General German intelligence service
| General German intelligence service | |
|---|---|
| legal form | GmbH (until 1953) |
| founding | October 1946 |
| resolution | 1992 |
| Seat | East Berlin , Berlin |
| Number of employees | 1,400 (1989) |
| Branch | News agency |
The General German Intelligence Service ( ADN ) was the only approved news and picture agency in the German Democratic Republic alongside Panorama DDR . It held a monopoly position in the delivery of almost all newspapers as well as radio and television in the GDR with news, reports, articles and photos of a national character. Messages were exchanged with around sixty agencies from other countries, which also resulted in the filter function for the GDR media. ADN was officially subordinate to the Council of Ministers of the GDR , but was guided and supervised by the central party apparatus of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany . From 1971 it was housed in the ADN building on Mollstrasse. By 1989 ADN had around 1,400 employees.
history
The ADN was founded in October 1946 as a GmbH by several publishers, newspapers and radio stations with the consent of the Soviet military administration in Germany . In April 1953, ADN GmbH was dissolved on the instructions of the SED leadership and converted into a state news agency. In 1956 the independent "Zentrale Bildstelle Berlin " was incorporated into the agency under the name ADN-Zentralbild. According to the ADN statute of 1966, goals and tasks arose from the SED program, the resolutions of the SED Central Committee and the decrees, ordinances and resolutions of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers of the GDR.
In the fall of 1961, after the wall was built , the ADN had to accept that its employees were excluded from the West German Federal Press Conference . It was not until 30 years later that the ADN correspondents were accepted again as full members of the BPK. Until the end of the 1970s, the “basic service” of ADN, which was developed by the domestic and international departments, was distributed to customers via telex. 1979 began the conversion to electronic word processing and text transmission with the help of technology from the Japanese company " Omron ". From 1977 until the imminent end of the GDR in 1989, Günter Pötschke (1929–2006) was General Director of ADN.
In May 1992 the ADN with 254 employees was sold to the Deutsche Depeschendienst (ddp). The historically valuable archive of ADN-Zentralbild with around seven million photographs dating back to the early years of photography has been transferred to the Federal Archives in Koblenz .
Areas
The international area comprised the areas of politics and economics in other countries including the Federal Republic of Germany ; all other areas at international level were also dealt with in the domestic area, which was subdivided into the areas of politics, economics, culture, education / science and sport. There was a report service and a special service for economic cooperation between the Comecon countries. Work was carried out from 15 regional offices in the GDR districts, including Berlin. ADN had a worldwide network of correspondents. The foreign offices were usually occupied by married couples, whose selection required the approval of the party apparatus. Another area was responsible for the international broadcasts of ADN, which were developed on the basis of the basic service and modified and translated for the specific needs of foreign customers. The information department almost exclusively supplied the SED leadership and the government with confidential reports from the Federal Republic of Germany and abroad. For this purpose, the news, press reports, radio and television broadcasts there were evaluated and special confidential correspondent reports were prepared.
The staff of the ADN was in Altthymen in Fuerstenberg / Havel , the Good Mühlenhof as proprietary resort available.
Central image
Zentralbild (abbreviated to ZB) was founded in 1952. From then on it was the only picture agency in the GDR until reunification. From 1956 it became part of the ADN. In 1991, Zentralbild was sold to the dpa and still exists today as an independent photo and picture agency under the umbrella of the dpa. The Zentralbild archive was transferred to the Federal Archives .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Transfer to ddp according to "www.wissen.de" ( Memento from May 11, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Altthymen - A district of the city of Fürstenberg / Havel .
- ↑ Ulrike Pilarczyk and Ulrike Mietzner: The reflected image. The serial iconographic photo analysis in the educational and social sciences. Klinkhardt, Bad Heilbrunn 2005, p. 86.
- ↑ dpa: e.g. photo agency .