Georg Dertinger

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Georg Dertinger (1949)

Georg Dertinger (born December 25, 1902 in Friedenau , † January 21, 1968 in Leipzig ) was a German politician ( DNVP , Eastern CDU ). He was Minister for Foreign Affairs of the GDR . After a Stalinist show trial , he was imprisoned in the GDR for ten years.

Life

School education, studies and work

Georg Dertinger attended the secondary school in Lichterfelde and Dahlem from 1910 . After the death of his father Rudolf Dertinger - who fell as a lieutenant in East Prussia in October 1914 - the half-orphan was able to get a vacancy in the cadet institute in Plön Castle in Holstein at Easter 1916 . Two years later he continued his training as a cadet at the main cadet institute in Groß-Lichterfelde. Georg Dertinger successfully passed his Abitur at the State Educational Institute in the former cadet house in Berlin-Lichterfelde in early 1922. While studying law and economics at the University of Berlin , he worked for the Magdeburgische Zeitung and later in the Magdeburg editorial team of the Federal Newspaper of the Stahlhelm .

Membership in the DNVP

He was a member of the German National People's Party . Dertinger belonged to the German men's club and had close contacts with the Tat group . In 1933 he accompanied Papen in the negotiations for the Concordat between the German Reich and the Holy See . From 1934 he was an employee of the service from Germany , the so-called Dertinger service for various provincial newspapers and abroad.

Membership in the Eastern CDU

In 1945 Dertinger was one of the founders of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) in the Soviet zone of occupation and was its press officer and, from 1946, general secretary of the CDU. He was a member of its board of directors as well as the constitution and coordination committee. Since Andreas Hermes was dismissed, Dertinger has been one of Hermes’s closest collaborators in the party chairmanship, Jakob Kaiser , and head of the personal staff at the CDU chairman. In the course of the political overthrow of Kaiser and the synchronization of the Eastern CDU, the SMA also made him chief executive. After the end of the war, Dertinger rented a house in Kleinmachnow and moved with his family to the Berlin suburb in December 1948. There he attended the general assembly of the CDU local group led by Peter Bloch

Dertinger was appointed provisional state chairman of the CDU of Saxony on January 23, 1950, after an investigation by the Political Committee of the main board of the CDU had been initiated against Hugo Hickmann in Berlin. On January 29, 1950, Dertinger stated in view of Hickmann's declaration that he had taken on the task of provisional management of the regional association. With the resignation of Hickmann, the function of the state chairman in Saxony according to the statutes was transferred to the second chairman, Otto Freitag . In 1951, at a meeting of the Political Committee of the CDU party leadership, Dertinger demanded that there had been "numerous cases" in which teachers "had serious problems of conscience due to their Christian attitude" that the teachers belonging to the CDU should have "no confession of conscience" when studying Marxism-Leninism “may be demanded”. Gerald Götting then spoke to the Minister for Public Education Paul Wandel and the then State Secretary Elisabeth Zaisser on this matter .

After his expulsion from the Eastern CDU in connection with Dertinger's arrest in 1953, a more than 30-year-old picture of him appeared in the GDR again in 1983 - Gerald Götting's view of Georg Dertinger and vice versa - together with other members of a meeting of the CDU Political Committee in the Berlin house of the party leadership from the summer of 1952.

MP and Minister

Speech on the founding of the GDR

From 1949 to 1953 Dertinger was a member of the People's Chamber and first Minister for Foreign Affairs. He played a decisive role in the drafting of the first constitution of the Democratic German Republic and the CDU newspaper Neue Zeit published his foreign policy objectives in October 1949. On July 6, 1950, he signed the Görlitz Agreement with Poland on the Oder-Neisse border and, together with the incumbent Polish Foreign Minister Stanisław Skrzeszewski, the final protocol of the border marking on January 27, 1951 in Frankfurt / Oder.

Political persecution

On January 15, 1953, Dertinger was arrested by the Ministry for State Security (MfS) and "prepared" for a secret trial before the Supreme Court of the GDR in an underground cell of the submarine in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen for more than 16 months in prison with torture and the extortion of confessions. . According to the guidelines of the Politburo of the SED , Dertinger condemned it in a Stalinist show trial together with Helmut Brandt and four other defendants because they had set themselves the goal of eliminating the GDR "and restoring the conditions of exploitation of the monopolists, large landowners and fascists". Dertinger's contribution was to organize “the intrusion of fascist armed gangs across the demarcation line” into the GDR. Under the chairmanship of Walter Ziegler , Dertinger received a sentence of 15 years in prison . As early as 1952, the MfS approached Dertinger's personal press officer, Gerold Rummler, to obtain incriminating information from him about his superior. Rummler then fled to West Berlin . After the trial, Dertinger was imprisoned in the Bautzen II special prison . In 1964 Dertinger was pardoned at Walter Ulbricht after Götting interceded after a meeting of the GDR State Council . Dertinger, who converted to Catholicism while in custody, worked for the St. Benno publishing house in Leipzig after his release . Götting commented on this in 1991, after the reunification of Germany : “When Nuschke informed me of Dertinger's arrest in January 1953, I was deeply shocked. The evening before we had sat together in his official apartment in Pankow. Even Otto Grotewohl , the then Prime Minister, was affected and had no relationships. To this day I am not familiar with the judicial files. Later it was said that Georg Dertinger, trusting the German concept of the former Soviet head of the secret service Beria, had led unauthorized initiatives and negotiations to form a unified, neutral Germany. At the time, neither Washington nor official Moscow were interested in it. Georg Dertinger had overestimated his possibilities. "

Georg Dertinger and his wife are buried in the south cemetery in Leipzig

The Dertingers family also fell victim to Stalinist persecution : his wife was sentenced to eight years in prison, which she also had to serve. The then eldest son Rudolf was 15 years old and received three years in prison under adult criminal law and then fled to the West, where he became a journalist and others. a. at the Kölnische Rundschau and the Aachener Nachrichten . After her arrest, the 13-year-old daughter Oktavia was placed in the care of her grandmother, who was also arrested and then banished to the Ore Mountains . The then nine-year-old Christian came to foster parents loyal to the SED with a new identity, was given back to his freed mother after eight years and was only able to discover his fate after the peaceful revolution . Today he lives in Leipzig.

Rehabilitation after the peaceful revolution

The party board member / main board member Horst Sladeczek, CDU member since 1946, was particularly committed to the complete rehabilitation of Dertinger. He knew the first East German foreign minister personally especially because he as a young Union Friend - how the party members designated at the time - in the early 1950s on a foreign policy course at the German Management Academy "Walter Ulbricht" in Forst Zinna , was to sign up as To prepare a “personal advisor” for the GDR Foreign Minister. In a letter to the editor to the newspaper “Neue Zeit”, Sladeczek described the view of the renewed CDU party leadership on Dertinger's exclusion from the party and tried to explain the party punishment handed down in 1953: “… Politics was and is always the art of the possible. But what was politically possible for the CDU at the time? Stalin was still alive, so Stalinism was personified. The ' Cold War ' was heading for a new climax. In foreign policy, the security interests of the victorious powers were also at stake, and their troops were present in the country. Was such a secretariat decision 'expected' or 'strongly recommended'? And it became clear to the new party executive of the GDR CDU at the turn of the year 1989/90: 'Coming to terms with the Dertinger case (and similar, less spectacular repression against other Union friends at that time) is part of the CDU's debt of honor to turn back to the future'. “Dertinger was politically and legally rehabilitated in the course of 1990 . After German reunification , the Berlin Regional Court overturned the 1954 judgment in September 1991 for "extortion of testimony and perversion of justice".

literature

Web links

Commons : Georg Dertinger  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Extract from the German lists of casualties from November 5, 1914
  2. ↑ See section Kadettenanstalt Plön 1867–1920 in the information on Schleswig-Holstein Contemporary History (Kiel) issue 26 (November 1994) pp. 3–100, digitized
  3. ^ Peter Joachim Lapp: Georg Dertinger: Journalist - Foreign Minister - Public Enemy. P. 22ff. and p. 296, Herder Verlag, Freiburg im Breisgau [et al.] 2005, ISBN 3-451-23007-0
  4. ^ Peter Joachim Lapp : Georg Dertinger: Journalist - Foreign Minister - Public Enemy . P. 296, Herder Verlag, Freiburg im Breisgau [u. a.] 2005, ISBN 3-451-23007-0
  5. ^ Lapp, Peter Joachim: Georg Dertinger: Journalist - Foreign Minister - Public Enemy , cf. Page 52: In 1938 Dertinger became the so-called chief editor of Dienst from Germany (DaD) as a non-party . - Published by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung e. V., Verlag Herder, Freiburg / Basel / Vienna, 2005, ISBN 3-451-23007-0
  6. ↑ Müller-Engbers, Wielgohs, Hoffmann (ed.): Who was who in the GDR? A biographical lexicon, Bonn 2001, p. 147
  7. ^ Gradl, JB Gradl: Beginning under the Soviet star. The CDU in the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany , p. 192, publication by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung Archive for Christian Democratic Politics, Cologne, 1981; ISBN 3-8046-8584-6
  8. ↑ See the corresponding article in the Spiegel from February 12, 1949 digitized version
  9. ^ Ernst-Thälmann-Strasse 8 in Kleinmachnow according to Lapp, Peter Joachim : Georg Dertinger: Journalist - Foreign Minister - Staatsfeind , Freiburg 2005, p. 91; ISBN 3-451-23007-0 .
  10. ↑ Bloch, Peter : Between Hope and Resignation. As CDU politician in Brandenburg 1945 - 1950 , Cologne 1986, p. 135
  11. ↑ New men in Saxony's CDU . In: Berliner Zeitung , January 25, 1950, p. 2.
  12. ↑ JB beginning under the Soviet star. The CDU in the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany , p. 159, ISBN 3-8046-8584-6 .
  13. ^ The decisions of the Political Affairs Committee . In: Neue Zeit , January 31, 1950, p. 1.
  14. ↑ Minutes of the meeting of the Political Affairs Committee on February 20, 1951, date of issue of the minutes: April 3, 1951 and the corresponding correction: " No confession of conscience may be required." (Archived: Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS)). KAS digital reading room
  15. ↑ ; Göttings report in the "teacher question" at the meeting of the Political Committee on 17 April 1951 listing under "Miscellaneous Digital Lesesesaal KAS
  16. ^ Gerhard Fischer: Otto Nuschke . A picture of life , Union Verlag Berlin, 1st edition, 1983, partial picture pages 39/40 between text pages 144 and 145
  17. ^ "Neue Zeit", October 13, 1949, p. 3 with a portrait of Dertinger
  18. ↑ As a former GDR Foreign Minister, he was retouched in later GDR publications of contemporary photos for the signing of the 1950 border agreement. The newspaper Neues Deutschland used such a retouched photo in the issue of 7/8. July 1990, p. 13, to which a reader in the issue of August 4, 1990, p. 13, pointed out critical.
  19. ^ Archive photo and caption in the Neue Zeit newspaper, March 29, 1990, page 3; in Neues Deutschland, January 28, 1951, p. 1, same motif: Head of Department Dr. Reintanz bent over the documents, while Dertinger and Skrzeszewski shook hands under the mural of GDR State President Wilhelm Pieck in the presence of the other delegation participants.
  20. ^ Karl Wilhelm Fricke : Historical revisionism from an MfS perspective ( Memento from June 27, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 132 kB)
  21. ↑ Falco Werkentin : Political criminal justice in the Ulbricht era . Christoph Links, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-86153-069-4 , p. 319
  22. ^ Excerpt from the judgment by Karl Wilhelm Fricke: Politics and Justice in the GDR. On the history of political persecution 1945–1968. Report and documentation. Science and politics, Cologne 1979, ISBN 3-8046-8568-4 , p. 279
  23. ↑ A prominent refugee from the East: Gerold Rummler, personal press officer of the Soviet Zone Foreign Minister Dertinger, gives a report on the reasons for his escape; Filmothek Bundesarchiv: Welt im Film 362/1952 from May 10, 1952
  24. ^ Günter Wirth: Ways and Effects of Christian Literature in the GDR. In: Frank-Lother Kroll (Ed.): Landscape of the Bourgeois. Selected papers , Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-428-12651-4 , p. 240.
  25. ^ Neue Zeit , February 19, 1991, page 3: Exclusive interview with the former chairman of the Eastern CDU, Gerald Götting
  26. ^ According to Peter Joachim Lapp in: Georg Dertinger. Journalist - Foreign Minister - Public Enemy , p. 166, this meeting took place on Tuesday, January 13, 1953, while Dertinger was arrested only on January 15 at around 4 a.m. in his service villa in Berlin-Pankow. ISBN 3-451-23007-0
  27. ↑ Excerpt from the answer to the Neue Zeit interview question: "In the course of the party's history work-up, the Dertinger case came up again. What is your position on these events?", Published in this daily newspaper on February 19, 1991, p 3
  28. ↑ "The abandoned child" in Peter Hartl : lied to, betrayed and re-educated. Children's fates from the 20th century . dtv 2007, ISBN 978-3423246187
  29. ^ Members of the main board of the Christian Democratic Union in Germany elected by the 16th party congress , published by the Secretariat of the Main Board of the CDU (1987), p. 58
  30. ↑ Neue Zeit newspaper , November 21, 1989, page 2: “If the history of the GDR were to be rewritten, then such considerations would also be appropriate for the CDU. It would be advisable to reassess personalities like the former Foreign Minister Georg Dertinger in an objective light "
  31. ↑ Neue Zeit newspaper , January 26, 1990, p. 5
  32. ↑ Neue Zeit newspaper , January 26, 1990, p. 5
  33. ↑ Bock, S./Muth, I./Schwiesau, H .: GDR foreign policy. An overview. Data, facts; Personen (III), Berlin, 2010, p. 297; ISBN 978-3-643-10559-2
personal data
SURNAME Dertinger, Georg
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (CDU), MdV, Minister of the GDR
DATE OF BIRTH December 25, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Friedenau
DATE OF DEATH January 21, 1968
Place of death Leipzig