Peter Florin
| Peter Florin | |
|---|---|
Peter Florin and Kurt Waldheim
|
|
| President of the United Nations General Assembly | |
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In office 1987–1988 |
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| Preceded by | Humayun Rashid Choudhury |
| Succeeded by | Dante Caputo |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
2 October 1921 Cologne, Germany |
| Died | 17 February 2014 (aged 92) Berlin, Germany |
| Parents |
Wilhelm Florin (1894-1944) Therese Althammer/Florin (1902-1990) |
Peter Florin (2 October 1921 – 17 February 2014) was an East German politician and diplomat.
Florin was born in Cologne on 2 October 1921.
His father, Wilhelm Florin (1894 - 1944), was a leading figure in the pre-war Communist Party of Germany. and, between 1924 and 1933, a member of the Reichstag (national parliament).
Florin left Germany with his parents in 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power and began persecuting Communists, moving first to France and then to the Soviet Union, where he attended the Karl Liebknecht School. There, he studied chemistry at the University of Mendeleyev.
During the Second World War, he fought with the Soviet partisans in Belarus. In 1944, Florin became editor of Freies Deutschland, a weekly anti-Nazi newspaper. At the end of the war, he returned to Germany as a member of the Ackermann Group, one of the regional groups sent to lay the groundwork for the Soviet Military Administration in Germany.
Following the war, Florin entered politics in the German Democratic Republic and served as vice-president of the regional parliament of Wittenberg, while working as chief editor of the daily newspaper Freiheit. Then, from 1949 to 1952, he was an advisor for the East German ministry of foreign affairs. In 1953, he was promoted to the head of the department of foreign affairs of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany's central committee. From 1954 to 1971, he was a member of the country's parliamentary committee on foreign affairs, which he presided over for a time.
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