Margot Honecker (née Feist) was born on April 17, 1927, and died on May 6, 2016.
She was an East German politician.
Honecker was an influential member of the East German communist party and East Germany until 1989.
Margot was “Minister of People’s Education” (Ministering für Volksbildung) of the GDR, between 1963 to 1989.
Erich Honecker was her husband, who was the leader of East Germany from 1971 until 1989.
In 1965, she was responsible for the enactment of the “Uniform Socialist Education System” and mandatory military training in schools.
Honecker was one of the few spouses of ruling Communist leaders who held significant power in her own right, though her prominence in the regime predated her husband’s ascension to the leadership of the SED.
In 1989, after the downfall of the communist regime, Margot fled to the Soviet Union with her husband Erich to avoid criminal charges from the Government of Germany.
She feared extradition to Germany, which led them to take refuge in the Chilean embassy in Moscow in 1991, but in 1992 her husband was extradited to Germany by Yeltsin’s Russian government to face a criminal trial and was detained in the Moabit prison.
Margot Honecker then fled from Moscow to Chile to avoid a similar fate.
At the time of her death, she lived in Chile with her daughter Sonja.
Margot Honecker decided to leave the East German Communist Party in 1990, after her husband’s expulsion from the party, and later became a member of the small fringe party Communist Party of Germany (1990), which is considered extremist by the German authorities: openly Stalinist, it condemns the de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union as “revisionist” and supports the North Korean regime.
Margot Honecker passed away at 89 yrs old.