Karl-Heinz Gerstner

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Karl-Heinz Gerstner (born November 15, 1912 in Charlottenburg ; † December 14, 2005 in Kleinmachnow ) was a German journalist and unofficial employee of the secret services of the Soviet Union ( KGB ) and the GDR ( MfS ).

Life

childhood and education

Gerstner was the illegitimate son of the high-ranking diplomat Karl Ritter . In 1921 he became a member of the Bündische Jugend and the scouts . As the winner in a speaker competition for Berlin students, Gerstner was able to attend the Tabor Academy Massachusetts in the USA for six months in 1928 . From 1930 he belonged to the left wing of the youth organization Deutsche Jungenschaft from November 1, 1929, which tended towards the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) . In these circles he met Friedrich Wolf , Harro Schulze-Boysen , Eberhard Koebel (tusk) and Heinrich Graf von Einsiedel, among others . From 1931 to 1935 Gerstner studied law at the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin. In 1931 he joined the socialist Red student group there . Gerstner earned the money for his living at Deutsche Bank . In the evening he took on from the end of 1932 Repetitorium of Kurt Georg Kiesinger in part. At the suggestion of the head of the legal department of Deutsche Bank, Gerstner also wrote a doctoral thesis on fiduciary transactions , with which the University of Erlangen awarded him a Dr. jur. PhD.

Period of National Socialism until 1940

On May 1, 1933, Gerstner became a member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) under the number 2,673,178 . After the First State Exam in 1935 Gerstner was within his legal training first for half a year at the District Court Rheinberg active and out in a company specializing in economic issues Berlin law office, which belonged to two lawyers of Jewish origin. In 1936, Gerstner successfully applied to the German Chamber of Commerce in Paris for the next stage in his legal clerkship . In addition to his good knowledge of French, Gerstner attributed this to the name of his father, who worked in a managerial position in the Foreign Office , but who did not know about his application. After a few weeks at the training station, Gerstner took hold of when he was offered paid employment in a newly created department of the Chamber of Commerce and interrupted his traineeship training. Shortly before the start of the war , he was withdrawn from France with all German employees in August 1939. In February 1940 he passed his assessor examination at the Berlin Court of Appeal . Shortly thereafter, he received the summons to muster . Because of the consequences of spinal polio , Gerstner was exempted from military service. At the same time the radio department of the Foreign Office had offered him a job because of his good knowledge of French.

During the Second World War

On April 1, 1940, Gerstner became an employee of the radio department and translated propaganda texts from German into French. According to Gerstner, he did not do this as a civil servant, but as a "scientific assistant", that is how all non-civil servants of the foreign higher service were described. The broadcasting department of the Foreign Office, which the Foreign Minister wanted to carry out propaganda abroad, was involved in disputes with the Propaganda Ministry (RMVP), which also felt responsible for this task. When the department head Gerhard Rühle was looking for a person shortly after Gerstner took up his duties, who would have enough authority to possibly assert himself in a dispute with the RMVP, Gerstner recommended his tutor Kurt Georg Kiesinger . Kiesinger was invited to an interview a few days later on April 5 and accepted. He was hired as a conscientious scientist and released from military service. Kiesinger thus escaped the war effort, because he had already received a draft notice.

After the defeat of France , Gerstner was requested by the new German ambassador Otto Abetz for the economic department of the embassy in Paris. From June 30, 1940 to the end of May 1944, Gerstner worked as a research assistant in the economic department of the German embassy in Paris. According to Gerstner's own statement, it was a continuation of his activity as a scientific assistant. During his work at the embassy, ​​Gerstner supported the Resistance by sending messages and issuing permits to the unoccupied zone of France, especially for Jewish families. From autumn 1944 to May 1945 Gerstner was an official employee of the Foreign Office in Berlin, which, however, had no use for him. Instead, he did illegal political work in socialist resistance groups in Berlin-Wilmersdorf .

After 1945 in Berlin and the GDR

On May 2, 1945 Gerstner was appointed second deputy mayor of Berlin-Wilmersdorf by the Soviet local commandant. After Wilmersdorf, which according to the decisions of the Yalta Conference belonged to the British sector of Berlin, was occupied by the British armed forces in June 1945, Gerstner was suspected of being a senior Nazi official in the German embassy in Paris on July 24, 1945 arrested by the British military police and handed over to the Soviet occupation forces. He was brought to the NKVD remand prison in the underground animal cadaver fresh storage cellars of the former Veterinary Medical Institute in Luisenstrasse in Berlin-Mitte, from where he was transferred on September 21, 1945 to special camp No. 3 in the NKVD restricted area Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. After producing numerous affidavits from members of the Resistance about the cooperation with him, Gerstner was released on January 21, 1946. According to Gerstner's account, he had succeeded in establishing contact with his wife via receipt . It took half a year to get the material he had requested from France. The Soviet investigators had received the exonerating material from the hands of his wife, who had entered the Soviet restricted area in Hohenschönhausen under the fire of a guard. In his memoirs, Gerstner summed up: "I owe her my life".

In fact, Gerstner had been recruited as an agent by Soviet "organs". Immediately after his release from Hohenschönhausen, Gerstner applied for membership to the re-founded KPD. The party rejected the application because of his NSDAP membership, work for the German embassy in Paris and imprisonment in Hohenschönhausen. As early as July 1946, the occupying powers allowed Gerstner to visit France again. His employment in the German Central Administration for Interzonal and Foreign Trade , which was set up by the Soviet military administration in 1946, tried to prevent the Personnel Policy Department (PPA) of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). The PPA had strong doubts about Gerstner's assertion that he had become a member of the NSDAP in 1933 on behalf of communists, and speculated about a "connection" to the Soviet state security. Gerstner himself found connection to discussion groups around Iwan Katz and Hans Oliva-Hagen in the American sector and was friends with Wolfgang Leonhard . In Wilmersdorf, Gerstner set up a discussion group whose participants included Rainer Hildebrandt , Günter Neumann and Fritz Teppich .

From 1948 to May 1989 Gerstner was a business journalist and from 1973 "chief reporter" of the Berliner Zeitung , which from 1953 was the SED organ for Berlin. At the request of the editors, he moved to East Berlin in 1949 , and from March 1953 Gerstner lived in Kleinmachnow . The SED only accepted him in 1957 after his tenth application. From 1955 to 1988 he was the weekly commentator on a Sunday economic review on Radio DDR I , which he always concluded with the words “objective, critical and optimistic as always”. From 1965 to 1978 he was involved in the television program Prisma with economic considerations, the presentation of political contexts and some criticism of the situation in the GDR. Several times he has been voted a TV favorite by the audience . Gerstner was considered an institution in the GDR and informed a large audience with his economic articles in newspapers as well as on radio and television. Gerstner retired in May 1989 and published his autobiography Objective, Critical, Optimistic in 1999 .

From 1975 Gerstner worked for the MfS as an unofficial employee under the code name Ritter. According to Götz Aly, there are thousands of pages of spy reports in the archive of the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi files . Gerstner received an additional salary of 2000 marks for it. For example, the actor Manfred Krug reports in his autobiography how Gerstner wanted to listen to him after his friend Wolf Biermann was expatriated. That happened when Gerstner visited him in April 1977, shortly after he had submitted an application to leave the GDR. In this conversation Krug even accused Gerstner of working for the MfS. The report by IM Ritter alias Gerstner has also been preserved. There IM Ritter stated that Krug was keeping a diary that Krug had thought he was an MfS informant, but that he had talked to him trustingly. In his memoir, Gerstner only reported that he had passed on statements by foreign diplomats to the MfS's Head Office for Enlightenment (HVA). In 1982 Gerstner was awarded the Patriotic Order of Merit in gold. In 1987 he also received the bar of honor . In a letter to the editor of the Berliner Zeitung , Gerstner contradicted Götz Aly's book review: “Aly claims that in the book I kept silent about my work for the Stasi, which is wrong ... I was what both sides wanted and knew how to use, a back channel . "

Gerstner married Sibylle Boden in 1945 , later founder of the GDR fashion magazine Sibylle and is the father of the writer Daniela Dahn and the painter and writer Sonja Gerstner .

Fonts

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The information on Gerstner's years up to the end of 1939 is based on his autobiography Objective, Critical and Optimistic. A Sunday contemplation of life . Edition Ost, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-932180-78-X , pp. 14–128.
  2. ↑ So Gerstner in his memoir: Objective, critical and optimistic. A Sunday contemplation of life . Edition Ost, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-932180-78-X , p. 121.
  3. ^ Philipp Gassert : Kurt Georg Kiesinger 1904–1988. Chancellor between the ages . DVA, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-421-05824-5 , pp. 105ff.
  4. ^ Philipp Gassert: Kurt Georg Kiesinger 1904–1988. Chancellor between the ages . DVA, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-421-05824-5 , p. 105.
  5. ↑ Karl-Heinz Gerstner: Objective, critical and optimistic. A Sunday contemplation of life . Edition Ost, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-932180-78-X , p. 124.
  6. ↑ Bernd-Rainer Barth , Helmut Müller-Enbergs :  Karl-Heinz Gerstner . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
  7. ↑ Karl-Heinz Gerstner: Objective, critical and optimistic. A Sunday contemplation of life . Edition Ost, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-932180-78-X , p. 183.
  8. ↑ Peter Erler : "GPU basement". Detention centers and remand prisons of the Soviet secret services in Berlin (1945–1949) . Association of the Persecuted by Stalinists, Landesverband Berlin, Berlin 2005, p. 54f., On Gerstner p. 55.
  9. ↑ On this and the following see the autobiography of Karl-Heinz Gerstner: Sachlich, Kritisch, Optimist. Berlin 1999, pp. 225-231.
  10. ^ Information in the files of the MfS zu Gerstner from August 1958. For Gerstner's activities in the years 1946/47 see Michael Kubina: Von Utopie, Resistance and Cold War. The untimely life of the Berlin councilor communist Alfred Weiland (1906–1978) . Lit, Münster / Hamburg / Berlin / London 2001, ISBN 3-8258-5361-6 , pp. 176–179, p. 178 for recruitment.
  11. ↑ a b Götz Aly: The respected GDR journalist Karl-Heinz Gerstner has presented his memoirs and is silent about his path from the capable Nazi diplomat to the busy Stasi agent "Ritter": Critical, optimistic and lying. In: Berliner Zeitung . February 26, 2000, accessed February 27, 2020 . Reprinted in: Götz Aly: Rasse und Klasse. Research on the German essence. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-10-000419-1 , pp. 210-215.
  12. ↑ “I'm done with them”. In: Der Spiegel . March 25, 1996, accessed on February 26, 2020 (excerpt from the memoirs of the actor Manfred Krug about Gerstner's activity as a spy for the MfS after Wolfgang Biermann's expatriation in November 1976).
  13. ↑ On the matter also Bernd-Rainer Barth , Helmut Müller-Enbergs :  Gerstner, Karl-Heinz . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
  14. ↑ Karl-Heinz Gerstner: A special letter to the editor: Karl-Heinz Gerstner's response to Götz Aly's criticism of his memoirs: "Neither a hero nor a coward". In: Berliner Zeitung . March 11, 2000, accessed February 27, 2020 .
  15. ↑ For the term back-channel see Track II diplomacy in the English language Wikipedia, see also Wjatscheslaw Jerwandowitsch Keworkow
personal data
SURNAME Gerstner, Karl-Heinz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist, unofficial employee of the GDR State Security
DATE OF BIRTH November 15, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin-Charlottenburg
DATE OF DEATH December 14, 2005
Place of death Kleinmachnow