Karl-Heinz Bartsch

Karl-Heinz Bartsch (born November 25, 1923 in Löblau , Danziger Höhe district , Free City of Danzig ; † July 19, 2003 in Halle ) was a German agricultural scientist , university professor and politician of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in the German Democratic Republic ( GDR). He was Deputy Minister of Agriculture and briefly a member of the Central Committee (ZK) of the SED and a candidate for the Politburo. He was relieved of his functions in 1963 and expelled from the SED because he had kept quiet about his membership in the Waffen SS at the time of National Socialism .

Life

After graduating from the Horst-Wessel-Gymnasium in Danzig, Karl-Heinz Bartsch, the son of an estate manager , began an apprenticeship as an agricultural assistant in the Schwichow estate administration in 1941 and became a member of the Hitler Youth (HJ). In April 1941 he volunteered for the Waffen SS and was trained in the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf . In autumn 1942 Bartsch was used in France and from June 1943 in the battle of the Kursk Arc in the Soviet Union . In August 1943 he was wounded and received the Iron Cross, second class. Bartsch was in a military hospital in Weiden until January 1944 and was then used again in France as SS-Unterscharführer in the 17th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Götz von Berlichingen" . In May 1945, Bartsch became an American prisoner of war and was interned in Saalfelden in Austria until June .

At the end of 1945 Bartsch returned to Germany and worked as an agricultural assistant at the Lutzfeld estate administration in Saxony-Anhalt . He began studying at the Martin Luther University in Halle (Saale) , which he graduated in 1949 as a qualified farmer. In February 1949 Bartsch joined the SED, began an apprenticeship at the Institute for Animal Breeding at the University of Rostock and worked as a scientific assistant at the Institute for Animal Breeding Research in Dummerstorf near Rostock . In 1951 Bartsch received his doctorate with a comparative study on north-western European dairy cattle breeds .

In 1952 Bartsch became operations manager of VEG Clausberg and was a member of the district management of the SED in the Erfurt district from 1954 to 1960 . From 1958 to 1960 he was department head and chairman of the faculty council at the Academy of Agricultural Sciences and researched and published on the subject of "Breeding and performance testing of the native Thuringian Franconian cattle".

From 1960 to 1962 Bartsch was deputy head of the agriculture department at the Central Committee (ZK) of the SED and in 1961 received his habilitation at the Agricultural Faculty of the University of Rostock . From 1961 to the beginning of 1963 he was director of the Institute for Animal Breeding and Pet Genetics at the Agricultural Faculty of the Humboldt University in Berlin . From 1962 to the beginning of 1963 Bartsch was also Deputy Minister for Agriculture, Registration and Forestry in the GDR and became a professor at the beginning of 1963 .

On the VI. At the SED party congress , Bartsch became a member of the SED Central Committee on January 21, 1963 and was elected as a candidate for the Politburo at its first meeting . From 7 to 9 February, he was chairman of the newly formed Agricultural Council at the Council of Ministers of the GDR . On February 9, 1963, after reports in the West German media about his past under National Socialism, Bartsch was expelled from the Central Committee of the SED and dismissed as deputy minister because of “not being a member of the Waffen SS and misrepresenting facts from his past”. On March 28, 1963, he was expelled from the SED at the request of the Central Party Control Commission (ZPKK).

From April 1963 to February 1965 Bartsch worked in the VEG Groß Many in the Waren district and from March 1, 1965 to 1981 he was director of the VEG for animal breeding in Woldegk and head of the local base of the research center for animal production. From 1967 to 1989 Bartsch was an unofficial employee of the Ministry for State Security of the GDR under the code name Eckart and supplied material on Western European scientists. On December 3, 1972, Bartsch made a request for re-entry into the SED, which was rejected by the ZPKK on March 2, 1973. From 1981 until his retirement in 1988, Bartsch LPG was chairman of a heifer rearing company . From 1988 to 1990 he worked as a teacher at the agricultural engineering school in Neubrandenburg .

Honors

• 1959 Patriotic Order of Merit in silver

literature

• Siegfried Kuntsche and Wilfriede Otto :  Karl-Heinz Bartsch . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
• Henry Leide: Nazi Criminal and State Security . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005.
• Andreas Malycha and Peter Jochen Winters: The SED: History of a German party . CH Beck , Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-59231-7 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Karl-Heinz Bartsch . In: Der Spiegel , issue 47/1966.
2. ↑ Loyalty instead of remorse . In: Der Spiegel , edition 8/1963.