Fritz Koch (diplomat)

Fritz Koch (born December 6, 1910 in Dresden , † January 20, 1990 in Berlin ) was a German politician ( SED ), diplomat and foreign trade official. Among other things, he was President of the Chamber for Foreign Trade and Deputy Minister for Foreign Trade and Internal German Trade in the GDR .

Life

Koch attended elementary school , completed a commercial apprenticeship and then worked as an accountant . On July 1, 1940, he joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). During the Second World War he did military service .

After 1945 Koch worked in foreign trade. He became a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and from 1951 acted as General Director of the German Internal and External Trade Company (DIA) electrical engineering, and from 1953 as Head of the Export Department in the Ministry for Foreign and Internal German Trade (MAI). Koch traveled to Egypt in the fall of 1952 to prepare a trade agreement. On March 7, 1953, he and the Egyptian Foreign Minister Mahmud Fauzi signed a trade and payments agreement between Egypt and the GDR in Cairo . It was the first trade agreement at government level that the GDR was able to reach with a partner on the African continent.

From 1953 to 1955, Koch then worked as a special representative of the government of the GDR for the Near and Middle East , based in Cairo. During his time as special representative, the GDR was able to further expand its trade relations in the Arab world through the conclusion of trade agreements with Lebanon (1953), Sudan and Syria (both 1955).

Afterwards Koch worked until 1958 as head of the main department for trade policy Europe in the MAI. From September 1958 to 1962, Koch was President of the Chamber for Foreign Trade. From 1962 to 1964 he was deputy minister for foreign trade and domestic German trade and was head of the heavy machinery and plant engineering division. From 1964 to 1968 he was a trade councilor at the embassy in Czechoslovakia . From 1969 he worked as a department head in the MAI. On October 13, 1974, he welcomed the Romanian President Nicolae Ceaușescu as director of the GDR exhibition at the Bucharest fair.

Koch died at the age of 79.

Awards

• Medal of Merit of the GDR
• Patriotic Order of Merit in bronze (1960) and in silver (1969)
• Honorary Degree of Honored Activist (1985)

literature

• Federal Ministry for All-German Issues (Ed.): SBZ biography . Deutscher Bundes-Verlag, Berlin 1964, p. 177.
• Walter Habel (Ed.): Who is who? The German who's who . Volume II. Arani-Verlag, Berlin-Grunewald 1965, p. 167.
• Andreas Herbst (eds.), Winfried Ranke, Jürgen Winkler: This is how the GDR worked. Volume 3: Lexicon of functionaries (= rororo manual. Vol. 6350). Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1994, ISBN 3-499-16350-0 , p. 177.
• Rosemarie Preuss: Koch, Fritz . In: Gabriele Baumgartner, Dieter Hebig (Hrsg.): Biographisches Handbuch der SBZ / DDR. 1945–1990 . Volume 1: Abendroth - Lyr . KG Saur, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-598-11176-2 , p. 410.
• Olaf Kappelt : Brown Book GDR. Nazis in the GDR . 2nd Edition. Berlin historica, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-939929-12-3 , p. 393.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Wolfgang G. Schwanitz : Egypt - Two Kinds of Germans in the Cold War  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: Comparativ , Heft 2 (2006), pp. 11–29.  
2. ^ Karl Wilhelm Fricke : Relations between East Berlin and Cairo . In: SBZ archive , volume 3 (1965), p. 33f.
3. ^ Hermann Wentker : Foreign policy within narrow limits. The GDR in the international system 1949–1989 . Oldenbourg, Munich 2007, p. 115.
4. ↑ Bucharest fair opened by Nicolae Ceaușescu . In: Neues Deutschland , October 14, 1974, p. 5.
5. ^ Obituary notice in the Berliner Zeitung of February 20, 1990, p. 14.
6. ↑ Commendable work recognized . In: Neues Deutschland , January 11, 1985, p. 8.