Hans-Joachim Laabs

Hans-Joachim Laabs (born April 1, 1921 in Regenwalde in Western Pomerania ; † July 8, 2009 in Schöneiche near Berlin ) was a German politician ( SED ). From 1950 to 1952 he was Minister for Popular Education of the State of Mecklenburg and briefly Minister for Popular Education of the GDR .

Life

The baker's son grew up in Kolberg , where he graduated from high school in 1939. In the same year he joined the NSDAP and was drafted into the Reich Labor Service . During the subsequent service in the Wehrmacht , Laabs was sentenced to probation at the front for communist activities and degradation of military strength.

As a prisoner of war, he returned from the United States in 1945 and began working as a new teacher in Hornkaten, Mecklenburg . In 1946 Laabs became a member of the SED. In 1947 he was headmaster in Grabow in Mecklenburg, a year later he was a school councilor for the district of Ueckermünde and from 1949 in the city of Schwerin . In 1950 Laabs was appointed head of the education and teaching department at the Mecklenburg Ministry of Education, and in the same year he succeeded Gottfried Grünberg as Minister of Education in Mecklenburg.

On August 14, 1952, Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl appointed Laabs State Secretary in the GDR Ministry for National Education and appointed his predecessor Elisabeth Zaisser to the post of minister. In the fall of 1953, Laabs was initially charged with managing the ministry after Wilhelm Zaisser's wife had to say goodbye in the course of the Zaisser / Herrnstadt affair. On March 18, 1954, the government officially appointed Laabs Minister for Popular Education. After the Volkskammer election in 1954 and the subsequent formation of a new government, Laabs vacated his ministerial chair and worked again as State Secretary in the Ministry of Popular Education until 1958. In 1958, Laabs was removed from office for " revisionism ".

From 1958 to 1963 he was a district school councilor in Frankfurt (Oder) and then deputy chief director of the Volk und Wissen publishing house . In 1966, Laabs started working at the German Central Pedagogical Institute in Berlin with a work on the character of school policy in advanced West African nation states. Illustrated by the example of the Republics of Guinea, Mali and Ghana PhD . From June 1973 to March 1981 Laabs was the main director of the Volk und Wissen publishing house; at the same time he took over the management of the field of international educational policy at the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the GDR (APW). In 1981 he was appointed Professor of International Educational Policy at the APW. He retired a year later. Laabs lived in Schöneiche near Berlin until his death and is the father of the gay activist Klaus Laabs .

Awards

• 1954 Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Wander Medal
• 1970 Patriotic Order of Merit in bronze, 1979 in silver and 1986 in gold
• 1976 Wilhelm Bracke Medal in gold
• 1977 Honorary title of Honored Publisher of the USSR

literature

• Olaf Kappelt : Brown Book GDR. Nazis in the GDR . Elisabeth Reichmann Verlag, Berlin 1981, p. 277.
• 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. 455.
• Short biography for:  Laabs, Hans-Joachim . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Neues Deutschland , May 2, 1986, p. 4.