Kurt Hot

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Kurt Heiss (born August 13, 1909 in Mannheim ; † November 26, 1976 in East Berlin ) was a communist functionary and journalist.

Life

Hot studied law at the universities of Berlin and Heidelberg, where he belonged to the communist student group. Because of his political activities he was expelled from the university. In 1927 he joined the KPD . In the last years of the Weimar Republic, he was a member of the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition and the League of Friends of the Soviet Union . He gained his first journalistic experience in 1932 as an editor of a communist newspaper. After the National Socialists came to power, he was interned as a “protective prisoner” in the Kislau concentration camp , from which he managed to escape. In October 1933 he went to the Saar area and continued his work as a communist editor there. Before the unification of the Saar area with the German Reich, he emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1935. There he worked for Radio Moscow . He interrupted this activity in 1936 and fought in the ranks of the interbrigades during the Spanish Civil War .

In 1947 he returned to the Soviet zone of occupation and worked for the Berliner Rundfunk as head of the Political Word department. At the same time he became a member of the SED . In 1948 he was appointed director of the Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk . A year later, the secretary of the Central Committee for Agitation and Propaganda, Hermann Axen , called him back from Leipzig to Berlin as part of the wave of party purges. Hot was considered to be true to the line; He was first on October 21, 1949 director of the Berlin radio and the German broadcaster , then on July 18, 1951 general director of the radio of the GDR and replaced Hans Mahle , who was accused of having operated a separation of radio from the party. When he took office in Berlin, he attached great importance to strengthening the SED group within the broadcasting houses. Looking at the dismissed German broadcaster director Heinz Schmidt , he said in a conference on October 31, 1949:

“By condemning the arrogant and double-faced behavior of Comrade Schmidt, the expanded party activity also vows to do everything possible to mobilize the entire operating group to fight to secure the political line in the broadcasting company and to display ideological vigilance in the future. "

On September 15, 1952, he was appointed first chairman of the State Broadcasting Committee. He held this position until 1956. At the beginning of 1957, he was appointed as the successor to Karl-Friedrich Wiese as Secretary General of the Society for Cultural Connections with Foreign Countries. From 1959, he took over the management of the SED district organ Ostsee-Zeitung as editor-in-chief in Rostock . In 1961 he changed to the medical journal Humanitas as editor-in-chief. In 1969, he was honored with the Patriotic Order of Merit in gold.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Neues Deutschland , October 22, 1949, p. 2.
  2. ^ New Germany , July 19, 1951, p. 1.
  3. ↑ Klaus Arnold: Cold War in the ether. The German broadcaster and the GDR's western propaganda . Münster: Lit, 2002. pp. 252 f. ISBN 3-8258-6180-5
  4. ↑ ibid., P. 250
personal data
SURNAME Hot Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German communist functionary and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH August 13, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Mannheim
DATE OF DEATH November 26, 1976
Place of death East Berlin