Heinz-Bernhard Zorn

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Heinz-Bernhard Zorn (also Heinz Zorn ; born April 28, 1912 in Berlin ; † May 15, 1993 in Berlin) was a German officer and fighter pilot. He was major i. G. ( in the general staff service ) of the Wehrmacht and as major general of the National People's Army (NVA) of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) involved in the development and expansion of the NVA's air forces for 24 years . The latent remaining distance, which the SED state used to maintain due to its origins and past, contradicted its life's work and was ultimately a painful disappointment for Heinz Zorn.

Life and career

Heinz Zorn was born as the only child of the civil servant Heinz Zorn and his wife Luise in Berlin-Tempelhof . There he attended high school and graduated from high school . From 1926 to 1930 he was a member of the Freischar Junge Nation . Even here, the high school student was considered mentally and physically above average. The 17-year-old Zorn decided towards the end of school for a military career. At the end of 1929, as a volunteer applicant, he received his draft notice for the 5th (Prussian) Infantry Regiment (IR 5) in Stettin .

Military career

Weimar Republic

Immediately after being called up, Heinz Zorn passed a special aptitude test by the Reichswehr , which was camouflaged and secretly recruited young potential pilots for the future air force.

First he came from April 1, 1930 as a flight student at the German Aviation School in Schleissheim near Munich, which followed from April 1, 1931, an infantry training in the training battalion of the IR 5 in Greifswald . In 1932 he was assigned to the 1st Battalion (IR 5) as a flag boy for a year . This was followed by a two-year training at the Infantry School in Dresden-Friedrichstadt , today's Army Officer School . Here he became an enthusiastic listener of the modern art of war , which was then taught by the leading military, such as Erwin Rommel , who taught here until 1933. Since the pilot's examination he has participated in the annual flight freshness maintenance courses.

Promotions

Period of National Socialism and World War II

In 1934 he was appointed officer, first employed as a company officer of the 5th company in Neuruppin (II./IR 5) and the temporary leave of absence from the Reichswehr. This was in connection with the visit to the school of the Luftsportbund in Jüterbog , the training as a swarm leader and re-entry into the air force of the Wehrmacht as head of an aviation technology company.

This was followed by various short-term assignments, for example in 1935 to the fighter pilot school at Faßberg Air Base , 1936 in Giebelstadt and in Kampfgeschwader 55 as a squadron TO and later as a squadron captain . In 1936 he became company commander of the guard company at the mayor of the Luftwaffe .

In 1941, Captain Zorn was assigned as Ia to Luftgaukommando II in Posen (now Poznań), which moved to Warsaw and Minsk at the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union . Here he was promoted to Quartermaster 1 with responsibility for supplying the flying formations of Air Fleet 2 and was transferred to Kermi in Finland in the same year with a part of the Luftgaukommando V.

In 1944 Zorn was transferred to the staff of the General of the Air Force in Bucharest , where he was named Major i. G. went into Romanian captivity and was handed over to the Soviet side. In the Soviet Union he joined the NKFD and in 1945 attended the Antifa school in Krasnogorsk near Moscow . From there he went to teach history at the central Antifa school in Ryazan and Ogre near Riga , from where he was released back home in 1949.

Return to Germany

In 1949 Heinz Zorn returned from captivity to post-war Germany to Berlin and, under the impression of collapse and motivated by his work in the NKFD, became a member of the SED .

During this period the Soviet occupation caused in their occupation zone building kasernierter police readiness and - schools under the auspices of the Department for Schools (VfS) or to the founding of the GDR in October 1949, the General Administration of Education (HVA), which were later combined and the core the NVA and the MfNV formed. In addition to tried and tested party cadres, former Wehrmacht soldiers, who were considered useful idiots but were initially indispensable, were placed in leading positions in the HfS and HVA.

In July 1949, Zorn came to the VfS / HVA with the rank of chief inspector (major general) as head of the main inspection department, where his experience in the air force was initially hardly in demand. When the previous head, Inspector General Wilhelm Zaisser , was promoted to Minister for State Security in February 1950, Zorn was deputy head of the DVP's Head Office for Education from February 8 to April 26, 1950 and was then replaced by Inspector General Heinz Hoffmann .

But as early as 1950 there was a personal meeting with Army General Tschuikow , who was then head of the Soviet Control Commission (SKK) and commander in chief of the GSSD , in which he was commissioned to help build the future NVA air force.

The corresponding preparatory work took place in the department of the HVA in Berlin-Johannisthal and were under the command of Heinz Kessler . Anger, meanwhile promoted to colonel, became his chief of staff . The young Kessler was able to build on the expertise of his deputy. The Kessler-Zorn duo led the zbV department, which in 1952 became the Volkspolizei-Luft (VP-Luft). For reasons of disguise, the VP-Luft was called the administration of the aero clubs. To this day, real names and camouflage names are confused, which speaks for the secrecy and the effectiveness of simple (Russian) rules of covered troop command.

General in the GDR

On October 1, 1952, Zorn was appointed major general. From 1955 to 1956 he was chief VP-Luft (pseudonym Administration of the Aeroclubs) m. d. F. b. and from March 1, 1956, the day the NVA was founded, first chief of the air force (LSK). Colonel Gerhard Bauer became the first head of air defense (LV) .

From December 1955 to April 1957 Kessler went to Moscow for general staff training at the General Staff Academy of the USSR "Kliment Voroshilov" . During this time the former air force major was interim at the head of the NVA air force. His deputy for flight training was Colonel Walter Lehweß-Litzmann , his former superior from his time in Kemi, Finland .

Despite this top use, the subjective feeling remained that, because of his origin and past, he apparently did not have the full confidence of the political elite of the GDR. It is also undisputed that at that time there was hardly anyone who could have replaced anger, that his behavior did not give him any reason to be suspicious and that his Soviet adviser, also in the rank of general, trusted him.

After successfully completing his studies and returning from Moscow, Kessler took over the leadership of the newly formed LSK / LV command and Zorn was to become his deputy and chief of staff again. But it turned out differently.

The hitherto good understanding between the commander and chief of staff was clouded by the decision of the SED Politburo on February 15, 1957, according to which all former Wehrmacht officers were to be gradually removed from the NVA. Since Kessler wanted to hold on to anger, he took him out of the line of fire by sending him to Moscow for general staff training. Zorn swallowed the bitter pill, graduated with a grade of good and would now have been predestined to take responsibility as Chief of Staff for building up the NVA air force as a modern armed force. The then Defense Minister Willi Stoph decided differently and ordered the relocation of the recently disappointed general to Dresden to the Friedrich Engels Military Academy as commander of the LSK / LV section . With that, anger was pacified for the next ten years.

From 1969 to 1974 it was then used for “special purposes” at the German Institute for Military History in Potsdam . Zorn was retired on December 31, 1974.

Foreign courier of the head office clearing up

Almost three years after leaving the NVA, he was now 65 years old, and in 1977 he was recruited and commissioned by the MfNV's Enlightenment Headquarters for intelligence activities as a foreign courier in the so-called non-socialist economic system. Between 1979 and 1980 there were four missions in Belgium , the Federal Republic of Germany and France . In August 1980 he was arrested at a meeting with the alleged source Dornier , a Belgian journalist, in Lille, France . In 1982, the seventy-year-old returned to the GDR as part of an agent exchange .

Private

Zorn was married to Edith Hauser, born Löwenstein (1910–1967), a Resistance fighter, who was in turn married to Harald Hauser for the first time . At the end of the 1980s, an application to visit his children in Mainfranken in the west was rejected and rejected by the MfS- Colonel Ehrhardt, then Deputy Operational of the Berlin District Administration.

Awards

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The generals and admirals of the NVA. Military history of the GDR A biographical handbook, p. 211. Ed. Military history research office by Rüdiger Wenzke , Klaus Froh
  2. ↑ Torsten Diedrich, Hans Ehlert u. Rüdiger Wenzke, In the service of the party - Handbook of the armed organs of the GDR, p. 263
  3. ^ Acknowledgments in Neues Deutschland on August 30, 1967
  4. ↑ Hans Ehlert, Armin Wagner: Comrade General! The military elite of the GDR in biographical sketches, Ch Links Verlag, Berlin, 2003
personal data
SURNAME Zorn, Heinz-Bernhard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Anger, Heinz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German officer and fighter pilot
DATE OF BIRTH April 28, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH May 15, 1993
Place of death Berlin