Brigitte Heinrich (politician)
Brigitte Heinrich (born June 29, 1941 in Frankfurt am Main ; † December 29, 1987 there ) was a German politician of the Greens and an agent of the GDR State Security .
Life
In 1966/67 Brigitte Heinrich was the press spokeswoman for the Socialist German Student Union. After her economics exam, she traveled to the Middle East in 1970. In the 1970s she became a lecturer in "International Relations" and President of the Student Parliament at the University of Frankfurt am Main . During this time she was in contact with various terrorist groups .
On November 26, 1974, Heinrich was arrested during the “Aktion Winterreise”, a nationwide raid against RAF supporters. The raid took place in fifteen German cities and communities after the murder of the Berlin Chamber Court President Günter von Drenkmann by terrorists from the June 2nd movement shortly after the death of RAF member Holger Meins . All of the arrested except Heinrich were released a few weeks later. After several months, she too, meanwhile seriously ill, was released before the second date of the detention examination and the proceedings were discontinued. In 1978 she published a pamphlet in Italian about her imprisonment in Milan in the form of a diary from the dungeon , in which she presented herself as a politically persecuted person.
After her release, she enrolled again at Frankfurt University and was a member of the student parliament for several years as president.
From 1980 Heinrich worked as a journalist for the Berliner tageszeitung .
In 1980, she was sentenced to one year and nine months' imprisonment for arms smuggling , which she served in open prison from late 1983 . The reason was her involvement in a German-Italian-Swiss network of anarchists, whose leader was Heinrich's friend, the German-Italian Petra Krause (* 1939).
After serving the remainder of her sentence, the Greens offered her a place on the list for the 1984 election to the European Parliament . She was a member of the European Parliament from 1984 until her death on December 29, 1987 . She died of a heart attack . The funeral service took place on January 6, 1988 in the main hall of the Frankfurt main cemetery with the participation of left-wing organizations and groups from a large number of countries.
Agent of the GDR State Security
After the reunification and peaceful revolution in the GDR , it became known that she had been recruited for the GDR state security in 1982 by her partner, the lawyer and GDR agent Klaus Croissant . Since then she has been working as an unofficial employee under the code name Beate Schäfer for the main department XXII (counter-terrorism). Croissant acted as their instructor and courier.
She accepted the list for the election to the European Parliament after consulting her Stasi command officer. She then also worked for Department II of the Enlightenment Headquarters ( parties and organizations of the FRG ), worked as a spy until her death and provided the GDR secret service with her knowledge of parliament, party and newspaper editors. She was ordered to break away from the terrorist environment in order to get into leading positions. She passed on her information in at least eight meetings with her senior officers and with written reports.
literature
- Peter O. Chotjewitz : My friend Klaus. Berlin 2007, Verbrecher Verlag, ISBN 978-3-935843-89-8
- Hubertus Knabe : The Infiltrated Republic , Propylaea 1999 (on Heinrich's informant activity for the Stasi)
- Jens Gieseke , Andrea Bahr: The State Security and the Greens. Between SED-West politics and East-West contacts . Ch. Links, 2016, ISBN 978-3-86153-842-4 .
Web link
- Entry on Brigitte Heinrich in the Members' database of the European Parliament
Individual evidence
- ^ Heinrich: Diario del Carcere, 1975: operazione Winterreise e persecuzione degli intellettuali in Germania. Milan 1978, quoted from Petra Terhoeven : German autumn in Europe. Oldenbourg, Munich 2014, p. 440.
- ↑ Petra Terhoeven: German Autumn in Europe. Munich 2014, p. 440.
- ↑ Dissolved and helpless . In: Der Spiegel . No. 39 , 1992, pp. 35-38 ( online ).
- ↑ Klaus Marxen , Gerhard Werle (ed.): Criminal justice and GDR injustice: Documentation. Espionage, Volume 4. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2004, ISBN 978-3899490800 , p. 19 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Heinrich, Brigitte |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German politician (Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen), MEP, agent of the GDR |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 29, 1941 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Frankfurt am Main |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 29, 1987 |
| Place of death | Frankfurt am Main |