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BOX-FOLDER-REPORT: 110-3-173
TITLE:             New East German Ambassador to Frague
BY:                Dorothy Miller
DATE:              1967-9-4
COUNTRY:           (n/a)
ORIGINAL SUBJECT:  Foreign relations Party

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RADIO FREE EUROPE Research

COMMUNIST AREA

GDR: Foreign relations
Party
4 September 1967

NEW EAST GERMAN AMBASSADOR TO PRAGUE,

On 31 August, the East German news agency ADN announced that
Peter Florin had been appointed the GDR's new ambassador to
Czechoslovakia. According to the same dispatch, Florin's predecessor,
Heinz Willmann, had been recalled for "reasons of health".

Florin's appointment follows after the announcement of Willmann's
recall in Neues Deutschland on 22 August. The paper had mentioned
that Willmann was received by President Antonin Novotny for a
discussion in connection with the termination of his diplomatic
activities in Czechoslovakia but failed to give any reasons for his
retirement or to indicate his future employment.

The departure from Prague of Heinz Willmann came as a rather
unexpected move since the career diplomat had served only 17 months
in Czechoclovakia. After having been Secretary General of the East
German Peace Council since 1950, 61 year-old Willmann, a member of
the SED, had been appointed Ambassador to Prague in March 1966.

The reason of poor health cited by the latest ADN news as the
reason for Willmann's recall might well be true, of course,
Willmann's future activities (or absence thereof) should shed some
further light on the matter. There is no doubt, however, that by
appointing Florin to the position the East German regime will now
be represented in Prague by a younger, more forceful, and shrewder
Ulbricht follower than previously.

Peter Florin was born in 1921, the son of a communist
functionary and Reichstag representative who died in the Soviet
Union during the war. On Hitler's advent in 1933, he was taken by
his parents first to France and then to the Soviet Union. He
attended the Karl Liebknecht School in Moscow, and eventually

[page 2]

specialized in chemistry.[1] He was deprived of his German
citizenship by decree in 1937 and in 1943 became editor of the Moscow
National Committee for a Free Germany. After the war he returned
to Germany. From 1946 to 1948 he was editor-in-chief of the Halle
District SED paper Freiheit. He subsequently continued his studies
in Leipzig. From 1949 to 1952 he was a section chief in the Ministry
for Foreign Affairs. In 1953 he became a Deputy of the Volkskammer
and head of the foreign affairs department of that body. Between
1954 and 1958, Florin was a candidate member of the Central Committee.
He was raised to full membership in 1958 and advanced to the
leadership of the Central Committee section for foreign affairs. In 1959,
he was a member of the East German government delegation attending
the Geneva Foreign Ministers' Conference. Subsequently he has
participated in most important international meetings. Since July
1960 he has been a member of the Committee for Solidarity with
African States.

There are the highlights of Florin's career. Regarding his
character it can be maintained that his Stalinist training in Moscow
left an imprint. When the former Foreign Minister Georg Dertinger
was arrested by the East German security service in 1953 as a "traito
and a spy", it was Florin who provided the evidence against him.
When SED State Secretary Anton Ackermann was indicted for "anti-state
activities and sympathies for the Zaisser-Herrnstadt group" on July
of 1953, Florin played a role in the indictment. Later he was active
in purging the Foreign Office of Ackermann followers. There were
undignified scenes in the Party group of the Foreign Office when
young Florin demanded that old communists and Social Democrats repent
publicly in the best style of Bolshevik self-criticism.

Florin has never been one given to political initiatives or
ideas; he is, rather, a faithful executor of Ulbricht's line. He
was the author of the last violent diatribe in Neues Deutschland
against the "Yugoslav traitors" before Khrushchev changed the
anti-Yugoslav policy of the rest of East Europe. He was the author, too,
of the first vitriolic attack against Albania which was published
in the SED's theoretical monthly Einheit. Certainly, the GDR will
have a strong Ulbricht man in Prague. The Ulbricht regime might
well feel that this is particularly needed now that the first step
has been taken to ameliorate West German-Czechoslovak relations with
the recent establishment of the FRG's trade mission in Prague.

Dorothy Miller

--------------

1) The Karl Liebknecht School was attended by the children of many
prominent German communists in Stalin's time. At the outbreak
of the war, among others, there were Wolfgang Leonhard, whose
mother Stalin sent to a Siberian concentration camp, and Robert
Dahlem, whose father had ignored Ulbricht's order to go to Moscow
from France and who preferred Hitler's to Stalin's concentration
camps. These three individuals, all of whom later became
prominent, formed a trio at the time. Of them only Florin is
still a communist.

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