Günther Wagenlehner

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Günther Wagenlehner (born November 19, 1923 in Oederan , † June 25, 2006 in Bonn ) was a German political scientist .

biography

Wagenlehner took an active part in the Second World War from 1941 and in 1945 was captured by the British as a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht . After his release he went back to Oederan and was arrested there by NKVD officers on August 15, 1945 . He came to the special camps in Bautzen and Mühlberg . After attempting to escape in 1946 and protesting against an extension of his captivity in 1948, he was sentenced in 1949 to 25 years of forced labor in a prison camp in the Soviet Union . Wagenlehner returned to Germany in October 1955 after ten years .

Immediately after his return in 1955, Wagenlehner studied political science, sociology, history and economics in Hamburg. With his work Lenin Between State and Communist Society he was awarded a Dr. phil. PhD. He then worked in the management staff of the Federal Ministry of Defense as a government director. There he was responsible for the press analysis of the Warsaw Pact media and for psychological defense. In this capacity he was a board member of the study society for time problems from 1972 until its dissolution in 1990 .

In 1962 Wagenlehner was a founding member of the Association of European Journalists and was later its President for 28 years.

In 1992 he traveled to Moscow with Helmut Kohl , where he was able to establish contact with the state archives that kept files on previous convictions of German prisoners of war. In order to process this data, he founded the Institute for Archive Evaluation in Bonn in 1993 .

In 2003 he received the Friedland Prize for Homecomers .

Works

  • The Soviet economic system and Karl Marx . 1960
  • Lenin between the state and communist society . 1961
  • Communism without a future: the new program of the CPSU . 1962
  • The Soviet justification of the intervention in the ČSSR . 1968
  • Escalation in the Middle East: The Political and Psychological Issues of Conflict . 1968
  • State or Communism: Lenin's Decision Against Communist Society . 1970
  • Who Owns the Soviet Union? The rule of the three hundred thousand . 1980
  • Farewell to communism: the decline of the communist idea from Marx to Gorbachev . 1987
  • The files of the SMT convicted German - archive evaluation in Moscow in wrong overcome-SED Dictatorship and Resistance , 1996, ISBN 3-931-575-17-9 (PDF; 330 kB)
  • with Klaus-Dieter Müller, Konstantin Nikischkin (ed.): The tragedy of captivity in Germany and in the Soviet Union 1941–1956 (= writings of the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism . Vol. 5). Böhlau, Cologne a. a. 1998, ISBN 3-412-04298-6 .
  • (Ed.) The German Question and International Security , 1988, Bernard & Graefe Verlag, ISBN 978-3-763758494
  • The Russian efforts to rehabilitate the German citizens persecuted between 1941 and 1956. Documentation and guide . 1999

literature

personal data
SURNAME Wagenlehner, Günther
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German political scientist
DATE OF BIRTH November 19, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Oederan
DATE OF DEATH June 25, 2006
Place of death Bonn