Kurt Edel

Kurt Edel (born  September 17, 1920 in Weißenfels ; †  March 2, 1987 in East Berlin ) was a German athlete and high-ranking sports official in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). From 1951 to 1955 he was President of the National Olympic Committee for East Germany .

Life

Kurt Edel was born in Weissenfels in 1920 and in 1940 belonged to the team of the Berlin Sports Club , which won the German athletics team championship. After the Second World War , in 1945 and 1946 he completed a sports teacher degree at the University of Halle and then at the Institute for Physical Education in Hamburg . In 1946 he was starting German champion over 400 meters for Hamburger SV and with the 4 x 400 meter relay , after he had already won the zone championship of the British occupation zone in the 400 meter run in the same year . As an anti-fascist he did not agree with the inconsistent denazification in Hamburg, he returned to the Soviet occupation zone . In 1948 and 1949 he won the zone championship over 400 meters in the Soviet zone of occupation. From 1947 to 1949 he worked as an employee for physical training at the Brandenburg State Police Department and briefly as the main advisor for sports issues at the headquarters of the German People's Police .

In 1951 he became the first president of the National Olympic Committee for East Germany . In the internal German negotiations with representatives of the West German National Olympic Committee for Germany , he was not recognized as an equal partner because of the West German claim to sole representation . In addition, there were mutual acceptance problems because, as a younger anti-fascist SED member, he had to deal with older sports officials such as Adolf Friedrich von Mecklenburg , Carl Diem or Karl Ritter von Halt . The negotiations with the representatives of the NOK for Germany and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on the status of the GDR athletes and the NOK for East Germany went without acceptable results for the GDR leadership, so that no athletes from the GDR at the 1952 Olympic Games participated. Karl Ritter von Halt had the talks with the GDR representatives about the formation of an all-German team for the 1952 Olympics in such a way “that they had to be inconclusive”. Four years later, Kurt Edel resigned at the request of the IOC after the NOK for East Germany was under his Leadership had terminated the Lausanne agreement to set up an all-German team with the National Olympic Committee for Germany . From 1960 to 1970 he was Secretary General of the Olympic Society of the GDR. He died in East Berlin in 1987 and remained a member of the GDR NOK until his death.

literature

• Volker Kluge:  Noble, Kurt . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 , p. 206.
• Noble, Kurt. In: Klaus Amrhein: Biographical Handbook on the History of German Athletics 1898-1998. Second edition. Leichtathletik-Fördergesellschaft, Darmstadt 1999, p. 98.
• Arnd Krüger : Sport and Politics. From gymnastics father Jahn to state amateur . Hanover: Torch Bearer, 1975; ISBN 3-7716-2087-2 .

Footnotes

1. ^ Karl Ritter von Halt to Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer , May 25, 1951; Quote from Tobias Blasius: Olympic Movement, Cold War and Germany Policy 1949-1972. Peter Lang - Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, Frankfurt am Main, 2001, ISBN 9783631381823 , p. 85