Kurt Vieweg

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Kurt Vieweg at the 13./14. Meeting of the People's Chamber of the GDR

Kurt Vieweg (born October 29, 1911 in Göttingen , † December 2, 1976 in Greifswald ) was one of the leading agricultural politicians in the early years of the GDR. At times he was General Secretary of the VdgB , a member of the People's Chamber and a member of the Central Committee of the SED .

Youth and Emigration

Kurt Vieweg was born in Göttingen as the son of a bank employee. After attending grammar school, he completed training as an agricultural assistant in Eisleben in 1930 and 1931. In his youth he was a member of the Wandervogel and Landvolk movement. In 1930 Vieweg joined the Hitler Youth , in which he remained until 1932, and made it up to the position of deputy Jungbannführer. At the same time, he worked for the KJVD from 1931 . In 1932 Vieweg finally became a member of the KJVD in Weißenfels and a member of the KPD . His communist activity in Germany first came to an end as an employee of the KJVD for Saxony-Anhalt.

In the autumn of 1933 Vieweg emigrated to Denmark. He initially worked for the International Red Aid in Lyngby and Gentofte . From 1935 until the occupation of the country in 1940, Vieweg was a guest student at the agricultural college in Copenhagen. At the same time, from 1936 he worked for the illegal KPD section leadership north. Vieweg belonged to a group around Walter Weidauer , which called itself the “Farmers 'Commission” and was supposed to establish contacts with farmers' circles in Germany. This group published the magazine “Bauernbriefe”, for which Vieweg wrote articles under the pseudonym “Oswald”. Since he did not necessarily appear to be a communist in public, he was officially able to study agriculture from the beginning of 1940. However, the German occupation in April 1940 forced Vieweg back into illegality. He spent the next few years in largely political inactivity. He was mainly concerned with creating material on Scandinavian agriculture for the Moscow KPD headquarters. In 1943 the KPD sent most of its members in Denmark to Sweden, including Vieweg. There he was briefly interned in a camp near Tyllesand. He then worked as a forest and factory worker. As head of the KPD group in Göteborg-Borås, it was here that he first came into contact with Herbert Wehner . Since Vieweg was able to prove that he was a guest student in Copenhagen, he was allowed to resume his studies from 1944 as part of a Swedish aid program for Scandinavian Hitler refugees at the Agricultural University of Ultuna in Uppsala . During his stay in Sweden he was mainly influenced by the agricultural policy program of the Swedish SAP . This influence was evident in his program “The Peasants and the Coming Democratic Republic”, published in 1944, in which he already called for the establishment of cooperatives, but also spoke out in favor of retaining the capitalist mode of production. This program and his studies were proof of Vieweg's profile as the agricultural expert of the KPD in exile. In the spring of 1945 Vieweg returned to Denmark. He first became secretary of the anti-fascist refugee committee in Copenhagen and was later employed as an employee of the Danish Ministry of Social Affairs. Before his return to Germany, Vieweg was also the political leader of the Copenhagen KPD group.

Back in Germany

In the summer of 1946, Vieweg and his wife Gertrud returned to Halle via Poland to the Soviet occupation zone . As a former KPD member, he became a member of the SED. He was assigned by the officials of the VdgB and became their deputy state secretary for Saxony-Anhalt. However, he soon rose to the position of state secretary. In mid-August 1947 Vieweg was entrusted with the post of General Secretary of the VdgB as successor to Anton Jadasch, not least because of his professional qualifications . The 1st German Farmers' Congress, at which the regional associations were dissolved and a main association founded, legitimized this decision through an official election. Vieweg now developed a lively activity and gave lectures at various universities on his agricultural policy ideas, in which he repeatedly defended the family farm. He consistently spoke out in favor of maintaining the agricultural structures of that time and for the "full development of the private initiative of the farms". This scientific activity led to his appointment as a full member of the German Academy for Agricultural Sciences in 1951. In 1948 Vieweg was appointed to the secretariat of the German Economic Commission (DWK), the forerunner of the GDR government.

In January 1949 Kurt Vieweg was co-opted into the party executive committee of the SED and on the III. SED party congress in 1950 elected to the central committee of the SED, in which he remained until 1954, where he was appointed secretary for agricultural issues. In this function, Vieweg drafted several, including all-German agricultural programs within the framework of the Soviet policy on Germany at the time, which also incorporated German and Scandinavian social-democratic programs, but also ideas of the Reichsnährstand . In the Volkskammer election on October 19, 1950, he was also elected as a member of the SED, which he remained for the entire first election period. On behalf of the Central Committee of the SED, Vieweg also began to set up illegal apparatus, including the conspiratorial “All-German Working Group for Agriculture and Forestry” in the Federal Republic of Germany, which he also headed.

Party enemy Vieweg

In the spring of 1952, however, this (from the GDR's point of view) illegal work in the West by the VdgB was uncovered. This event and an investigation of Vieweg's activities in Scandinavian emigration by the Central Party Control Commission of the SED as part of a party purge gradually discredited Vieweg. Since he was expected to flee, he was placed under surveillance by the Ministry of State Security . As a result of the questioning by the Central Party Control Commission, Vieweg was accused of falsifying questionnaires by witnesses, despite very contradicting accounts of his activities in Scandinavia, which in the opinion of the commission made it necessary to at least remove him from the SED secretariat. A resignation for health reasons was officially announced. He was also released from his office as VdgB General Secretary. However, Vieweg was not completely dropped, but entrusted with the establishment of the Institute for Agricultural Economics at the German Academy for Agricultural Sciences. Furthermore, he initially succeeded in an academic career. He received his PhD in 1955 at the Humboldt University of Berlin Dr. agr. completed his habilitation and was appointed professor at the German Academy of Agricultural Sciences. As editor together with Otto Rosenkranz of the multi-volume standard work “Handbuch des Genossenschaftsbauern” he received the GDR National Prize in the same year . For his institute, Vieweg claimed the status of a leading institution in agricultural economic research in the GDR. This claim and the creation of internal party brochures, which were not least influenced by his study trip to Sweden and Denmark in November 1955 and which many high SED functionaries did not approve of, did not, however, have a beneficial effect on him. Past him and his institute, the SED created an agricultural commission to promote collectivization. Sobered by this policy and struck by the revelations of the XX. At the party congress of the CPSU and the events in Hungary in autumn 1956, Vieweg criticized the SED's existing agricultural policy. In November 1956, Vieweg therefore presented his own program with the title “New Agricultural Program for the Development of Agriculture in Building Socialism in the GDR”. At the 30th Central Committee plenum on January 30, 1957, however, this program was discredited by Walter Ulbricht as the “restoration of capitalism in agriculture”. The Central Party Control Commission of the SED decided on March 18, 1957 to expel the party. This was accompanied by the forced resignation from all political offices.

Escape and imprisonment

In this situation, Vieweg saw only one way out of escaping to the Federal Republic of Germany. On March 27, 1957, he withdrew via West Berlin . At first he found refuge in Herbert Wehner's apartment. However, on October 19, Vieweg surprisingly returned to the GDR. Contrary to what was probably agreed, he was arrested immediately, although the warrant was not opened until March 27, 1958. In October 1959 the Supreme Court of the GDR sentenced Kurt Vieweg to twelve years in prison for “treason”, along with the revocation of all titles and claims. He was released from Bautzen II prison by a pardon from the Chairman of the State Council in December 1964 . On December 27, 1990, the judgment was overturned by the Berlin Regional Court.

Greifswald academics

In 1965, Vieweg was assigned a position as an employee at the Nordic Institute at the University of Greifswald. In 1969 he became research group leader and he resumed teaching. As part of his research, Vieweg also worked for the MfS's intelligence headquarters . In 1971 Kurt Vieweg was appointed full professor. In 1974 he retired.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In the literature available so far on this topic it is assumed that Vieweg returned on a promise by Markus Wolf to be assured of impunity and that Herbert Wehner urged him to return.


personal data
SURNAME Vieweg, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (SED), MdV, Secretary for Agriculture in the Central Committee, Secretary General of the VdGB, university professor
DATE OF BIRTH October 29, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Goettingen
DATE OF DEATH 2nd December 1976
Place of death Greifswald