About Wolfgang Leonhard
Wolfgang Leonhard was a German political author and historian of the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic and Communism. A German Communist whose family had fled Hitler's Germany and who was educated in the Soviet Union, after World War II Leonhard became one of the founders and leaders of the German Democratic Republic until he became disillusioned and fled in 1949, first defecting to Yugoslavia and then moving to West Germany in 1950 and later to the United Kingdom. In 1956 he moved to the United States, where he was a popular and influential professor at Yale University from 1966 to 1987, teaching the history of communism and the Soviet Union, topics about which he wrote several books. After the Cold War ended, he returned to Germany. Leonhard was chosen as a member of one of the two groups of German communists who were the first to return to Germany as soon as the Red Army had reached German territory. I was the first high ranking official escaping from East Germany who was trained in Moscow, in the Soviet Union." In Yugoslavia, Leonhard was in charge of the German programmes of Belgrade Radio.
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