Kim Il Sung erased Soviet liberators to justify leadership cult

By Marcus Boone · August 10, 2026

North Korea's claim to have won its own liberation was branded a fraud by East German analysts who feared a growing personality cult was betraying socialist unity.

A memo dated May 16, 1963, sits in the archives of the GDR Ministry for Foreign Affairs. It is a clinical dissection of a North Korean internal party brochure titled "The Revolutionary Traditions of our Party Established during the Period of the Armed anti-Japanese Struggle." The document, available in English translation from the Cold War International History Project, was produced by the 1st Extra-European Department, Section Korea, and signed by an official named Wegricht.

To a casual observer in 1963, the brochure might have seemed like standard socialist hagiography. To Wegricht, it was a dangerous deviation. The East German analyst did not find the brochure’s narrative merely flattering; he found it historically fraudulent. He describes the text as containing "boundless nationalist arrogance," noting that it attempts to isolate the Korean liberation movement from the broader international context.

"Nationalist Exaggeration"

According to Wegricht, the brochure’s primary failure is its attempt to view the Korean-Japanese liberation movement independently of the Chinese people and the Soviet Union. He points out as an "historic fact" that there were strong links between Korean patriots and the Chinese Communist Party, noting that Kim Il Sung himself had been a member of the CCP.

The analyst bristles at the brochure's claim that the armed anti-Japanese struggle dealt a "devastating blow" to the Japanese imperialists. He argues that by ignoring the world economic crisis of 1929–1932 and the VII World Congress of the Comintern in 1935, the author "overstates the role of the Korean partisans' struggle."

More offensive to the GDR analyst is the erasure of other figures. The brochure focuses exclusively on Kim Il Sung, while Wegricht notes that other leaders—such as Choe Yong-geon, Kim Il, Pak Geum-cheol, and the deceased Kim Chaek and Pak Dal—played equally important roles. He concludes that the Marxist-Leninist theory of leadership is being "abused" to justify a personality cult. The brochure asks rhetorically, "Who if not Comrade Kim Il Sung could have saved the fatherland," a sentiment Wegricht identifies as "alien to Marxism-Leninism."

Soviet Union as Liberator

For the East Germans, the most glaring omission is the role of the Soviet Union. Wegricht reports a "denial of the Soviet Union's role as Korea's liberator from the Japanese yoke." In the eyes of the GDR, the North Korean state owed its existence to Soviet support and the experiences of the Soviet Union in constructing socialism.

This tension reveals a rift in the socialist camp. While the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK)—the ruling party of North Korea—was framing its legitimacy through an indigenous, heroic struggle, the East Germans saw this as a betrayal of proletarian internationalism. Wegricht views the brochure's claim that Korean partisans "spread the seed of revolution" among the Chinese people as a "quite arrogant remark towards the Chinese comrades."

"Everything by our own force"

By 1963, the WPK was beginning to codify what would become the ideology of Juche. The brochure explicitly links the current DPRK policy to the "organizational, ideological, as well as tactical and strategic foundations" of the anti-Japanese struggle. It emphasizes the principle of "everything by our own force," as well as the Chollima movement and the Cheongsan-ri method.

Wegricht is not convinced by these ancestral links. He observes that the exaggeration of these "traditions" has only "begun just now." He argues that the principle of "everything by our own force" is being applied to the partisans in hindsight, effectively projecting modern policy back into the 1930s to create a fictitious lineage.

Furthermore, Wegricht argues that this insistence on self-reliance is not a virtue but a hindrance, stating that it "prevented the DPRK from faster progress especially in the economic field." He sees the brochure's narrative as a tool to ignore the "strength of the socialist camp" and the existing expertise of the Soviet Union.

A False Representation

Wegricht concludes his report with five summary points. He asserts that the brochure does not reflect the actual course of history and describes it as "a new link in the chain of a false representation of Korea's history between 1930 and 1945." He suggests that this historical inaccuracy is precisely why the brochure was intended for internal party use only, rather than general public consumption.

The memo ends with a distribution list. Copies were sent to the Central Committee’s Foreign Policy Department, the embassy, a counselor at the embassy, and a Comrade Grunert in the Culture Department. The record leaves it unclear whether Wegricht’s critique ever reached Pyongyang or if the GDR leadership chose to ignore the "nationalist arrogance" of its ally in the interest of diplomatic stability.