Helmut Brandt (politician, 1911)

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Helmut Alfred Brandt (born July 16, 1911 in Berlin ; † October 31, 1998 in Königswinter ) was a city councilor for the CDU in Berlin and a member of the German People's Council . Between 1950 and 1964 he was imprisoned as a political prisoner in GDR prisons.

Life

Brandt was born in 1911 as the son of a police officer in Berlin-Spandau . He studied law and economics and received his doctorate in both subjects. He then worked at Deutsche Bank . Since 1929 he was politically active as a secretary in the German People's Party (DVP), for which he worked in the Reichstag until 1933 . After a brief employment at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for International Law , Brandt started a legal practice in 1938. During the Second World War he was deployed on the Western and Eastern Fronts and in the Ministry of Armaments. After a short American captivity , he returned to Berlin in June 1945. There he opened a law firm and accepted a teaching position at Berlin University .

As an expert on legal issues, Brandt was one of the founders of the CDU in Berlin. When this split as a result of increased political pressure in 1948, he joined the pro-Soviet regional association in the eastern part of the city. In West Berlin , he was therefore accused of splitting the CDU. In the same year he entered the First German People's Council for the CDU . At the same time, in the summer of 1948, Brandt's confidante Walter Bredendiek became a university advisor and youth representative on the East Berlin state board of the CDU, which had spun off as a working group from the entire Berlin state association, as well as CDU representative in the Democratic Block of Berlin University. In mid-July 1948 Brandt became chairman of the sub-committee for university issues in the cultural policy committee of the main board of the CDU. Because of his bourgeois-conservative attitude, however, he was soon ousted by the pro- communist forces around Arnold Gohr , who succeeded him as chairman of the regional association in the Soviet sector of Berlin. With this, the youth officer Walter Bredendiek left the regional association. From October 1949 Brandt worked as a secretary of state in the German Democratic Republic - Ministry of Justice . In May 1950, he asked Justice Minister Max Fechner ( SED ) and CDU chairman Otto Nuschke to reissue the Waldheim trials , in which 3,324 former inmates of Soviet special camps had been sentenced for alleged Nazi crimes . In September 1950 he was arrested on the street by employees of the Ministry for State Security (MfS). Since no incriminating material could be found despite almost four years of pre- trial detention (including in the basement prison of the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen remand prison ), the MfS arbitrarily assigned Brandt to the alleged “conspiratorial group” around Georg Dertinger . In June 1954 the Supreme Court of the GDR sentenced him to ten years in prison in a secret trial for alleged “subversive work” .

After Otto Nuschke's petition for clemency, he was released from the Bautzen II special prison in early September 1958 . In order to prevent an appearance in front of Western journalists, however, he was arrested again only 36 hours later, while trying to get to West Berlin. After another pre-trial detention in Hohenschönhausen , the Frankfurt (Oder) district court sentenced him in March 1959 to ten years imprisonment for alleged espionage, inducement to flee from the republic as well as propaganda and agitation that endanger the state .

After 5095 days in custody, Brandt was one of the first political prisoners to be ransomed by the Federal Republic in August 1964 . He moved to the Rhineland , worked at various universities and worked as a scientific reviewer for the German Bundestag until 1977 . Brandt, who was denied a renewed political career with the CDU , joined the CSU in 1977 . After reunification , he took an active part in reviewing the Waldheim trials . In 1998 he died after a long illness in Königswinter near Bonn .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Karl Wilhelm Fricke : Historical revisionism from an MfS perspective ( Memento from June 27, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 132 kB)
personal data
SURNAME Brandt, Helmut
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Brandt, Helmut Alfred (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (CDU), MdV
DATE OF BIRTH July 16, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH October 31, 1998
Place of death Koenigswinter