbricht was much decorated by the state and party leadership of the GDR, including in 1959, 1963 and 1978 the Fatherland Order of Merit, and in 1969 and 1983 the Order of Karl Marx and 1988 the Grand Star of Friendship of Nations.

In a rare interview, after German reunification, in 1990, she complained that "Honecker wasted my husband's inheritance".

On March 27, 2002, she struggled out of her wheelchair and shuffled to a ladder propped against a bookcase. She climbed to look for a book on an upper shelf and crashed to the floor, and died that night. She lived in 12 Majakowskiring street, Pankow, Berlin. She and Walter adopted a Russian girl (1944-1991).