Willi Stoph, who has died aged 84, seemed for much of his public life to be a diligent, colourless servant of the German Democratic Republic, espousing its causes with a zeal that was easily exceeded by his arch-rival and GDR leader Erich Honecker.
But Stoph was not what he seemed: for after the GDR caved in, in late 1989, it emerged that he had plotted during the preceding 10 years or so with Erich Mielke, head of the Stasi security police, to overthrow Honecker and take over the GDR. It also emerged that he had an appetite for luxurious living, and even that he had been for a time a loyal Nazi.
It was Honecker who revived the idea of Stoph's possible Nazism. In 1945, he claimed in 1989, Stoph, who had won the Iron Cross in the Wehrmacht, had written for his regiment's newspaper that one of his greatest experiences had been participation in a military parade for Hitler's birthday.
The problem was that the article had been 'rediscovered' in 1960, when the GDR was lobbying for international recognition. The acerbic party leader, Walter Ulbricht, called in the ambitious Honecker; the author of such a piece, he declared, could not remain GDR defence minister, which Stoph then was. So he was removed to become deputy and then successor to the ailing prime minister, Otto Grotewohl.
Stoph never recovered. He had been a member of the politburo, elected in the reshuffle which followed the 1953 Berlin workers' uprising, and one of Ulbricht's favourites. But he seemed destined always to be thwarted at the last fence. His compensation came in October 1989, when he proposed that Honecker should be removed from office.
But within two and a half years he was on trial for his life with Honecker and other senior GDR figures on charges relating to deaths at the frontier between the two German states. But as the trial was getting into its stride, Stoph suffered a heart attack and was released.
Born in Berlin and starting work as a bricklayer, Stoph joined the Communist party at 17. Service on the Russian front pushed him towards an impulsive adulation for the Fuehrer, but as soon as the war ended he rejoined the communist party, collaborating with the Soviet occupiers in their demands for reparations.
With the GDR's founding in 1949 he was soon on Ulbricht's central committee and politburo. He became interior minister in 1952, soon taking on responsibilities in forming a GDR army. On becoming the country's first defence minister, he was promoted to general and deputy commander of the Warsaw Pact forces.
A year after the Berlin Wall went up, Stoph was made first deputy prime minister, and two years after that prime minister. He held this position with bureaucratic thoroughness almost continuously until the 1989 end. The only break, caused again by differences with Honecker, came in 1973-76, when he headed the state council.
In the early 1960s he joined the chorus which saw West Berlin as the centre of east-west tension, accusing the west of sending in coach loads of 'military tourists'. Erecting the Berlin wall, he said, was a benefit to humanity.
His moment in the limelight came in March 1970 when he was Chancellor Willy Brandt's host for the German-German meeting in Erfurt. Brandt was mobbed, but Stoph pressed for diplomatic recognition and reunification - on GDR terms. History may yet claim he made some progress when Brandt replied: 'We must accept the situation as it is. It is obvious that relations between east and west cannot be greatly improved so long as relations in the heart of Europe remain disturbed.' But when Stoph reached Kassel for the next meeting the talks broke down. West German communists were out in force with welcoming placards; but so too were anti-communists. The GDR flag was pulled down and the initiative was over. Leonid Brezhnev fumed in the Kremlin at what he saw as humiliation for the communist cause. By 1973, Stoph had been kicked upstairs and a year later Brandt was gone. It took the guile of Honecker and the machinations of the European security conference in Helsinki in 1975 to retrieve the situation.
In early 1984, Stoph's niece, Ingrid Berg, chose to leave the GDR with her husband and two children to re-settle in the west. It was another setback for Stoph, but he fought back, outlining plans in 1986 for enhancing what he called the GDR's 'economic invulnerability'. But it was already too late; Mikhail Gorbachev's undermining process had begun, and when Stoph deputised for the ailing Honecker at a Comecon meeting in Bucharest in the summer of 1989, the GDR experiment was all but over.
Willi Stoph, politician, born July 9, 1914, died April 13, 1999