Erich Honecker, the East German ruler who built the Berlin Wall and had border guards shoot defectors trying to escape to the West, died unrepentant in exile. He was 81.
Honecker's body was to be cremated Monday. He died Sunday after being extremely ill for four months with liver cancer, said his lawyer, Nicholas Becker, reached by telephone in Berlin. Honecker had lived in Chile since early 1993 with his wife, Margot, and their daughter, Sonja.His cancer prompted German authorities to allow him to leave Germany, saving him from a near-certain manslaughter conviction for ordering the shootings of East Germans trying to escape.
Egon Krenz, who replaced Honecker in 1989 as East Germany's ruler but lasted only 11/2 months in office, described Honecker as a victim of circumstances.
"Work, bread and peace - that was Honecker's service to East Germany," Krenz said in a statement. "Cold War and loyalty set limits on his room to maneuver that he couldn't escape."
The German government was less compassionate.
A spokesman for German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, whose aggressive push for unification caused East Germany to disappear in 1990, released a brief, blunt statement.
"Honecker failed in his political goals. His policies brought suffering to countless people in Germany. Out of respect for the dead, it is fitting to say little more about his role in postwar German history," Dieter Vogel said.
Alfred Bauer, head of a cultural center in Buenos Aires that promoted cultural relations with the former East Germany, said that in a visit with Honecker last June, Honecker described himself as "a fighter for revolution and socialism."
"I struggled for these ideals since I was 16. . . . I shall remain loyal to my ideals until my death," Bauer quoted him as saying.
Born Aug. 25, 1912, in Saarland in western Germany, Hon-ecker joined a Communist youth group at age 14 and spent 10 years in a Nazi prison.
After World War II, Honecker rose in the East German party ranks and became a member of the ruling Politburo in 1958. Beginning in August 1961, he supervised the construction of the Berlin Wall to stem the westward exodus of East Germans.
Honecker took over as party leader in 1971. The peak of his political career came in September 1987, when he visited West Germany and received all the protocol honors of a foreign head of state.
But as a peaceful revolution swelled around him in 1989, Hon-ecker was ousted by his Politburo colleagues. Popular pressure soon forced the Communists to open the wall.