Hans-Joachim Seidowsky

Hans-Joachim Seidowsky , also: Hans Seidowsky (born October 7, 1932 in Leipzig ) was program director and head of the “International Program Exchange” department at German TV , the East German state television. In addition, Seidowsky had worked as an unofficial employee for the Ministry of State Security from 1957 .

Live and act

Seidowsky comes from a working class family; his parents Adolf and Alice Seidowsky are said to have been of Jewish descent, originally from Lithuania and communists; his father Adolf Seidowsky (born December 29, 1906) was imprisoned several times, was deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on December 13, 1940 and murdered on March 25, 1942 in the Nazi killing center in Bernburg .

Hans-Joachim Seidowsky attended elementary school in Leipzig until 1947 and then learned the hairdressing trade. After the skilled worker examination in 1950, he began studying at the workers and farmers faculty at the University of Leipzig . In 1952 he gained as the High School and went to Berlin, where he attended the Humboldt University a philosophy recorded -Studies. From 1954 to 1956 he studied again in Leipzig, in order to complete his studies in 1957 with a diploma in Berlin.

During his studies he specialized in questions of Marxist religious criticism, problems of the history of political clericalism, party and state politics in church issues, the relationship between Christianity and the socialist state From 1957 to 1961 he worked in the State Secretariat for Church Issues in the GDR, initially as a press officer, then as a personal advisor to State Secretary Werner Eggerath . At the same time he began working intensively at the Ministry for State Security as an IM under the code names Gerhard and Jochen . As early as 1956 he had reported for the Central Committee of the SED as an observer on the Catholic Day in Cologne. It was led by the main department XX / 4, which was responsible for church questions, but apparently also worked, and increasingly, for the main intelligence department .

From November 1961 he began an apprenticeship at the Institute for the History of the Peoples of the USSR at the Humboldt University under Eduard Winter . Here he was also awarded a doctorate in 1965 after completing his dissertation on the Reich Concordat. phil. PhD. At the same time he was an employee and temporarily head of the Wandlitz Institute , a conspiratorial object of the State Security in Berlin-Pankow for the evaluation and disinformation of church sources.

Under the legend that he was an idealistic young Marxist who was dissatisfied with the then government of the GDR, he managed to make a number of high-ranking contacts in church circles, for example with Erich Müller-Gangloff . With this he undertook a two-week trip to Italy in 1961 , during which he met Eduard Waetjen . In research it is controversial to what extent Seidowsky was able to influence Müller-Gangloff before he saw through him as a Stasi agent in 1964. Hubertus Knabe concludes from the available files that Müller-Gangloff was deliberately used to promote the interests of the SED in internal German dialogue. To Hans Jakob Stehle Seidowsky built a trusting relationship by provided him with internal documents of the Catholic Church in the GDR.

Seidowsky was able to successfully dispel internal suspicions of the Stasi that he might be a double agent . The suspicion remained that he might work for the KGB . He took care of relations with foreign churches and was the most important discussion partner of Provost Bill Williams and Paul Oestreicher on their projects in the GDR.

Seidowsky is now seen as the driving force behind the campaign against Eugen Gerstenmaier . From 1973 he worked directly for the Central Committee of the SED. He was secretly jointly responsible for planning Erich Honecker's visits to Italy in 1985 and to the Federal Republic of 1987. In negotiations with the Holy See for the establishment of diplomatic relations between the GDR and the Vatican, he was designated as ambassador.

His main official activity was with the German television radio , where he was a member of the scientific working group from 1969 and rose to the position of deputy of Heinz Adameck , the chairman of the state committee for television and the director for international program matters. In this capacity, as a program dealer , he was responsible for buying and selling television films and dubbing jobs and was often abroad, especially in Switzerland, where he handled program business through the Tarimex company . In 1987/1988, in connection with and as a result of the Honecker visit, he was involved in negotiations with the ARD, represented by Dietrich Schwarzkopf .

After the fall of the Berlin Wall , he worked for the Berlin media company Electronic Media Beteiligungsgesellschaft (EMG) , which was financed from SED party assets , and worked from April to October 1994 as managing director of HDA, the operator of the film center "High Definition Oberhausen" (HDO) . After Der Spiegel reported on his Stasi past, he officially resigned, but remained active as a consultant .

He later worked as a film dealer for Leo Kirch in the East .

Works

• The Reich Concordat of July 20, 1933 as a contribution of the political-clerical forces of the Catholic Church in Germany and the Vatican to the stabilization of the fascist dictatorship in Germany. Berlin, Humboldt-U., Phil. F., Diss. V. March 31, 1965

literature

• Jefferson Adams: Seidowsky, Hans-Joachim , in: Historical dictionary of German intelligence. (Historical dictionaries of intelligence and counterintelligence 11) Plymouth: Scarecrow Press 2009 ISBN 978-0-8108-5543-4 , pp. 414f
• Merrilyn Thomas: Communing with the enemy: covert operations, Christianity and Cold War politics in Britain and the GDR. Frankfurt etc .: Peter Lang 2005 ISBN 978-3-03910-192-4 , esp.p. 48 ff

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Thomas (lit.), p. 50, but that does not match Adolf Seidowsky's place of birth Leipzig in the memorial book - Victims of the persecution of Jews under the Nazi tyranny 1933–1945
2. ^ Entry on Adolf Wolf Seidowsky in the memorial book - Victims of the persecution of Jews under the National Socialist tyranny 1933–1945 , accessed on December 16, 2011.
3. ↑ CV in the dissertation.
4. ↑ Cf. Clemens Vollnhals (Ed.): The church policy of the SED and state security: an interim balance . Ch. Links Verlag , Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-86153-122-4 , p. 86.
5. ↑ Bernd Schäfer: State and Catholic Church in the GDR . Böhlau-Verlag, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 1998 (Writings of the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarian Research; Vol. 8) Zugl .: Halle, Univ., Diss., 1998 ISBN 3-412-04598-5 , p. 111.
6. ↑ Thomas (lit.), p. 53ff.
7. ^ Clemens Vollnhals: The church political department of the Ministry for State Security. The Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic, Department of Education and Research, 1997, p. 12f.
8. ↑ Hubertus Knabe: The infiltrated republic. Stasi in the west. Berlin: Propylaen 1999 ISBN 3-549-05589-7 , pp. 295-297.
9. ↑ See Stehle's late thanksgiving in Secret Diplomacy in the Vatican: the Popes and the Communists. Benziger 1993 ISBN 9783545250918 ; on the Stehle-Kanal see also Hubertus Knabe: The discreet charm of the GDR. Munich: Propylaen 2001 ISBN 9783549071373 and, critically, the review prisoner of prejudice , FAZ of July 27, 2001, accessed on December 12, 2011.
10. ↑ Thomas (lit.), p. 55.
11. ^ Adams (lit.), p. 135.
12. ↑ Bernd Schäfer: The Vatican and the GDR 1962–1989 , in: Ulrich Pfeil (Ed.): The GDR and the West. Transnational Relations 1949–1989 (research on GDR society), Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2001 ISBN 9783861532446 , pp. 257–272, here p. 264.
13. ↑ Care allowance from Zug. The ways of the East German film dealer Hans-Joachim Seidowsky , Der Spiegel issue of September 26, 1994, accessed on December 12, 2011
14. ^ Rüdiger Steinmetz: Continuities and breaks in German-German television before, on and after November 9, 1989 , in Gerlinde Frey-Vor / Rüdiger Steinmetz (ed.): Rundfunk in Ostdeutschland: Memories - Analyzes - Opinions . UVK-Verlagsgesellschaft, Konstanz 2003 (Yearbook Media and History; 2003) ISBN 3-89669-418-9 , pp. 9–22, here pp. 13f. ( Digital version  ( 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 .; PDF; 192 kB)  
15. ↑ Many tricks and little film , Der Spiegel issue 43/1998 of October 19, 1998, accessed on December 12, 2011.
16. ^ The Spiegel report about him in issue 39/1994 under the heading Der kleine Schalck is not accessible online. According to a statement by Der Spiegel in its 44/1994 issue , it contained several incorrect claims about the privacy and professional activity of Dr. Hans-Joachim Seidowsky, one of Leo Kirch's negotiating partners.