[1] Ulrich Makosch was born into a working-class family, in Wittenberge,[1] a mid-sized manufacturing town on the north bank of the Elbe, some 160 km (100 miles) to the north-west of Berlin.
He had already joined the national Union of Journalists in 1952, but it was not till 1963, his thirtieth year, that he became a member of the country's ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED / Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands).
[1] From 1965 till 1971 Makosch worked as a chief foreign correspondent for the East German Television Corporation, focused on south-east Asia and based, for much of the time, in Djakarta and Singapore.
He also wrote reports about the region, notably about the 1965 putsch in Indonesia[3] and, later, about the Vietnam War, and published numerous books on these and related topics.
After 1990 it transpired that he had served the Ministry for State Security since the 1950s as a secret informer, recorded in the Stasi files from 1969 under the code name "IMB Primus".