Lorenz Lochthofen

Lorenz Lochthofen (born October 21, 1907 in Altenderne-Oberbecker , † September 14, 1989 in Bad Liebenstein ) was a German politician of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and works manager in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), who after 22 years in Soviet Exiled from 1963 to 1967 was a member of the Central Committee of the SED .

Life

Lorenz Lochthofen was born in Altenderne near Dortmund as the child of a miner. Lochthofen attended elementary school in Scholven from 1914 to 1921 . From 1921 to 1925 he was an apprentice in the central coking plant of the Scholven colliery and obtained a skilled worker qualification as a locksmith . From 1921 Lochthofen was involved in communist organizations. In 1921 he was head of a KJVD local group and an active trade unionist. Until 1930, Lochthofen worked on shaft and coking plant assemblies in the Ruhr area . In August 1930, he went to clashes with the Nazi SA over Holland and Scandinavia to emigrate to the Soviet Union and worked until 1931 in the Donets Basin in the Ukrainian SSR as a fitter and welder. From 1931 to 1935 Lochthofen studied journalism in Moscow and political economy in Engels ( ASSR of the Volga Germans ) and then became editor of the German-language newspaper “ Nachrichten ”. In 1935 he was a lecturer in political economy and historical and dialectical materialism at a party school in the city of Engels.

In 1937 he was a victim of the Stalin purges and sentenced to eight years of forced labor. He spent the next 20 years in the Vorkuta labor camp and in exile. Lochthofen's first wife Lotte Rayß (1912–2008), his six-month daughter Larissa, who died shortly afterwards, and other relatives were also sent into exile. After completing eight years of forced labor, Lochthofen had to remain an exile in Vorkuta for life and met his future second wife there in 1946. While in exile, Lochthofen completed an evening course in theoretical and applied mechanics and in 1953 passed an external examination as a mining technician at the technical college in Vorkuta. From January 1957 Lochthofen was chief engineer for mechanical engineering on a geological expedition in Vorkuta.

As early as 1947, Lochthofen applied for a return to Germany in a letter to Wilhelm Pieck . Lochthofen was completely rehabilitated in Saratow on May 14, 1956 and was able to travel to the GDR in 1958 with his wife, son Pawel, born in 1947, and son Sergej, born in 1953 . There he initially worked as a fitter in VEB Waggonbau Gotha and then became head of the standards department and assistant to the plant management. In 1960/61, Lochthofen was technical director at VEB Waggonbau and then from 1961 to 1965 head of the office machinery plant in Sömmerda and the Association of Publicly Owned Enterprises (VVB) "Data Processing and Office Machines" in Erfurt , which at the time had over ten thousand employees. From 1961 Lochthofen was a member of the SED district leadership in Sömmerda . From 1963 to 1967 Lochthofen was the only former inmate of a Soviet camp to be a member of the Central Committee of the SED . In 1967 he retired to private life for health reasons and died in Bad Liebenstein in 1989 .

media

• In 1969, after Lorenz Lochthofen's life , Wolfgang Held wrote the screenplay for the film Time to Live , although the stay in Vorkuta was relocated to Buchenwald concentration camp in order to bypass censorship .
• In 2011, the documentary filmmaker Loretta Walz produced the film Im Schatten des Gulag - Born a German under Stalin , in which Lochthofen's eldest son, Pawel Lochthofen, reports on his childhood in exile.
• In 2012 the journalist Sergej Lochthofen published a book about his father's life under the title Black Ice Cream - My Father's Life Novel .

family

Lorenz Lochthofen is the father of the author and journalist Sergej Lochthofen and the grandfather of the journalist Boris Lochthofen , who became director of the MDR -Landesfunkhaus Thuringia in 2016 .

swell

• Personal data : Information from the city of Dortmund (parents' marriage certificate), special wanted list of the USSR
• Curriculum vitae : BArch DY 30 / IV 2/11 / v.5001, cadre file, curriculum vitae from February 6, 1957 and December 9, 1962
• Studies KUNMS : BArch RY 1 / I 2/3/81 page 33 List III. Year school of the western university (there also the note “single”). Also B. Herlemann, The German-speaking area at the cadre schools of the Communist International, p. 210f, and Biographical Handbook of German-speaking Emigration after 1933 as well as PA AA interrogations R 104551, K. Antes, WKP (b): BArch RY 1 / I 2 / 3/81 sheet 33 List III.
• Engels / Editor : Cadre files, résumés from February 6, 1957 and December 9, 1962. Also biographer. Handbook of German-speaking Emigration after 1933 and Jarmatz u. a., Exile in der USSR, pp. 317, 603. Features Writing in DZZ v. February 12, 1935 and From 'Bettelowka' to the wealthy collective village in DZZ on January 9, 1936
• Arrest, imprisonment, Vorkuta : Neuscheler, The largest slavery, p. 32, cadre files, BArch DY 30 / IV 2/11 / v.5001, curriculum vitae from February 6, 1957, Karl Tuttas, one of those memories, Halle 1980, p 172ff.
• Letter to Pieck : cadre files, letter dated August 14, 1947
• Rehabilitation in the SU : cadre files, curriculum vitae from February 6, 1957
• Return : PA AA inventory Berlin A 505 sheet 88ff
• SED rehabilitation : Gabert / Prieß, documents, p. 161
• Activities in the GDR : SBZ biography, 3rd edition reprint 1965, p. 217, website: NKVD and Gestapo, sources for the GULag book and supplements

literature

• Peter Erler :  Lochthofen, Lorenz . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
• Sergej Lochthofen : Black Ice: My father's novel of life. Berlin: Rowohlt 2012, ISBN 978-3-498-03940-0 .
• Strub-Rayß, Lotte: Damned and disenfranchised. Stuttgart - Basel - Moscow ... 16 years of the Gulag and exile. From the estate, ed. by Konrad Rayß. With a cultural studies epilogue by Horst Groschopp. Berlin: Trafo Verl., 2018, ISBN 978-3-86465-049-9 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ In dialogue, Alfred Schier with Sergej Lochthofen, TV interview, Phoenix, December 3, 2012
2. ↑ Short biography of Pawel Lochthofen ( Memento of the original from December 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 3.5 MB) in the documentation for the film In the Shadow of the Gulag 
3. ^ Sergej Lochthofen: Black Ice . P. 432
4. ↑ In the shadow of the Gulag - born as a German under Stalin. Thuringia premiere of the film
5. ↑ Sergej Lochthofen: Black Ice - My father's novel of life . Rowohlt, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-498-03940-0 .