Background
Sindermann was born in Dresden as the son of the Saxon Social Democratic politician Karl Sindermann.
government offical German Democratic Republic
Sindermann was born in Dresden as the son of the Saxon Social Democratic politician Karl Sindermann.
Horst Sindermann joined the Communist Youth Federation (KJVD) in 1929 and in 1932 became a local functionary in Dresden. The group was banned by the Nazi regime and in June 1933, Sindermann was arrested and condemned to eight months of imprisonment for illegal political activities. In September 1934, he became political director of the KJVD"s Dresden branch.
In March 1935, he again was arrested for attempted high treason, tortured and put in solitary confinement for six years at Waldheim jail.
In 1941, he was transferred to "protective custody" to several concentration camps, first at Sachsenhausen, then at Mauthausen in Upper Austria, and finally at Ebensee, until being freed by the arriving United States. army in 1945. After the war, Sindermann returned to Saxony and joined the KPD. Sindermann worked as a newspaper editor of the Sächsische Volkszeitung at Dresden and the Volksstimme at Chemnitz from 1945 to 1947.
He became First party secretary in the Landkreis of Chemnitz and Leipzig. He ran afoul of party chairman Otto Grotewohl, whom he criticised for being married to a former Nazi functionary, and in June 1949 was censured by the party"s controlling commission and was demoted to the Freiheit paper in Halle, where he then became editor-in-chief from 1950 to 1953.
Sindermann was director of agitation and propaganda in the Central Committee from 1954 to 1963.
In the same year, he also was appointed first party secretary in the district of Halle (until 1971) and was first elected into the Volkskammer. In 1967, he was admitted to the politburo. In 1971, he became Deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers—i. est, deputy prime minister of East Germany.
Two years later, he became its chairman, or prime minister when the previous occupant, Willi Stoph, succeeded the deceased Walter Ulbricht as Chairman of the State Council.
His rise was cut short in October 1976, as party leader Erich Honecker deemed him too liberal on economics. Stoph returned to the premiership, while Sindermann was demoted to the posts of President of the Volkskammer and deputy chairman of the State Council.
Although he nominally held the third-highest state office in East Germany, he was left with little political influence. Sindermann remained in these positions until the peaceful revolution, during which he resigned from all offices in November 1989.
In January he was arrested but eventually released on health concerns, without charges being filed.
He died in 1990 in Berlin.
After 1946 he was a member of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), created in April 1946 from the forced merger of Communists and Social Democrats in the Soviet Occupation Zone. In a desperate attempt to change its image, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the renamed SED, expelled him in December.
Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany]
In 1958, he became a candidate and in 1963 a member of the Central Committee. He was the only Communist to hold this post. The SED usually reserved the post of parliament chairman for a top member of a block party to keep up the appearance that East Germany was a democracy.
Married; 2 children.