Egon Rudi Ernst Krenz (German pronunciation: [ˈeːgɔn ˈkʁɛnts]; born 19 March 1937) is a German former politician who was the last Communist leader of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) during the Revolutions of 1989. He succeeded Erich Honecker as the General Secretary of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) but was forced to resign only weeks later when the Berlin Wall fell.

Throughout his career, Krenz held a number of prominent positions in the SED. He was Honecker's deputy from 1984 until he succeeded him in 1989 amid protests against the regime. Krenz was unsuccessful in his attempt to retain the Communist regime's grip on power. The SED gave up its monopoly of power some weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Krenz was forced to resign shortly afterward. He was expelled from the SED's successor party on 21 January 1990. In 2000, he was sentenced to six and a half years in prison for manslaughter for his role in the Communist regime. After his release from prison in 2003, he retired to the small town of Dierhagen in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. He remained on parole until the end of his sentence in 2006. Krenz and Karel Urbánek from Czechoslovakia are the last two former General Secretaries from the Eastern Bloc still alive.

Krenz was born to German parents in Kolberg, then part of Nazi Germany in what is now part of Poland. In his autobiography, Krenz suggested that his father, who died in 1943, was of Jewish descent. His family resettled in Damgarten in 1945 during the mass repatriations and expulsions of Germans from Poland at the end of World War II.

Trained as a teacher and working as a journalist early in his career, Krenz joined the Free German Youth (FDJ) in 1953, as a teenager and the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in 1955. After serving in the Volksarmee from 1959 to 1961, he rejoined the FDJ. He studied at a prestigious Communist Party staff school in Moscow for three years, became a nomenklatura member and obtained a social science degree by 1967. Throughout his career, Krenz held a number of posts in the SED and the communist government. He was leader of the Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation from 1971 to 1974, and became a member of the central committee of the party in 1973. He was also a member of the Volkskammer (East Germany's legislature) from 1971 to 1990, and a member of its presidium from 1971 to 1981. Between 1974 and 1983, he was leader of the communist youth movement, the Free German Youth. From 1981 to 1984 he was a member of the Council of State.

In 1983, he joined the Politburo and became the Secretary for Security, Youth and Sport in the Central Committee; the same position Honecker had held before becoming General Secretary. He rose to supreme prominence when he became Honecker's deputy on the Council of State in 1984. Around the same time, he replaced Paul Verner as the unofficial number-two man in the SED leadership, thus making him the second-most powerful man in the country. Although he was the youngest member of the Politburo (and indeed, one of only two people elevated to full membership in that body from 1976 to 1984), speculation abounded that Honecker had tapped him as his heir apparent.

Following popular protests against East Germany's communist government, Prime Minister Willi Stoph moved that the SED Politburo "release" Honecker as General Secretary of the SED Central Committee, naming Krenz his successor. Krenz had been approached several months earlier about ousting Honecker, but was reluctant to move against a man he called "my foster father and political teacher". He was initially willing to wait until the seriously ill Honecker died, but by October was convinced that the situation was too grave to wait for what he had called "a biological solution".

Despite many protests, the Volkskammer elected Krenz to both of Honecker's major state posts—Chairman of the Council of State and Chairman of the National Defence Council. The former post was equivalent to that of president, while the latter post made Krenz commander-in-chief of the National People's Army. For only the second time in the Volkskammer's forty-year history, the vote was not unanimous (the first was on the law on abortion); 26 deputies voted against and 26 abstained.

In his first address as leader, Krenz promised to blunt some of the harsher edges of Honecker's regime and promised democratic reforms. The speech was identical to the one he had given to a closed group of the SED Central Committee; he even addressed the national audience as "Genossen" (comrades)–a term reserved for members of the SED. The speech sounded formulaic, and few East Germans believed him. For instance, they still remembered that after the Tiananmen Square protest just months earlier, he had gone to China to thank Deng Xiaoping on behalf of the regime. In Honecker's resignation speech, he named Krenz as his successor, further conveying an impression of undemocratic intransigence. For this and other reasons, Krenz was almost as detested as Honecker had been; one popular joke suggested that the only difference between them was that Krenz still had a gallbladder. Indeed, almost as soon as he took power, thousands of East Germans took to the streets to demand his resignation.