Hans Modrow was born in 1928 in the former German province of Pome­ra­nia. At the age of 17, he was draf­ted into the Nazi “Volks­sturm” and subse­quently taken prisoner by the Red Army. He atten­ded a Soviet antifa school and retur­ned to Germany in 1949 to work as a machi­nist. He became invol­ved in the Free German Youth (FDJ), became a member of the Socia­list Unity Party (SED) and also of the Free German Trade Union Fede­ra­tion (FDGB). From 1954 to 1957 he comple­ted a corre­spon­dence course in Marxism-Leni­nism and in 1961 compe­ted a graduate degree at the College for Econo­mics in Berlin. In 1958 Modrow became a member of the People’s Cham­ber and from 1967 to 1989 he was a member of the Central Commit­tee of the SED. On 13 Novem­ber 1989, he was elec­ted the last chair­man of the DDR Coun­cil of Ministers.

From 1990 to 1994, Modrow was a member of the Party of Demo­cra­tic Socia­lism (PDS) in the German Fede­ral Parlia­ment and from 1999 to 2004 in the Euro­pean Parlia­ment. He was Chair­man of the Coun­cil of Elders of DIE LINKE until shortly before his death on 11 Febru­ary 2023.