Peter Florin

Peter Florin
Florin (left) and Kurt Waldheim, 1973
President of the United Nations General Assembly
In office Template:En dash range
Preceded by	Humayun Rashid Choudhury
Succeeded by	Dante Caputo
East German Ambassador to the United Nations
In office Template:En dash range
Preceded by	Horst Grunert
Succeeded by	Harry Ott
East German Ambassador to Czechoslovakia
In office Template:En dash range
Preceded by	Heinz Willmann
Succeeded by	Herbert Krolikowski
Head of the International Relations Department of the Central Committee
In office Template:En dash range
Secretary	Walter Ulbricht Hermann Axen
Preceded by	Grete Keilson
Succeeded by	Paul Markowski
Volkskammer Member of the Volkskammer for Dresden-Süd, Dresden-West, Dresden-Mitte In office Template:En dash range Preceded by Multi-member district Succeeded by Constituency abolished
Born
Died
Personal details
Born	Cologne, Rhine Province, Free State of Prussia, Weimar Republic (now North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany)
Died	Berlin, Germany
Party	Socialist Unity Party (1946–1989)
Other political affiliations	Communist Party of Germany (1945–1946)
Parent	Wilhelm Florin (father)
Alma mater	D. Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology (Dipl.-Ing.)
Occupation	Diplomat Party Functionary
Awards	Order of the Red Star Patriotic Order of Merit, 1st class Medal for Fighters Against Fascism Banner of Labor Order of the Patriotic War Order of Karl Marx Star of People's Friendship Hero of Labour Order of Karl Marx
Military Service
Born
Died
Allegiance	Soviet Union
Branch	Red Army
Service years	1941–1944
Conflicts	Second World War
Central institution membership 1958–1989: Full member, Central Committee 1954–1958: Candidate member, Central Committee Other offices held 1973–1989: Deputy Minister, Ministry for Foreign Affairs 1969–1973: State Secretary, Ministry for Foreign Affairs 1949–1950: Deputy Head, International Relations Department of the Central Committee

Peter Florin (2 October 1921 – 17 February 2014) was an East German politician and diplomat.

Early life

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 D. Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology.

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.

Career

File:Peter Florin 1954 Edit.jpg

Florin's official Volkskammer portrait, 1954

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 for International Relations 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.

From 1967 to 1969, Florin was East Germany's ambassador to Czechoslovakia. He supported the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring uprising in 1968. In 1969, he was named secretary of state and first deputy foreign minister.

From 1973 to 1982, Florin was the German Democratic Republic's permanent representative to the United Nations. In 1982, he became president of the national commission for UNESCO in East Germany. In 1987 and 1988, he presided over the forty-second session of the United Nations General Assembly.

Personal life

Peter Florin was married, and had three children. His wife Edel was, in the late 1980s, a professor of Russian literature at Humboldt University in East Berlin.

Florin spoke fluent German, Russian and English, and good French. During his presidency of the United Nations General Assembly, he was, according to the New York Times, "nicknamed 'Comrade Glasnost' by delegates, who s[aw] him as him a symbol of the modern Communist of the Gorbachev era."

He died on 17 February 2014, aged 92.

External links

• Media related to at Wikimedia Commons
• "Forty-second General Assembly opens in hopeful atmosphere of increasing multilateral co-operation", UN Chronicle, November 1987