Erich Grützner

Erich Grützner

Erich Grützner (born July 30, 1910 in Pirna ; † November 21, 2001 in Leipzig ) was a German trade unionist and SED functionary. From 1958 to 1989 he was a member of the SED in the People's Chamber of the GDR .

Life

Grützner was born in Pirna in 1910 as the son of a steel smelter. After elementary school he worked in various professions from 1925 without having completed an apprenticeship. In 1924 he joined the Young Spartakusbund , in 1925 the KJVD and the German Metalworkers' Association , his first contact with a kind of trade union.

In 1932 Grützner became a member of the KPD , for which he worked illegally from 1933. As a result, he was sentenced to 16 months in prison in 1934 for “preparing for high treason ” . From 1939 until the end of the war, Grützner worked as a chemical worker in Pirna.

Immediately after the war, Grützner was the head of the youth committee of the city of Pirna until 1946. In 1947 he switched to the FDGB and was a full-time functionary of the FDGB district administration in Pirna until 1949 . During this time he attended the SED state party school in Ottendorf in 1948 . From 1948 to 1950 Grützner was also city councilor and chairman of the city council of Pirna. In 1950 he was delegated to the FDGB University " Fritz Heckert " Bernau , where he first studied and then until 1954 worked as a teacher and head of department.

Then Grützner was sent to Leipzig, where he was chairman of the FDGB district board of Leipzig from February 1954 to March 1959 and, in this function, from July 1955 to October 1959 also a member of the executive committee of the federal board of the FDGB. He also became a member of the SED district leadership in Leipzig, where he remained until 1989. In 1954 Grützner was also "elected" to the Leipzig District Assembly, of which he was a member until 1981. From 1956 to 1963 he completed a distance learning course at the party college "Karl Marx" , which he graduated with a degree in social science. In 1959 Grützner became chairman of the Leipzig District Council , which he remained for 15 years.

During this period, the Paulinerkirche Leipzig was torn down as part of the expansion of what was then Karl Marx University Leipzig into a socialist university. His figure can therefore be seen in the painting by Werner Tübke on the first floor of the main building of the Leipzig University, the working class and intelligentsia , the result of a competition with the general theme "Working class and intelligentsia are inextricably linked under the leadership of the Marxist-Leninist party in socialism" was. Next to him are the then 1st Secretary of the SED district leadership Paul Fröhlich and the then Lord Mayor of Leipzig Walter Kresse .

From 1958 to 1989 Grützner was a member of the SED of the People's Chamber of the GDR and in 1967 was appointed to the "Commission for the drafting of a socialist constitution for the German Democratic Republic " under the leadership of Walter Ulbricht . He was also a member of the Budget and Finance Committee from 1958 to 1963 and from 1976 to 1989. Grützner belonged to Walter Ulbricht's inner management, so that his career under Honecker soon ended. From 1960 to 1976 he was a member of the State Council of the GDR , where he was a member of the “Strategic Working Group”. In 1974 Rolf Opitz succeeded Erich Grützner as chairman of the Leipzig district council. Grützner held his last office from 1974. He became chairman of the Leipzig district committee of the GDR's anti-fascist resistance fighters (KdAW). Erich Grützner died in 2001.

Grützner was honored with the Fritz Heckert Medal in 1955 , the Order Banner of Labor in 1964 , the Patriotic Order of Merit in 1970 and the Karl Marx Order in 1985 .

literature

• Helmut Müller-Enbergs :  Grützner, Erich . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .

Web links

Commons : Erich Grützner  - Collection of images

Individual evidence

1. ^ Federal Archives: Archives of the SED and the FDGB
2. ^ FDGB lexicon
3. ^ The leading personalities of the Leipzig Central Authority. (No longer available online.) Leipzig Regional Council, archived from the original on March 9, 2008 ; Retrieved April 5, 2013 . 
4. ↑ Paulinerverein: Especially now. We demand reconstruction. 2002.
5. ^ Resolution of the People's Chamber of December 1, 1967
6. ↑ Erich Grützner in the Munzinger archive , accessed on April 5, 2013 ( beginning of article freely accessible)
7. ↑ Radio Free Europe: THE NEW EAST GERMAN GOVERNMENT BODIES ( Memento of the original from November 29, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. dated December 13, 1971, in the Open Society Archive 
8. ^ Heinz Mohnhaupt, Hans-Andreas Schönfeldt, Annerose Gündel: Enforcement of norms in Eastern European post-war societies 1944–1989 . 2004, ISBN 3-465-03241-1 , pp. 254 ( limited preview in Google Book search).