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Erich Honecker

Erich Ernst Paul Honecker (25 August 1912 – 29 May 1994) was a German communist politician who led the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) from 1971 until shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. He held the posts of General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and Chairman of the National Defence Council; in 1976, he replaced Willi Stoph as Chairman of the State Council, the official head of state. As the leader of East Germany, Honecker was viewed as a dictator. During his leadership, the country had close ties to the Soviet Union, which maintained a large army in the country.

Honecker's political career began in the 1930s when he became an official of the Communist Party of Germany, a position for which he was imprisoned by the Nazis. Following World War II, he was freed by the Soviet army and relaunched his political activities, founding the SED's youth organisation, the Free German Youth, in 1946 and serving as the group's chairman until 1955. As the Security Secretary of the SED Central Committee, he was the prime organiser of the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and, in this function, bore administrative responsibility for the "order to fire" along the Wall and the larger inner German border.

In 1970, Honecker initiated a political power struggle that led, with support of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, to him replacing Walter Ulbricht as General Secretary of the SED and chairman of the National Defence Council. Under his command, the country adopted a programme of "consumer socialism" and moved towards the international community by normalising relations with West Germany and also becoming a full member of the UN, in what is considered one of his greatest political successes. As Cold War tensions eased in the late 1980s with the advent of perestroika and glasnost—the liberal reforms introduced by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—Honecker refused all but cosmetic changes to the East German political system. He cited the continual hardliner attitudes of Kim Il Sung, Fidel Castro and Nicolae Ceaușescu whose respective governments of North Korea, Cuba and Romania had been critical of reforms. Honecker was forced to resign by the SED Politburo in October 1989 in a bid to improve the government's image in the eyes of the public; the effort was unsuccessful, and the regime would collapse entirely the following month.

Following German reunification in 1990, Honecker sought asylum in the Chilean embassy in Moscow, but was extradited back to Germany in 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union, to stand trial for his role in the human rights abuses committed by the East German government. However, the proceedings were abandoned, as Honecker was suffering from terminal liver cancer. He was freed from custody to join his family in exile in Chile, where he died in May 1994.

Childhood and youth
Honecker was born into a deeply Protestant family in Neunkirchen, in what is now Saarland, to Wilhelm Honecker (1881–1969), a coal miner and political activist, and his wife Caroline Catharine Weidenhof (1883–1963). The couple, married in 1905, had six children: Katharina (Käthe, 1906–1925), Wilhelm (Willi, 1907–1944), Frieda (1909–1974), Erich, Gertrud (1917–2010) and Karl-Robert (1923–1947). Erich, their fourth child, was born on 25 August 1912 during the period in which the family resided on Max-Braun-Straße, before later moving to Kuchenbergstraße 88 in the present-day Neunkirchen city district of Wiebelskirchen. After World War I, the Territory of the Saar Basin was occupied by France. This change from the strict rule of Ferdinand Eduard von Stumm to French military occupation provided the backdrop for what Wilhelm Honecker understood as proletarian exploitation, and introduced young Erich to communism. After his tenth birthday in 1922, Erich Honecker became a member of the Spartacus League's children's group in Wiebelskirchen. Aged 14 he entered the KJVD, the Young Communist League of Germany, for whom he later served the organisation's leader of Saarland from 1931.

Honecker did not find an apprenticeship immediately after leaving school, but instead worked for a farmer in Pomerania for almost two years. In 1928 he returned to Wiebelskirchen and began a traineeship as a roofer with his uncle, but quit to attend the International Lenin School in Moscow and Magnitogorsk after the KJVD handpicked him for a course of study there. There, sharing a room with Anton Ackermann, he studied under the cover name "Fritz Malter".

Opposition to the Nazis and imprisonment
In 1930, aged 18, Honecker entered the KPD, the Communist Party of Germany. His political mentor was Otto Niebergall, who later represented the KPD in the Reichstag. After returning from Moscow in 1931 following his studies at the International Lenin School, he became the leader of the KJVD in the Saar region. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Communist activities within Germany were only possible undercover; the Saar region however still remained outside the German Reich under a League of Nations mandate. Honecker was arrested in Essen, Germany but soon released. Following this he fled to the Netherlands and from there oversaw KJVD's activities in Pfalz, Hesse and Baden-Württemberg.

Honecker returned to the Saar in 1934 and worked alongside Johannes Hoffmann on the campaign against the region's re-incorporation into Germany. A referendum on the area's future in January 1935 however saw 90.73% vote in favour of reunifying with Germany. Like 4,000 to 8,000 others, Honecker then fled the region, initially relocating to Paris.

On 28 August 1935 he illegally travelled to Berlin under the alias "Marten Tjaden", with a printing press in his luggage. From there he worked closely together with KPD official Herbert Wehner in opposition/resistance to the Nazi state. On 4 December 1935 Honecker was detained by the Gestapo and until 1937 remanded in Berlin's Moabit detention centre. On 3 July 1937 he was sentenced to ten years imprisonment for the "preparation of high treason alongside the severe falsification of documents".

Honecker spent the majority of his incarceration in the Brandenburg-Görden Prison, where he also carried out tasks as a handyman. In early 1945 he was moved to the Barnimstrasse women's prison in Berlin due to good behaviour and to be put to work repairing the bomb-damaged building, as he was a skilled roofer. During an Allied bombing raid on 6 March 1945 he managed to escape and hid himself at the apartment of Lotte Grund, a female prison guard. After several days she persuaded him to turn himself in and his escape was then covered up by the guard. Honecker spent most of his time in prison under solitary confinement.

After the liberation of the prisons by advancing Soviet troops on 27 April 1945, Honecker remained in Berlin. His "escape" from prison and his relationships during his captivity later led to him experiencing difficulties within the Socialist Unity Party, as well as straining his relations with his former inmates. In later interviews and in his personal memoirs, Honecker falsified many of the details of his life during this period. Material from the East German State Security Service has been used to allege that, to be released from prison, Honecker offered the Gestapo evidence incriminating fellow imprisoned Communists, claimed he had renounced Communism "for good", and was willing to serve in the German army.

Post-war return to politics
In May 1945 Honecker was "picked up" by chance in Berlin by Hans Mahle and taken to the Ulbricht Group, a collective of exiled German communists that had returned from the Soviet Union to Germany after the end of the Nazi regime. Through Waldemar Schmidt, Honecker befriended Walter Ulbricht, who had not been aware of him at that point. Honecker's future role in the group was still undecided until well into the summer months, as he had yet to face a party process. This ended in a reprimand due to his "undisciplined conduct" in fleeing from prison at the start of the year, an action which was debated upon, potentially jeopardising the other (communist) inmates.

In 1946, Honecker became the co-founder of the Free German Youth (FDJ), whose chairmanship he also undertook. After the formation of the SED, the Socialist Unity Party, in April 1946 through a merger of the KPD and SPD, Honecker swiftly became a leading party member and took his place in the party's Central Committee.

On 7 October 1949, the German Democratic Republic was formed with the adoption of a new constitution, establishing a political system similar to that of the Soviet Union. Within the state's socialist single party government, Honecker determinedly resumed his political career and the following year was named as a candidate member of the Politbüro of the SED's Central Committee. As President of the Free German Youth movement, he organised the inaugural "Deutschlandtreffen der Jugend" in East Berlin in May 1950 and the 3rd World Festival of Youth and Students in 1951, although the latter was beset with organisational problems.

During the internal party unrest following the suppressed uprising of June 1953, Honecker sided with First Secretary Walter Ulbricht, despite the majority of the Politburo attempting to depose Ulbricht in favour of Rudolf Herrnstadt. Honecker himself though faced questioning from party members about his inadequate qualifications for his position. On 27 May 1955 he handed the Presidency of the FDJ over to Karl Namokel, and departed for Moscow to study for two years at the School of the Soviet Communist Party at Ulbricht's request. During this period he witnessed the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in person, where its First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin.

After returning to East Germany in 1958, Honecker became a fully-fledged member of the Politburo, taking over responsibility for military and security issues. As the Party Security Secretary he was the prime organiser of the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 and also a proponent of the "order to fire" along the Inner German border.

Leadership of East Germany
While Ulbricht had replaced the state's command economy with, firstly the "New Economic System", then the Economic System of Socialism, as he sought to improve the country's failing economy, Honecker declared the main task under his New System of Economic Socialism to in fact be the "unity of economic and social politics", essentially through which living standards (with increased consumer goods) would be raised in exchange for political loyalty. Tensions had already led to his once-mentor Ulbricht removing Honecker from the position of Second Secretary in July 1970, only for the Soviet leadership to swiftly reinstate him. Honecker played up the thawing East-West German relationship as Ulbricht's strategy, to win the support of the Soviet leadership under Leonid Brezhnev. With this secured, Honecker was appointed First Secretary (from 1976 titled general secretary) of the Central Committee on 3 May 1971 after the Soviet leadership forced Ulbricht to step aside "for health reasons".

After also succeeding Ulbricht as Chairman of the National Defence Council in 1971, Honecker was eventually also elected Chairman of the State Council (a post equivalent to that of president) on 29 October 1976. With this, Honecker reached the height of power within East Germany. From there on, he, along with Economic Secretary Günter Mittag and Minister of State Security Erich Mielke, made all key government decisions. Until 1989 the "little strategic clique" composed of these three men was unchallenged as the top level of East Germany's ruling class. Honecker's closest colleague was Joachim Herrmann, the SED's Agitation and Propaganda Secretary. Alongside him, Honecker held daily meetings concerning the party's media representation in which the layout of the party's own newspaper Neues Deutschland, as well as the sequencing of news items in the national news bulletin Aktuelle Kamera, were determined.

Under Honecker's leadership, East Germany adopted a program of "consumer socialism", which resulted in a marked improvement in living standards already the highest among the Eastern bloc countries – though still far behind West Germany. More attention was placed on the availability of consumer goods, and the construction of new housing was accelerated, with Honecker promising to "settle the housing problem as an issue of social relevance". His policies were initially marked by a liberalisation toward culture and art. While 1973 brought the World Festival of Youth and Students to East Berlin, soon dissident artists such as Wolf Biermann were expelled and the Ministry for State Security raised its efforts to suppress political resistance. Honecker remained committed to the expansion of the Inner German border and the "order to fire" policy along it. During his time in the office around 125 East German citizens were killed while trying to reach the West. After the Federal Republic had secured an agreement with the Soviet Union on cooperation and a policy of non-violence, it became possible to reach a similar agreement with the GDR. The Basic Treaty between East and West Germany in 1972 sought to normalise contacts between the two governments.

East Germany also participated in the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe held in Helsinki in 1975, which attempted to improve relations between the West and the Eastern Bloc, and became a full member of the United Nations. These acts of diplomacy were considered Honecker's greatest successes in foreign politics.

Honecker received additional high-profile personal recognitions including honorary doctorates of business administration from East Berlin's Humboldt University in 1976, Tokyo's Nihon University in 1981 and the London School of Economics in 1984 and the Olympic Order from the IOC in 1985. In September 1987, he became the first East German head of state to visit West Germany, where he was received with full state honours by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in an act that seemed to confirm West Germany's acceptance of East Germany's existence. During this trip he also journeyed to his birthplace in Saarland, where he held an emotional speech in which he spoke of a day when Germans would no longer be separated by borders. This trip had been planned twice before, including September 1984, but was initially blocked by the Soviet leadership which mistrusted the special East-West German relationship, particularly efforts to expand East Germany's limited independence in the realm of foreign policy.

Illness, downfall and resignation
In the late 1980s, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced glasnost and perestroika, reforms to liberalise the socialist planned economy. Frictions between him and Honecker had grown over these policies and numerous additional issues from 1985 onward. East Germany refused to implement similar reforms, with Honecker reportedly telling Gorbachev: "We have done our perestroika; we have nothing to restructure". Gorbachev grew to dislike Honecker, and by 1988 was lumping him in with Bulgaria's Todor Zhivkov, Czechoslovakia's Gustáv Husák and Romania's Nicolae Ceaușescu as a "Gang of Four": a group of inflexible hardliners unwilling to make reforms.

According to White House experts Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, Gorbachev looked to Communist leaders in Eastern Europe to follow his example of perestroika and glasnost. They argue:
 * Gorbachev himself had no particular sympathy for Erich Honecker, chairman of the East German Communist Party, and his hard-line comrades and the government. As early as 1985... [Gorbachev] had told East German party officials that kindergarten was over; no one would lead them by the hand. They were responsible for their own people. The relations between Gorbachev and Honecker went downhill from there.

Western analysts, according to Zelikow and Rice, believed in 1989 that Communism was still secure in East Germany:
 * Bolstered by relatively greater affluence than his country's Eastern European neighbours enjoyed in a fantastically elaborate system of internal controls, East Germany's longtime leader Eric Honecker seemed secure in his position. His government had long dealt with dissent through a mixture of brutal repression, forced emigration, and the vent of allowing occasional, limited travel to the West for a substantial part of the population.

Honecker felt betrayed by Gorbachev in his German policy and ensured that official texts of the Soviet Union, especially those concerning perestroika, could no longer be published or sold in East Germany. One month after the 1989 Polish legislative election in which Lech Wałęsa and the Solidarity Citizens' Committee unexpectedly won 99 out of 100 votes, at the Warsaw Pact summit on 7–8 July 1989 in Bucharest, the Soviet Union reaffirmed its shift from the Brezhnev Doctrine of the limited sovereignty of its member states, and announced "freedom of choice". The Bucharest statement prescribed that its nations henceforth developed their "own political line, strategy and tactics without external intervention". This called into question the Soviet guarantee of existence for the Communist states in Europe. Already in May 1989 Hungary had begun dismantling its border with Austria, creating the first gap in the so-called Iron Curtain, through which later several thousand East Germans quickly fled in hopes of reaching West Germany by way of Austria. But with the mass exodus at the Pan-European Picnic in August 1989 (which was based on an idea by Otto von Habsburg to test Gorbachev's reaction to the opening of the border), the subsequent hesitant behaviour of the Socialist Unity Party of East Germany and the non-intervention of the Soviet Union opened the floodgates. Thus the united front of the Eastern Bloc was broken. The reaction to this from Erich Honecker in the Daily Mirror of August 19, 1989 was too late and showed the current loss of power: "Habsburg distributed leaflets far into Poland, on which the East German holidaymakers were invited to a picnic. When they came to the picnic, they were given gifts, food and Deutsche Mark, and then they were persuaded to come to the West." Later, after his fall, Honecker said of Otto von Habsburg in connection with the summer of 1989: "That this Habsburg drove the nail into my coffin." Now tens of thousands of media-informed East Germans made their way to Hungary, which was no longer ready to keep its borders completely closed or to oblige its border troops to use force of arms. A 1969 treaty required the Hungarian government to send the East Germans back home; however, starting on 11 September 1989, the Hungarians let them pass into Austria, telling their outraged East German counterparts that they were refugees and that international treaties on refugees took precedence.

At the time, Honecker was sidelined through illness, leaving his colleagues unable to act decisively. He had been taken ill with biliary colic during the Warsaw Pact summit. He was shortly afterwards flown home to East Berlin. After an initial stabilisation in his health, he underwent surgery on 18 August 1989 to remove his inflamed gallbladder and, due to a perforation, part of his colon. According to the urologist Peter Althaus, the surgeons left a suspected carcinogenic nodule in Honecker's right kidney due to his weak condition, and also failed to inform the patient of the suspected cancer; other sources say the tumour was simply undetected. As a result of this operation, Honecker was away from his office until late September 1989.

Back in office, Honecker had to contend with the rising number and strength of demonstrations across East Germany that had first been sparked by reports in the West German media of fraudulent results in local elections on 7 May 1989, the same results he had labelled a "convincing reflection" of the populace's faith in his leadership. He also had to deal with a new refugee problem. Several thousand East Germans tried to go to West Germany by way of Czechoslovakia, only to have that government bar them from passing. Several thousands of them headed straight for the West German embassy in Prague and demanded safe passage to West Germany. With some reluctance, Honecker allowed them to go – but forced them to go back through East Germany on sealed trains and stripped them of their East German citizenship. Several members of the SED Politbüro realised this was a serious blunder and made plans to get rid of him. As unrest visibly grew, large numbers began fleeing the country through the West German embassies in Prague and Budapest, as well as over the borders of the "socialist brother" states. Each month saw tens of thousands more exit. On 3 October 1989 East Germany closed its borders to its eastern neighbours and prevented visa-free travel to Czechoslovakia; a day later these measures were also extended to travel to Bulgaria and Romania. East Germany was now not only behind the Iron Curtain to the West, but also cordoned off from most other Eastern bloc states.

On 6–7 October 1989 the national celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the East German state took place with Gorbachev in attendance. To the surprise of Honecker and the other SED leaders in attendance, several hundred members of the Free German Youth — reckoned as the future vanguard of the party and nation — began chanting, "Gorby, help us! Gorby, save us!". In a private conversation between the two leaders Honecker praised the success of the nation, but Gorbachev knew that, in reality, it faced bankruptcy; East Germany had already accepted billions of dollars in loans from West Germany during the decade as it sought to stabilise its economy. Attempting to make Honecker accept a need for reforms, Gorbachev warned Honecker that "He who is too late is punished by life", yet Honecker maintained that "we will solve our problems ourselves with socialist means". Protests outside the reception at the Palace of the Republic led to hundreds of arrests in which many were brutally beaten by soldiers and police.

As the reform movement spread throughout Central and Eastern Europe, mass demonstrations against the East German government erupted, most prominently in Leipzig—the first of several demonstrations which took place on Monday nights across the country. In response, an elite paratroop unit was dispatched to Leipzig—almost certainly on Honecker's orders, since he was commander-in-chief of the Army. A bloodbath was averted only when local party officials themselves ordered the troops to pull back. In the following week, Honecker faced a torrent of criticism. This gave his Politburo comrades the impetus they needed to replace him.

After a crisis meeting of the Politburo on 10–11 October 1989, Honecker's planned state visit to Denmark was cancelled and, despite his resistance, at the insistence of the regime's number-two-man, Egon Krenz, a public statement was issued that called for "suggestions for attractive socialism". Over the following days Krenz worked to secure himself the support of the military and the Stasi and arranged a meeting between Gorbachev and Politburo member Harry Tisch, who was in Moscow, to inform the Kremlin about the now-planned removal of Honecker; Gorbachev reportedly wished them good luck.

The sitting of the SED Central Committee planned for the end of November 1989 was pulled forward a week, with the most urgent item on the agenda now being the composition of the Politburo. Krenz and Mielke attempted by telephone on the night of 16 October to win other Politburo members over to remove Honecker. At the beginning of the session on 17 October, Honecker asked his routine question of "Are there any suggestions for the agenda?" Stoph replied, "Please, general secretary, Erich, I propose that a new item be placed on the agenda. It is the release of Comrade Erich Honecker as general secretary and the election of Comrade Egon Krenz in his place." Honecker reportedly calmly responded: "Well, then I open the debate".

All those present then spoke, in turn, but none in favour of Honecker. Günter Schabowski even extended the dismissal of Honecker to also include his posts in the State Council and as Chairman of the National Defence Council while childhood friend Günter Mittag moved away from Honecker. Mielke, hollering and pounding the conference room table with his fist pointed at Honecker and blamed him for almost all the country's current ills and threatened to publish compromising information that he possessed, if Honecker refused to resign. A ZDF documentary on the matter claims this information was contained in a large red briefcase found in Mielke's possession in 1990. After three hours the Politburo voted to remove Honecker. In accordance with longstanding practice, Honecker voted for his own removal. When the public announcement was made, it was branded as a voluntary decision on Honecker's part, ostensibly "due to health reasons". Krenz was unanimously elected as his successor as General Secretary.

Start of prosecution and asylum attempts
Three weeks after Honecker's ousting the Berlin Wall fell, and the SED swiftly lost control of the country. On 1 December, the Volkskammer deleted the provisions in the East German constitution giving the SED a monopoly of power, thus formally ending Communist rule in East Germany two months after Honecker's removal. In an effort to rehabilitate itself, the SED expelled Honecker and several other former officials two days later. He went on to join the newly founded Communist Party of Germany in 1990, remaining a member until his death.

During November the People's Chamber had already set up a committee to investigate corruption and abuses of office, with Honecker being alleged to have received annual donations from the National Academy of Architecture of around 20,000 marks as an "honorary member". On 5 December 1989 the chief public prosecutor in East Germany formally launched a judicial inquiry against him on charges of high treason, abuses of confidence and embezzlement to the serious disadvantage of socialist property (the charge of high treason was dropped in March 1990). As a result, Honecker was placed under house arrest for a month.

Following the lifting of his house arrest, Honecker and his wife Margot were forced to vacate their apartment in the Waldsiedlung housing area in Wandlitz, exclusively used by senior SED party members, after the People's Chamber decided to put it to use as a sanatorium for the disabled. In any case, Honecker spent the majority of January 1990 in hospital after having the error of the tumour missed in 1989 corrected after the suspicion of cancer was confirmed. Upon leaving the hospital on 29 January he was re-arrested and held at the Berlin-Rummelsburg remand centre. However, on the evening of the following day, 30 January, Honecker was again released from custody: The district court had annulled the arrest warrant and, due to medical reports, certified him unfit for detention and interrogation. Lacking a home, Honecker instructed his lawyer Wolfgang Vogel to ask the Evangelical Church in Berlin-Brandenburg for help. Pastor Uwe Holmer, leader of the Hoffnungstal Institute in Lobetal, Bernau bei Berlin, offered the couple a home in his vicarage. This drew immediate condemnation and later demonstrations against the church for assisting the Honeckers, given they had both discriminated against Christians who did not conform with the SED leadership's ideology. Aside from a stay at a holiday home in Lindow in March 1990 that lasted only one day before protests swiftly brought it to an end, the couple resided at the Holmer residence until 3 April 1990.

The couple then moved into a three-room living quarters within the Soviet military hospital in Beelitz. Here, doctors diagnosed a malignant liver tumour following another re-examination. Following German reunification, prosecutors in Berlin issued a further arrest warrant for Honecker in November 1990 on charges that he gave the order to fire on escapees at the Inner German border in 1961 and had repeatedly reiterated that command (most specifically in 1974). However, this warrant was not enforceable because Honecker lay under the protection of Soviet authorities in Beelitz. On 13 March 1991 the Honeckers fled Germany from the Soviet-controlled Sperenberg Airfield to Moscow on a military jet with the aid of Soviet hardliners.

The German Chancellery had only been informed by Soviet diplomats about the Honeckers’ flight to Moscow one hour in advance. It limited its response to a public protest, claiming the existence of an arrest warrant meant the Soviet Union was breaching international law by admitting Honecker. The initial Soviet reaction was that Honecker was now too ill to travel and was receiving medical treatment after a deterioration of his health. He underwent further surgery the following month.

On 11 December 1991 the Honeckers sought refuge in the Chilean Embassy in Moscow, while also applying for political asylum in the Soviet Union. Despite an offer of help from North Korea, Honecker instead reached out to the Chilean government under Christian Democrat Patricio Aylwin. Under Honecker's rule, East Germany had granted many Chileans exile following the military coup of 1973 by Augusto Pinochet. In addition his daughter Sonja was married to a Chilean. Chilean authorities, however, stated he could not enter their country without a valid German passport.

Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union on 25 December 1991 and gave all his powers to Russian president Boris Yeltsin. Russian authorities had long been keen on expelling Honecker, against the wishes of Gorbachev, and the new government now demanded that he leave the country or else face deportation.

In June 1992, Chilean President Patricio Aylwin, leader of a center-left coalition, finally assured German Chancellor Helmut Kohl that Honecker would be leaving the embassy in Moscow. Reportedly against his will, Honecker was ejected from the embassy on 29 July 1992 and flown to Berlin's Tegel Airport, where he was arrested and detained in Moabit Prison. By contrast, his wife Margot travelled on a direct flight from Moscow to Santiago, Chile, where she initially stayed with her daughter Sonja. Honecker's lawyers unsuccessfully appealed for him to be released from detention in the period leading up to his trial.

Criminal trial
On 12 May 1992, while under protection in the Chilean embassy in Moscow, Honecker, along with several co-defendants, including Erich Mielke, Willi Stoph, Heinz Kessler, Fritz Streletz and Hans Albrecht, were accused in a 783-page indictment of taking part in the "collective manslaughter" of 68 people as they attempted to flee East Germany. It was alleged that Honecker, in his role as Chairman of the National Defence Council, had both given the decisive order in 1961 for the construction of the Berlin Wall and also, at subsequent meetings, ordered the extensive expansion of the border fortifications around West Berlin and the barriers to the West so as to make any passing impossible. In addition, specifically at a May 1974 sitting of the National Defence Council, he had stated that the development of the border must continue, that lines of fire were warranted along the whole border and, as prior, the use of firearms was essential: "Comrades who have successfully used their firearms [are] to be praised". Honecker, in his role of chairman of the party, was responsible for the deaths of many more than the 68 mentioned above. As of 22 April 2015, well over 1,000 deaths have been discovered mainly through secret East German documentation: "It is still not known for sure how many people died on the inner German border or who they were, as the East German state treated such information as a closely guarded secret. But numbers have risen steadily since unification, as evidence has been gathered from East German records. Current unofficial estimates put the figure at up to 1,100 people."

The charges were approved by the Berlin District Court on 19 October 1992 at the opening of the trial. On the same day, it was decided that the hearing of 56 charges would be postponed and the remaining twelve cases would be the subject of the trial to begin on 12 November 1992. The question of under which laws the former East German leader could be tried was highly controversial and, in the view of many jurists, the process had an uncertain outcome.

During his 70-minute-long statement to the court on 3 December 1992, Honecker said that he had political responsibility for the building of the Berlin Wall and subsequent deaths at the borders, but claimed he was "without juridical, legal or moral guilt". He blamed the escalation of the Cold War for the building of the Berlin Wall, saying the decision had not been taken solely by the East German leadership but all the Warsaw Pact nations that had collectively concluded in 1961 that a "Third World War with millions dead" would be unavoidable without this action. He quoted several West German politicians who had opined that the wall had indeed reduced and stabilised the two factions. He stated that he had always regretted every death, both from a human point of view and due to the political damage they caused.

Making reference to past trials in Germany against communists and socialists such as Karl Marx and August Bebel, he claimed that the legal process against him was politically motivated and a "show trial" against communism. He stated that no court lying in the territory of West Germany had the legal right to place him, his co-defendants or any East German citizen on trial, and that the portrayal of East Germany as an "Unrechtsstaat" was contradictory to its recognition by over one hundred other nations and the UN Security Council. Furthermore, he questioned how a German court could now legally judge his political decisions in the light of the lack of legal action taken over various military operations that had been carried out by Western nations with either overt support or absence of condemnation from (West) Germany. He dismissed public criticism of the Stasi, arguing that journalists in Western countries were praised for denouncing others. While accepting political responsibility for the deaths at the Wall, he believed he was free of any "legal or moral guilt", and thought that East Germany would go down in history as "a sign that socialism is possible and is better than capitalism".

By the time of the proceedings Honecker was already seriously ill. A new CT scan in August 1992 had confirmed an ultrasound examination made in Moscow and the existence of a malignant tumour in the right lobe of his liver. Based on these findings and additional medical testimonies, Honecker's lawyers requested that the legal proceedings, as far as they were aimed against their client, be abandoned and the arrest warrant against him withdrawn; the cases against both Mielke and Stoph had already been postponed due to their ill health. Arguing that his life expectancy was estimated to be three to six months, while the legal process was forecast to take at least two years, his lawyers questioned whether it was humane to try a dying man. Their application was rejected on 21 December 1992 when the court concluded that, given the seriousness of the charges, no obstacle to the proceedings existed.

Honecker lodged a constitutional complaint to the recently created Constitutional Court of the State of Berlin, stating that the decision to proceed violated his fundamental right to human dignity, which was an overriding principle in the Constitution of Berlin, above even the state penal system and criminal justice. On 12 January 1993, Honecker's complaint was upheld and the Berlin District Court therefore abandoned the case and withdrew their arrest warrant. An application for a new arrest warrant was rejected on 13 January. The court also refused to commence with the trial related to the indictment of 12 November 1992, and withdrew the second arrest warrant related to these charges. After a total of 169 days Honecker was released from custody, drawing protests both from victims of the East German regime as well as German political figures.

Honecker flew via Brazil to Santiago, Chile, to reunite with his wife and his daughter Sonja, who lived there with her son Roberto. Upon his arrival he was greeted by the leaders of the Chilean Communist and Socialist parties. In contrast, his co-defendants Heinz Kessler, Fritz Streletz and Hans Albrecht were sentenced on 16 September 1993 to imprisonment of between four and seven-and-a-half years. On 13 April 1993 a final attempt to separate and continue the trial against Honecker in his absence was discontinued. Four days later, on the 66th birthday of his wife Margot, he gave a final public speech, ending with the words: "Socialism is the opposite of what we have now in Germany. For that I would like to say that our beautiful memories of the German Democratic Republic are testimony of a new and just society. And we want to always remain loyal to these things".

Death
Honecker died on 29 May 1994 of liver cancer at the age of 81 in a terraced house in the La Reina district of Santiago. His funeral, arranged by the Communist Party of Chile, was conducted the following day at central cemetery in Santiago.

Family
Honecker was married three times. After being liberated from prison in 1945, he married the prison warden Charlotte Schanuel (née Drost), nine years his senior, on 23 December 1946. She died suddenly from a brain tumour in June 1947. Details of this marriage were not revealed until 2003, well after his death.

By the time of her death, Honecker was already romantically involved with the Free German Youth official Edith Baumann, whom he met on a trip to Moscow. With her, he had a daughter, Erika (b. 1950), who later gave him his granddaughter Anke. Sources differ on whether Honecker and Baumann married in 1947 or 1949, but in 1952 he fathered an illegitimate daughter, Sonja (b. December 1952-2022), with Margot Feist, a People's Chamber member and chairperson of the Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation.

In September 1950, Baumann wrote directly to Walter Ulbricht to inform him of her husband's extramarital activity in the hope of him pressuring Honecker to end his relationship with Feist. Following his divorce and reportedly under pressure from the Politburo, he married Feist. However, sources again differ on both the year of his divorce from Baumann and of his marriage to Feist; depending on the source, the events took place either in 1953 or 1955. For more than twenty years, Margot Honecker served as Minister of National Education. In 2012 intelligence reports collated by West German spies alleged that both Honecker and his wife had secret affairs but did not divorce for political reasons; however, his bodyguard Bernd Brückner, in a book about his time spent in Honecker's service, denied the claims.

Honecker had three grandchildren from his daughter Sonja, who had married the Chilean-born exile Leonardo Yáñez Betancourt: Roberto (b. 1974), Mariana (b. 1985), who died in 1988 at the age of two leaving Honecker himself heartbroken, and Vivian (b. 1988). Roberto's origins are debated; he is claimed to be the illegally adopted son of Heidi Stein, Dirk Schiller, born on 13 June 1975 in Görlitz, who disappeared in March 1979, due to alleged physical similarities between Dirk and Yáñez, Stein suspecting that her son might have been kidnapped at three years old by Stasi agents for Honecker's younger daughter.

Honecker's daughter divorced Yáñez in 1993. She resided in Santiago with her two surviving children and died in 2022.

National honours

 * East Germany:
 * Held der DDR.png Hero of the German Democratic Republic, twice (1982, 1987)
 * Held der Arbeit.png Hero of Labour (1962)
 * Ehrenspange.png Honor clasp in Gold of the Patriotic Order of Merit (1955)
 * Order of Karl Marx, five times (1969, 1972, 1977, 1982, 1985)
 * GDR Order of Banner of Labor (1954-1974) BAR.png Order of the Banner of Labor

Foreign honours

 * 🇦🇹 Austria:
 * AUT Honour for Services to the Republic of Austria - 1st Class BAR.svg Grand Star of the Order of Honour for Services to the Republic of Austria
 * People's Republic of Bulgaria:
 * Пластина на орден „Георги Димитров“.gif Order of Georgi Dimitrov
 * 🇨🇺 Cuba:
 * Ribbon jose marti.png Order of José Martí
 * Order of Playa Girón (ribbon bar).png Order of Playa Girón (1986)
 * Czechoslovakia:
 * CZE_Rad_Bileho_Lva_3_tridy_BAR.svg First Class of the Order of the White Lion (1987)
 * Cs2okg.png Order of Klement Gottwald (1982)
 * 🇫🇮 Finland:
 * FIN Order of the White Rose Grand Cross BAR.png Commander of the Grand Cross of the White Rose of Finland (1977)
 * Polish People's Republic:
 * POL_Order_Zaslugi_PRL_kl1_BAR.png Grand Cordon of the Order of Merit of the People's Republic of Poland
 * 🇳🇮 Nicaragua:
 * Orden Sandino 1.svg First Class of the Order of Augusto Cesar Sandino
 * 🇰🇵 North Korea:
 * DPRK_ribbon_bar_-_Order_of_National_Flag_1st_Class.svg First Class of the Order of the National Flag (1988)
 * Socialist Republic of Romania:
 * Order Victoria Socialismului rib.png Order of Victory of Socialism (1987)
 * Soviet Union:
 * Hero of the USSR Gold Star.png Hero of the Soviet Union (1982)
 * Order of Lenin ribbon bar.png Order of Lenin, thrice (1972, 1982, 1987)
 * Order october revolution rib.png Order of the October Revolution (1977)
 * CombatCooperationRibbon.png Medal "For Strengthening of Brotherhood in Arms" (1980)
 * 100 lenin rib.png Jubilee Medal "In Commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin" (1969)
 * Honorary citizen of the city of Magnitogorsk, Chelyabinsk Oblast (1989)
 * Vietnam
 * Vietnam Hochiminh Order ribbon.png Order of Ho Chi Minh

 * undefined:
 * Order of the Yugoslavian Great Star Rib.png Order of the Yugoslav Great Star (1974)

 * International Olympic Committee:
 * Olympic Order gold ribbon.svg Olympic Order (1985)

In popular culture

Dmitri Vrubel's 1990 mural on the Berlin Wall My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love, depicting a socialist fraternal kiss between Honecker and Leonid Brezhnev, became known around the world.

A traffic signal inspired by Honecker wearing a jaunty straw hat was used in parts of East Germany (Ost-Ampelmännchen) and has become a symbol of Ostalgie.

British actor Paul Freeman will portray Honecker in upcoming film Whispers of Freedom.

title: Erich Honecker


text:
IBM AS/400

The IBM AS/400 (Application System/400) is a family of midrange computers from IBM announced in June 1988 and released in August 1988. It was the successor to the System/36 and System/38 platforms, and ran the OS/400 operating system. Lower-cost but more powerful than its predecessors, the AS/400 was extremely successful at launch, with an estimated 111,000 installed by the end of 1990 and annual revenue reaching $14 billion that year, increasing to 250,000 systems by 1994, and about 500,000 shipped by 1997.

A key concept in the AS/400 platform is Technology Independent Machine Interface (TIMI), a platform-independent instruction set architecture (ISA) that is translated to native machine language instructions. The platform has used this capability to change the underlying processor architecture without breaking application compatibility. Early systems were based on a 48-bit CISC instruction set architecture known as the Internal Microprogrammed Interface (IMPI), originally developed for the System/38. In 1991, the company introduced a new version of the system running on a series of 64-bit PowerPC-derived CPUs, the IBM RS64 family. Due to the use of TIMI, applications for the original CISC-based programs continued to run on the new systems without modification, as the TIMI code can be re-translated to the new systems' PowerPC Power ISA native machine code. The RS64 was replaced with POWER4 processors in 2001, which was followed by POWER5 and POWER6 in later upgrades.

The AS/400 went through multiple re-branding exercises, finally becoming the System i in 2006. In 2008, IBM consolidated the separate System i and System p product lines (which had mostly identical hardware by that point) into a single product line named IBM Power Systems. The name "AS/400" is sometimes used informally to refer to the IBM i operating system running on modern Power Systems hardware.

Fort Knox
In the early 1980s, IBM management became concerned that IBM's large number of incompatible midrange computer systems was hurting the company's competitiveness, particularly against Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX. In 1982, a project named Fort Knox commenced, which was intended to consolidate the System/36, the System/38, the IBM 8100, the Series/1 and the IBM 4300 series into a single product line based around an IBM 801-based processor codenamed Iliad, while retaining backwards compatibility with all the systems it was intended to replace. A new operating system would be created for Fort Knox, but the operating systems of each platform which Fort Knox was intended to replace would also be ported to the Iliad processor to allow customers to migrate their software to the new platform.

The Fort Knox project proved to be overly ambitious, and ran into multiple delays and changes of scope. As the project advanced, the requirement to support IBM 8100 and Series/1 software was dropped. When IBM's engineers attempted to port the operating systems and software of their existing platforms, they discovered that it would be impossible without making extensive changes to the Iliad processor for each individual operating system – changes which the Iliad's architects were unwilling to make. The proposed solution to this was to augment Iliad with operating system-specific co-processors which provided hardware support for a single operating system. However, the amount of logic needed in each co-processor grew until the co-processors became the main processor, and the Iliad was relegated to the role of a support processor – thus failing the goal of consolidating on a single processor architecture. The Fort Knox project was ultimately cancelled in 1985.

Silverlake
During the Fort Knox project, a skunkworks project was started at IBM Rochester by engineers who believed that Fort Knox's failure was inevitable. These engineers developed code which allowed System/36 applications to run on top of the System/38, and when Fort Knox was cancelled, this skunkworks project evolved into an official project to replace both the System/36 and System/38 with a single new hardware platform. The project became known as Silverlake (named for Silver Lake in Rochester, Minnesota) and officially began in December 1985. The Silverlake hardware was essentially an evolution of the System/38 which reused some of the technology developed for the Fort Knox project.

Silverlake's goal was to deliver a replacement for the System/36 and System/38 in as short of a timeframe as possible, as the Fort Knox project had stalled new product development at Rochester, leaving IBM without a competitive midrange system. On its launch in 1986, the System/370-compatible IBM 9370 was positioned as IBM's preferred midrange platform, but failed to achieve the commercial success IBM hoped it would have. Much like Silverlake, the 9370 also reused the co-processor developed during the Fort Knox project as its main processor, and the same SPD I/O bus which was derived from the Series/1 bus.

AS/400
On June 21, 1988, IBM officially announced the Silverlake system as the Application System/400 (AS/400). The announcement included more than 1,000 software packages written for it by IBM and IBM Business Partners. The AS/400 operating system was named Operating System/400 (OS/400).

The creators of the AS/400 originally planned to use the name System/40, but IBM had adopted a new product nomenclature around the same time, which led to the Application System/400 name. Firstly, IBM began prefixing "System" in product names with words to indicate the intended use or target market of the system (e.g. Personal System/2 and Enterprise System/9000). Secondly, IBM decided to reserve one and two digit model numbers for personal systems (e.g. PS/2 and PS/55), three digit numbers for midrange systems (e.g. AS/400) and four digit numbers for mainframes (e.g. ES/9000). The reassignment of two digit model numbers from midrange systems to personal systems was to prevent the personal systems from running out of single-digit numbers for new products.

The move to PowerPC
In 1990, IBM Rochester began work to replace the AS/400's original System/38-derived 48-bit CISC processors with a 96-bit architecture known as C-RISC (Commercial RISC). Rather than being a clean-slate design, C-RISC would have added RISC-style and VLIW-style instructions to the AS/400's processor, while maintaining backwards compatibility with the System/370-style Internal Microprogrammed Interface (IMPI) instruction set and the microcode used to implement it.

In 1991, at the request of IBM president Jack Kuehler, a team under the leadership of Frank Soltis delivered a proposal to adapt the 64-bit PowerPC architecture to support the needs of the AS/400 platform. Their extensions to the PowerPC architecture, known as Amazon (and later as PowerPC AS), were approved by IBM management instead of the C-RISC design for development into the next AS/400 processor architecture. These extensions include support for tagged memory, as well as assistance for decimal arithmetic.

IBM initially attempted to create a single PowerPC implementation for both AS/400 and high-end RS/6000 systems known as Belatrix. The Belatrix project proved to be too ambitious, and was cancelled when it became apparent that it would not deliver on schedule. Instead, a pair of AS/400-specific processors were designed at IBM Endicott and IBM Rochester, known as Cobra (for low end systems) and Muskie (for high end systems) respectively. These became the initial implementations of the IBM RS64 processor line. The RS64 series continued to be developed as a separate product line at IBM until the POWER4 merged both the RS64 and POWER product lines together.

Despite the move from IMPI to an entirely different processor architecture, the AS/400's Technology Independent Machine Interface (TIMI) mostly hid the changes from users and applications, and transparently recompiled applications for the new processor architecture. The port of OS/400 to the PowerPC AS architecture required a rewrite of most of the code below the TIMI due to the use of IMPI microcode to implement significant quantities of the operating system's low level code. This led to the creation of the System Licensed Internal Code (SLIC) - a new implementation of the lower levels of the operating system mostly written in C++.

Rebranding
The AS/400 family line was rebranded several times in the 1990s and 2000s as IBM introduced newer generations of hardware and operating system.

In 1994, the AS/400 Advanced Series name was used for new models, followed by the rebranding of the product line to AS/400e (the e standing for e-business) in 1997.

In 2000, eServer iSeries was introduced as part of its eServer branding initiative. The eServer iSeries was built on the POWER4 processor from the RS64 processors used by previous generations, meaning that the same processors were used in both the iSeries and pSeries platforms, the latter of which ran AIX.

In 2004, eServer i5 (along with OS/400 becoming i5/OS) the 5 signifying the use of POWER5 processors, was introduced, replacing the eServer iSeries brand. Successive generations of iSeries and pSeries hardware converged until they were essentially the same hardware sold under different names and with different operating systems. Some i5 servers were still using the AS/400-specific IBM Machine Type (MT/M 9406-520), and were able to run AIX in an LPar along i5/OS, while the p5 servers were able to run i5/OS respectively. The licensing for AIX and i5/OS was controlled in the firmware by the POWER hypervisor.

The final rebranding occurred in 2006, when IBM rebranded the eServer i5 to System i.

In April 2008, IBM introduced the IBM Power Systems line, which was a convergence of System i and System p product lines. The first Power Systems machines used the POWER6 processors; i5/OS was renamed as IBM i, in order to remove the association with POWER5 processors. IBM i is sold as one of the operating system options for Power Systems (along with AIX and Linux) instead of being tied to its own hardware platform.

Legacy
Although announced in 1988, the AS/400 remains IBM's most recent major architectural shift that was developed wholly internally. After the departure of CEO John Akers in 1993, when IBM looked likely to be split up, Bill Gates commented that the only part of IBM that Microsoft would be interested in was the AS/400 division. (At the time, many of Microsoft's business and financial systems ran on the AS/400 platform, which ended around 1999 with the introduction of Windows 2000.  )

System architecture
According to Frank Soltis, one of the architects of the AS/400 platform, the AS/400's architecture is defined by five architectural principles. Most of these principles are inherited from System/38.

Technology Independence

The high-level instruction set (called TIMI for "Technology Independent Machine Interface" by IBM), allows application programs to take advantage of advances in hardware and software without recompilation. TIMI is a virtual instruction set independent of the underlying machine instruction set of the CPU. User-mode programs contain both TIMI instructions and the machine instructions of the CPU, thus ensuring hardware independence. This is conceptually somewhat similar to the virtual machine architecture of programming environments such as Java and .NET.

Unlike some other virtual-machine architectures in which the virtual instructions are interpreted at run time, TIMI instructions are never interpreted. They constitute an intermediate compile time step and are translated into the processor's instruction set as the final compilation step. The TIMI instructions are stored within the final program object, in addition to the executable machine instructions. This is how application objects compiled on one processor family (e.g., the original CISC AS/400 48-bit processors) could be moved to a new processor (e.g., PowerPC 64-bit) without re-compilation. An application saved from the older 48-bit platform can simply be restored onto the new 64-bit platform where the operating system discards the old machine instructions and re-translates the TIMI instructions into 64-bit instructions for the new processor.

The system's instruction set defines all pointers as 128-bit. This was the original design feature of the System/38 (S/38) in the mid 1970s planning for future use of faster processors, memory and an expanded address space. The original AS/400 CISC models used the same 48-bit address space as the S/38. The address space was expanded in 1995 when the RISC PowerPC RS64 64-bit CPU processor replaced the 48-bit CISC processor.

Software integration
OS/400 (now known as IBM i) is the native operating system of the AS/400 platform, and was the sole operating system supported on the original AS/400 hardware. Many of the advanced features associated with the AS/400 are implemented in the operating system as opposed to the underlying hardware, which changed significantly throughout the life of the AS/400 platform. Features include a RDBMS (Db2 for i), a menu-driven interface, support for multiple users, block-oriented terminal support (IBM 5250), and printers.

Object-based design
Unlike the "everything is a file" principle of Unix and its derivatives, on IBM i everything is an object (with built-in persistence and garbage collection).

Single-level store
IBM uses a single-level store virtual memory architecture in the AS/400 platform. For 64-bit PowerPC processors, the virtual address resides in the rightmost 64 bits of a pointer while it was 48 bits in the S/38 and CISC AS/400. The 64-bit address space references main memory and disk as a single address set which is the single-level store concept.

Hardware integration
Later generations of hardware are also capable of supporting various guest operating systems, including SSP, AIX, Linux, Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003. While OS/400, AIX, and Linux are supported on the POWER processors on LPARs (logical partitions), Windows is supported with either single-processor internal blade servers (IXS) or externally linked multiple-processor servers (IXA and iSCSI). SSP guests were supported using emulation from OS/400 V3R6 through V4R4 using the Advanced 36 Machine facility of the operating system, a feature distinct from the System/36 Environment compatibility layer which requires System/36 software to be recompiled.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: IBM AS/400


text:
IBM System p

The IBM System p is a high-end line of RISC (Power)/UNIX-based servers. It was the successor of the RS/6000 line, and predecessor of the IBM Power Systems server series.

History
The previous RS/6000 line was originally a line of workstations and servers. The first System p server line was named the eServer pSeries in 2000 as part of the e-Server branding initiative.

In 2004, with the advent of the POWER5 processor, the server family was rebranded the eServer p5.

In 2005, following IBM's move to streamline its server and storage brands worldwide, and incorporating the "System" brand with the Systems Agenda, the family was again renamed to System p5. The System p5 now encompassed the IBM OpenPower product line.

In 2007, after the introduction of the POWER6 processor models, the last rename under the System p brand dropped the p (numbered) designation.

In April 2008, IBM announced a rebranding of the System p and its unification with the mid-range System i platform. The resulting product line was called IBM Power Systems.

Processors
Whereas the previous RS/6000 line used a mix of early POWER and PowerPC processors, when pSeries came along, this had evolved into RS64-III and POWER3 across the board—POWER3 for its excellent floating-point performance and RS64 for its scalability, throughput, and integer performance.

IBM developed the POWER4 processor to replace both POWER3 and the RS64 line in 2001. After that, the differences between throughput and number crunching-optimized systems no longer existed. Since then, System p machines evolved to use the POWER5 but also the PowerPC 970 for the low-end and blade systems.

The last System p systems used the POWER6 processor, such as the POWER6-based System p 570 and the JS22 blade. In addition, during the SuperComputing 2007 (SC07) conference in Reno, IBM introduced a new POWER6-based System p 575 with 32 POWER6 cores at 4.7 GHz and up to 256 GB of RAM with water cooling.

Features
All IBM System p5 and IBM eServer p5 machines support DLPAR (Dynamic Logical Partitioning) with Virtual I/O and Micro-partitioning.

System p generally uses the AIX operating system and, more recently, 64-bit versions of the Linux operating system.

BladeCenter

 * IBM BladeCenter JS12 (POWER6)
 * IBM BladeCenter JS22 (POWER6)
 * IBM BladeCenter JS23 (POWER6)
 * IBM BladeCenter JS43 (POWER6)

eServer pSeries

 * IBM eServer pSeries 610 (7028-6C1 & 6E1)
 * IBM eServer pSeries 615 (7029-6C3, 7029-6E3) (1~2-core POWER4+ CPU)
 * IBM eServer pSeries 620 (7025-F80, 6F0 & 6F1) (1~3 2-core RS64-IV CPUs)
 * IBM eServer pSeries 630 (7028-6C4, 7028-6E4) (1 1-core POWER4 CPU or 1~2 2-core POWER4 CPUs)
 * IBM eServer pSeries 640 (7026-B80) 1-4 POWER3-II CPUs
 * IBM eServer pSeries 650 (7038-6M2) 2-8 POWER4 CPUs
 * IBM eServer pSeries 655 (7039-651) 4-8 POWER4 CPUs
 * IBM eServer pSeries 660 (7026-H80, 6H0, 6H1, M80 & 6M1)
 * IBM eServer pSeries 670 (7040-671) 4-16 POWER4 CPUs
 * IBM eServer pSeries 680 (7017 range)
 * IBM eServer pSeries 690 (7040-681) 8-32 POWER4 CPUs

The IBM p690 was, at the time of its release in late 2001, the flagship of IBM's high-end Unix servers during the POWER4 era of processors. It was built to run IBM AIX Unix, although it is possible to run a version of Linux minus some POWER4-specific features.

It could support up to 32 (1.5, 1.7 or 1.9 GHz) POWER4+ processors and 1 TB of RAM, which weighs well over 1000 kg. It was used in a supercomputer at Forschungszentrum Jülich in 2004, and was discontinued in late 2005.

eServer p5
Released in 2004.

 * IBM eServer p5 510 Express (9111-510) (1~2-core 1.5 GHz POWER5 CPU)
 * IBM eServer p5 510 (9111-510) (1~2-core 1.65 GHz POWER5 CPU)
 * IBM eServer p5 520 Express (9111-520) (1~2-core 1.5 GHz POWER5 CPU)
 * IBM eServer p5 520 (9111-520) (2-core 1.65 GHz POWER5 CPU)
 * IBM eServer p5 550 Express (9113-550) (1~2 1~2-core 1.5 GHz POWER5 CPUs)
 * IBM eServer p5 550 (9113-550) (1~2 2-core 1.65 GHz POWER5 CPUs)
 * IBM eServer p5 570 Express (9117-570) (1~8 2-core 1.5 GHz POWER5 CPUs)
 * IBM eServer p5 570 (9117-570) (1~8 2-core 1.65 GHz or 1.9 GHz POWER5 CPUs)
 * IBM eServer p5 590 (9119-590) (1~4 8-core 1.65 GHz POWER5 MCMs)
 * IBM eServer p5 595 (9119-595) (2, 4, 6 or 8 8-core 1.65 GHz or 1.9 GHz POWER5 MCMs)

System p5

 * IBM System p5 185 (7037-A50) (1~2-core PowerPC 970 CPU)
 * IBM System p5 505 (9115-505) (1~2-core POWER5 or POWER5+ CPU)
 * IBM System p5 505Q (9115-505) (4-core POWER5+ CPU)
 * IBM System p5 510 (9110-51A) (1~2 1~2-core POWER5 or POWER5+ CPUs)
 * IBM System p5 510Q (9110-51A) (1~2 4-core POWER5+ CPUs)
 * IBM System p5 520 (9131-52A) (1~2-core POWER5+ CPU)
 * IBM System p5 520Q (9131-52A) (4-core POWER5+ CPU)
 * IBM System p5 550 (9133-55A) (1~2 2-core POWER5+ CPUs)
 * IBM System p5 550Q (9133-55A) (1~2 4-core POWER5+ CPUs)
 * IBM System p5 560Q (9116-561) (1, 2 or 4 4-core POWER5+ CPUs)
 * IBM System p5 570 (9117-570) (1~8 2-core POWER5+ CPUs)
 * IBM System p5 575 (9118-575) (8 1~2-core POWER5+ CPUs)
 * IBM System p5 590 (9119-590) (1~2 16-core POWER5 or POWER5+ processor books)
 * IBM System p5 595 (9119-595) (1~4 16-core POWER5 or POWER5+ processor books)

System p

 * IBM System p 520 Express (1, 2 or 4-core POWER6 CPU)
 * IBM System p 550 Express (1~4 2-core POWER6 CPUs)
 * IBM System p 560 Express (POWER6)
 * IBM System p 570 (POWER6)
 * IBM System p 575 (POWER6)
 * IBM System p 595 (9119-FHA) (1~8 8-core POWER6 processor books)

System p was rebranded to Power Systems in 2008.

OpenPower
OpenPower was the name of a range of servers in the System p line from IBM. They featured IBM's POWER5 CPUs and run only 64-bit versions of Linux. IBM's own UNIX variant, AIX is not supported since the OpenPower servers are not licensed for this operating system.

There were two models available, with a variety of configurations.

Before 2005, OpenPower belonged to the eServer product line but were eventually rolled into the IBM's Power Systems product portfolio.

 * IBM eServer OpenPower 710 (9123-710) (1~2-core POWER5 CPU)
 * IBM eServer OpenPower 720 (9124-720) 1-4 POWER5 CPUs

IntelliStation POWER

 * IBM IntelliStation POWER 265
 * IBM IntelliStation POWER 275
 * IBM IntelliStation POWER 185 (PowerPC 970)
 * IBM IntelliStation POWER 285

BladeCenter

 * IBM BladeCenter JS20 (PowerPC 970)
 * IBM BladeCenter JS21 (PowerPC 970)

title: IBM System p


text:
User:Closely

main interests
*law : criminal law and punishment *philosophy : the political interpretation of ontologies *critical studies : culture study and critical theory *psychoanalysis : Freud and Lacan

title: User:Closely


text:
Cape Cod Canal

The Cape Cod Canal is an artificial waterway in Massachusetts connecting Cape Cod Bay in the north to Buzzards Bay in the south, and is part of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. The approximately 17.4 mi long canal traverses the neck of land joining Cape Cod to the state's mainland. It mostly follows tidal rivers widened to 480 ft and deepened to 32 ft at mean low water, shaving up to 135 mi off the journey around the Cape for its approximately 14,000 annual users.

Most of the canal is located in the town of Bourne, but its northeastern terminus is in Sandwich. Scusset Beach State Reservation lies near the canal's north entrance, and the Massachusetts Maritime Academy is near its south. A swift-running current changes direction every six hours and can reach 5.2 mph during the receding ebb tide.

The waterway is maintained by the United States Army Corps of Engineers and has no toll fees. It is spanned by the Cape Cod Canal Railroad Bridge, the Bourne Bridge, and the Sagamore Bridge. Traffic lights at either end govern the approach of vessels over 65 ft.

The canal is occasionally used by whales and dolphins, including endangered North Atlantic right whales, which can cause closure of the canal.

History
Construction of a canal was first considered by Myles Standish of the Plymouth Colony in 1623, and the Pilgrims scouted the low-lying stretch of land between the Manomet and Scusset rivers for potential routes. William Bradford established the Aptucxet Trading Post in 1627 at the portage between the rivers. Trade prospered with the Indians of Narragansett Bay and the Dutch of New Netherland, and this was a major factor enabling the Pilgrims to pay off their indebtedness.

In 1697, the General Court of Massachusetts considered the first formal proposal to build the canal but took no action. In 1717, a canal was created in Orleans, Massachusetts called Jeremiah's Gutter which spanned a narrower portion of the Cape some distance to the east, but it remained active only until the late 1800s. More energetic planning with surveys took place repeatedly in 1776 (commissioned by George Washington), 1791,  1803, 1818, 1824–1830, and 1860. None of these efforts came to fruition.

The first attempts at actually building a canal did not take place until the late 19th century; earlier planners either ran out of money or were overwhelmed by the project's size. The engineers finally decided which route to take through the hillsides by connecting and widening the Manomet and Scusset rivers. The first excavation began in 1880, when the Cape Cod Ship Canal Company hired 400 immigrant Italian laborers to begin digging with shovels and wheelbarrows. The effort ran out of money almost immediately, and the laborers were unpaid and forced to beg for food in Sandwich. In 1883, the Cape Cod Ship Canal Company reorganized under engineer Frederick Lockwood. The company used a bucket dredge to clear nearly a mile of channel through the Sandwich marshes before shutting down in 1891.

Private construction
On June 22, 1909, construction finally began for a working canal under the direction of August Belmont Jr.'s Boston, Cape Cod & New York Canal Company, using designs by engineer William Barclay Parsons. The canal engineers encountered many problems, such as huge boulders underwater. Divers were hired to blow them up, but the effort slowed dredging. Another problem was cold winter storms which forced the engineers to stop dredging altogether and wait for spring. Nevertheless, the canal opened on a limited basis on July 29, 1914, and it was completed in 1916. The privately owned toll canal had a maximum width of 100 ft and a maximum depth of 25 ft, and it took a somewhat difficult route from Phinney Harbor at the head of Buzzards Bay. Several accidents occurred due to the narrow channel and navigation difficulty, and these limited traffic and tarnished the canal's reputation. Toll revenues failed to meet investors' expectations as a result, despite shortening the trade route from New York City to Boston by 62 mi.

Public takeover and expansion

On July 25, 1918, the Director General of the United States Railroad Administration took over jurisdiction and operation of the canal under a presidential proclamation. Four days earlier, the German U-boat SMU U-156 surfaced 3 mi off Orleans, Massachusetts on July 21, 1918, and shelled the tugboat Perth Amboy and her string of four barges. The canal remained under government control until 1920, during which the United States Army Corps of Engineers re-dredged the channel to 25 ft deep.

In 1928, the government purchased the canal for $11.4 million as a free public waterway, and $21 million was spent between 1935 and 1940 increasing the canal's width to 480 ft and its depth to 32 ft. As a result, it became the widest sea-level canal of its time. The southern entrance to the canal was rebuilt for direct access from Buzzards Bay rather than through Phinney Harbor. Before construction began, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology built a huge scale model of the canal (9 feet to a mile, roughly $1/587$ actual size) to study the hydraulic effects of tidal currents on the enlarged and rerouted canal.

World War II
During World War II, shipping again used the canal to avoid U-boats patrolling offshore. It was protected by coastal artillery batteries at the Sagamore Hill Military Reservation at the northern entrance and the Butler Point Military Reservation at the southern entrance. The artillery was never fired in defense of the canal.

The Mystic Steamship Company's collier SS Stephen R. Jones was grounded and sank in the canal on June 28, 1942. Shipping was routed around Cape Cod, and the Liberty ship SS Alexander Macomb was torpedoed by the German submarine U-215 on July 3 with the loss of 10 lives. The canal reopened on July 31 after the wrecked Stephen R. Jones was removed with the help of 17 tons of dynamite.

Recreational uses
The canal is used extensively by recreational and commercial vessels. Service roads on both sides of the canal provide access for fishing and are heavily used by in-line skaters, bicyclists, and walkers. Several parking areas are maintained at access points. Bourne Scenic Park is leased by the Corps of Engineers to the Town of Bourne Recreation Authority for use as a tent and RV campground adjacent to the Canal.

The Army Corps of Engineers maintains the Cape Cod Canal Visitor Center which introduces visitors to the history, features, and operation of the canal. Features include a retired 41 ft US Army Corps of Engineers patrol boat, a 46-seat theater showing continuous DVD presentations on canal history, canal flora and fauna, real time radar and camera images of the waterway, and a variety of interactive exhibits. Corps Park Rangers staff the center and provide free public programs on a variety of subjects. The Visitor Center is open seasonally from May to October, and admission is free. It is located on Moffitt Drive in Sandwich near the canal's east end. A second seasonally staffed center is at the Herring Run along Scenic Highway.

Scusset Beach State Reservation lies just north of the east end of the canal and offers beach facilities as well as tent and RV camping. A 0.7 mi trail there leads to Sagamore Hill, once an Indian meeting ground and the site of a World War II coastal fortification. Bournedale Hills Trail extends 1.4 mi along the north side of the Canal from Bourne Scenic Park campground to the Herring Run. The trail includes a 0.8 mi self-guided loop which interprets the Canal's historic and natural features.

folklore and proposal
A spoof became popular during the late 20th century concerning a fictitious road tunnel, allegedly built in the 1960s, under the Cape Cod Canal. It came into popular usage in Massachusetts as a commentary on the severe traffic entering and exiting Cape Cod during the summer months. Since 1994, decals have been sold in shops around the Cape as popular souvenirs purporting to be "permits" allowing the bearer to use the tunnel; the popularity of these "permits" briefly led to a lawsuit among several different sellers. In 2019, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) indicated that it had studied the idea of adding a tunnel to help alleviate traffic, but due to findings it would not presently consider moving forward.

title: Cape Cod Canal


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Colin Renfrew

Andrew Colin Renfrew, Baron Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, (born 25 July 1937) is a British archaeologist, paleolinguist and Conservative peer noted for his work on radiocarbon dating, the prehistory of languages, archaeogenetics, neuroarchaeology, and the prevention of looting at archaeological sites.

Renfrew was formerly the Disney Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge and Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and is now a Senior Fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

Early life and education
Renfrew was educated at St Albans School, Hertfordshire (where one of the houses is named after him) and from 1956 to 1958 did National Service in the Royal Air Force. He then went up to St John's College, Cambridge, where he read Natural Sciences then Archaeology and Anthropology, graduating in 1962. He was elected president of Cambridge Union in 1961 and was a member of the University of Cambridge Archaeological Field Club (AFC). He had run against and lost an election to Barry Cunliffe to become president of the AFC. In 1965, he completed his PhD thesis Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of the Cyclades and their external relations; in the same year he married Jane M. Ewbank.

Academic

In 1965, Renfrew was appointed to the post of lecturer in the Department of Prehistory and Archaeology at the University of Sheffield. Between 1968 and 1970, he directed excavations at Sitagroi, Greece. In the 1968 Sheffield Brightside by-election he unsuccessfully contested this parliamentary constituency on behalf of the Conservative Party. In that year he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, in 1970 was elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and in 2000 elected an Honorary Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.

In 1972, Renfrew became Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton, succeeding Barry Cunliffe. During his time at Southampton he directed excavations at Quanterness in Orkney and Phylakopi on the island of Milos, Greece. In 1973, Renfrew published Before Civilisation: The Radiocarbon Revolution and Prehistoric Europe in which he challenged the assumption that prehistoric cultural innovation originated in the Near East and then spread to Europe. He also excavated with Marija Gimbutas at Sitagroi.

In 1980, Renfrew was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. In 1981 he was elected to the Disney Professorship of Archaeology in the University of Cambridge, a post he held until his retirement. In 1990 Renfrew was appointed as the founding Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

In 1987, he published Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of the Indo-European Origins, a book on the Proto-Indo-Europeans. His "Anatolian hypothesis" posited that this group lived 2,000 years before the Kurgans, in Anatolia, later diffusing to Greece, then Italy, Sicily, Corsica, the Mediterranean coast of France, Spain, and Portugal. Another branch migrated along the fertile river valleys of the Danube and Rhine into central and northern Europe.

He developed the Anatolian hypothesis, which argues that Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed ancestor of the Indo-European languages, originated approximately 9,000 years ago in Anatolia and moved with the spread of farming throughout the Mediterranean and into central and northern Europe. This hypothesis contradicted Marija Gimbutas's Kurgan hypothesis, which states that Proto-Indo-European was spread by a migration of peoples from the Pontic–Caspian steppe approximately 6,000 years ago.

From 1987 to 1991, he co-directed excavations at Markiani on Amorgos and at Dhaskalio Kavos, Keros, Greece.

Renfrew's work in using the archaeological record as the basis for understanding the ancient mind was foundational to the field of evolutionary cognitive archaeology. Renfrew and his student, Lambros Malafouris, coined the phrase neuroarchaeology to describe an archaeology of mind.

In 1996, Renfrew formulated a sapient paradox, that can be formulated as ""why there was such a long gap between emergence of genetically and anatomically modern humans and the development of complex behaviors?"

Renfrew served as Master of Jesus College, Cambridge from 1986 until 1997. In 2004, he retired from the Disney Professorship and is now a Senior Fellow at the McDonald Institute. From 2006 to 2008 he directed new excavations on the Cycladic Island of Keros, and is currently co-director of the Keros Island Survey.

Positions, awards and accolades

 * Fellow of the British Academy (1980)
 * Renfrew was created a life peer on 24 June 1991 as Baron Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, of Hurlet in the District of Renfrew.
 * Foreign Associate to the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 1996.
 * Balzan Prize, given in Prehistoric Archaeology for 2004.
 * Chair, Managing Council for the British School at Athens, since 2004.
 * Visiting Scholar, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA, 2005–06.
 * Member of the American Philosophical Society since 2006.
 * Honorary degrees from the Universities of Sheffield, Athens, Southampton, Liverpool, Edinburgh, St Andrews, Kent, London and Lima.

Books

 * Renfrew, A.C., 1972, The Emergence of Civilisation: The Cyclades and the Aegean in The Third Millennium BC, London.
 * Renfrew, A.C., 1973, Before Civilisation, the Radiocarbon Revolution and Prehistoric Europe, London: Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-6593-5
 * Renfrew, A.C. and Kenneth L. Cooke, eds. 1979 Transformations: Mathematical Approaches to Culture Change. New York: Academic Press. ISBN 978-0-12-586050-5
 * Renfrew, A.C. and Malcolm Wagstaff, eds., 1982,  An Island Polity, the Archaeology of Exploitation in Melos, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 * Renfrew, Colin, 1984,  Approaches to Social Archeology, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 0-85224-481-9
 * Renfrew, A.C., ed. 1985,  The Archaeology of Cult, the Sanctuary at Phylakopi, London: British School at Athens / Thames & Hudson.
 * Colin Renfrew, Marija Gimbutas and Ernestine S. Elster, eds. 1986. Excavations at Sitagroi, a prehistoric village in northeast Greece. Vol. 1. Los Angeles : Institute of Archaeology, University of California.
 * Renfrew, A.C., 1987, Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins, London: Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-6612-5
 * Renfrew, A.C. and Ezra B. W. Zubrow, eds. 1994, The ancient mind: elements of cognitive archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-45620-3
 * Renfrew, A.C. and Paul Bahn, 1991, Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice, London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 0-500-28147-5. (Sixth edition 2012)
 * Renfrew, A.C., 2000, Loot, Legitimacy and Ownership: The Ethical Crisis in Archaeology, London: Duckworth. ISBN 0-7156-3034-2
 * Renfrew, A.C., 2003, Figuring It Out: The Parallel Visions of Artists and Archaeologists, London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 0-500-05114-3
 * Ernestine S. Elster and Colin Renfrew, eds., 2003. Prehistoric Sitagroi: Excavations in Northeast Greece, 1968–1970. Vol. 2: The Final Report. Los Angeles, CA: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. Monumenta archaeologica 20.
 * Renfrew, A.C., and Paul Bahn, eds. Archaeology: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge, 2005.
 * Renfrew, A.C., and Paul Bahn, Archaeology Essentials: Theories, Methods and Practice, London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-84138-9. (Fourth edition 2018).
 * Renfrew, A.C., 2008, Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind, Modern Library. ISBN 0-679-64097-5
 * Matsumura S., Forster P. and Renfrew C., eds., 2008, Simulations, Genetics and Human Prehistory, Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archeological Research. ISBN 978-1-902937-45-8

Articles

 * "Models of change in language and archaeology", Transactions of the Philological Society 87 (1989): 103–55.
 * "Archaeology, genetics and linguistic diversity", Man 27 (1992): 445–78.
 * "Time depth, convergence theory, and innovation in Proto-Indo-European: 'Old Europe' as a PIE linguistic area", Journal of Indo-European Studies 27 (1999): 257–93.
 * "'Indo-European' designates languages: not pots and not institutions", Antiquity 79 (2005): 692–5.
 * "Archaeogenetics", in Archaeology: The Key Concepts, eds. Colin Renfrew & Paul Bahn. London: Routledge, 2005, pp. 16–20.
 * "Phylogenetic network analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genomes", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, April 8, 2020

title: Colin Renfrew