Ulbricht played a leading role in the creation of the Weimar-era Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and later in the early development and establishment of the German Democratic Republic.

After the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933 and the Nazi-led investigation into his role in ordering the 1931 murder of police captains Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck, Ulbricht lived in Paris and Prague from 1933 to 1937 and in the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1945.

After the end of World War II, Ulbricht re-organized the German Communist Party in the Soviet occupation zone along Stalinist lines.

Ulbricht presided over the total suppression of civil and political rights in the East German state, which functioned as a communist-ruled dictatorship from its founding in 1949 onward.

The nationalization of East German industry under Ulbricht failed to raise the standard of living to a level comparable to that of West Germany.

In the years before the 1933 Nazi election to power, paramilitary wings of Marxist and extreme nationalist parties provoked massive riots connected with demonstrations.

On 2 August 1931, KPD members of the Reichstag Heinz Neumann and Hans Kippenberger received a dressing down from Ulbricht, who was the party's leader in the Berlin-Brandenburg region.

The German Popular Front under the leadership of Heinrich Mann in Paris was dissolved after a campaign of behind-the-scenes jockeying by Ulbricht to place the organization under the control of the Comintern.

[20] Ulbricht spent some time in Spain during the Civil War, as a Comintern representative, ensuring the murder of Germans serving on the Republican side who were regarded as not sufficiently loyal to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin; some were sent to Moscow for trial, others were executed on the spot.

[25] The East German police had to call in Soviet military units stationed in the city to help suppress the demonstration and communist rule was restored after several dozen deaths and 1,000 arrests.

He returned to Berlin and he took the lead in calling in Soviet troops to suppress the widespread unrest with full backing from Moscow and its large army stationed inside the GDR.

His power consolidated, Ulbricht suppressed critics such as Karl Schirdewan, Ernst Wollweber, Fritz Selbmann, Fred Oelssner, Gerhart Ziller and others from 1957 onward, designated them as "factionalists" and eliminated them politically.

[32] During this time, the refugees' mood was rarely expressed in words, though East German laborer Kurt Wismach did so effectively by shouting for free elections during one of Ulbricht's speeches.

The New Economic System, which involved measures to end price hikes and increase access to consumer goods,[25] was not very popular within the party, however, and from 1965 onwards opposition grew, mainly under the direction of Erich Honecker and with tacit support of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

This became gradually critical as East Germany faced increasing economic problems due to his failed reforms, and other countries refused to offer any kind of assistance.

At the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution in Moscow, he untactfully boasted about having personally known Lenin and having been an active communist in the USSR already 45 years ago.

In 1969 Ulbricht's Soviet guests at the State Council (Staatsrat) showed clear signs of dissatisfaction when he lectured them heavily on East Germany's supposed economic successes.

[41] On 3 May 1971 Ulbricht was forced to resign from virtually all of his public functions "due to reasons of poor health" and was replaced, with the consent of the Soviets,[42] by Erich Honecker.

Ulbricht died at a government guesthouse in Groß Dölln near Templin, north of East Berlin, on 1 August 1973, during the World Festival of Youth and Students, having suffered a stroke two weeks earlier.

He was honoured with a state funeral, cremated and buried at the Memorial to the Socialists (German: Gedenkstätte der Sozialisten) in the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery, Berlin.

Despite stabilising the GDR to some extent, and making improvements in the national economy which were unimaginable in many other Warsaw Pact states, he never succeeded in raising East Germany's standard of living to a level comparable to that in the West.

[45]With his below-average height of 165 cm (5 ft 5 in), his high-pitched voice, which may have come into being as a result of a larynx disease he carried with him since 1925,[46] his strong Saxon accent, his lack of rhetorical talent, his consistent use of the confirmatory term "ja?"

After attempts to stylise him as a charismatic leader in the 1950s failed due to lack of popular support, the East German leadership at least pretended that such charisma existed.

In 1956, when Destalinisation started both in the Soviet Union as well as the Eastern Bloc countries, the newspaper Neues Deutschland published an article titled: "With Walter Ulbricht for the fortune of humanity.

The festivities around his 60th birthday in 1953 were however cut short because of the crisis developing into the 1953 East German uprising: An already finished propaganda movie about him was not published and a stamp with his image was not publicised either.

[49] On other dates, the official East German propaganda followed the standards set by the personality cults of Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union.

On these occasions, Ulbricht's origin from a working-class family was emphasised, he was hailed as the "foundation of a new life" (by Johannes R. Becher) as well as a "worker genius" and "master of the times": The German Democratic Republic views him as an idol in terms of dilligence, energy and workforce - as the personification of unimaginable achievements.

[53] A tape containing a recitation of Goethe's Faust by a parodist imitating Ulbricht was in wide circulation in East Germany, eventually causing the Stasi secret police to intervene on the charge of defamation of the state.

Although Beate Ulbricht remembered her father warmly, she referred to her mother in an extensive interview given to a tabloid in 1991 as "the hag", adding that she was "cold-hearted and egoistic".

[55] In 1956, Ulbricht was awarded the Hans Beimler Medal, for veterans of the Spanish Civil War, which caused controversy among other recipients, who had actually served on the front line.