Lothar Bolz

Lothar Bolz (right) in Geneva in 1959

Lothar Bolz (born September 3, 1903 in Gleiwitz , Upper Silesia , † December 29, 1986 in East Berlin ) was a German politician of the GDR block party NDPD . From January 1953 to June 1965 he was Minister for Foreign Affairs of the GDR .

Life

education and profession

Bolz was the son of a watchmaker. He attended secondary school together with Rudolf Herrnstadt . After high school graduated Bolz 1921-1925 study of law , art and literary history in Munich , Kiel and Breslau followed by promotion to Dr. jur. Then he was a trainee lawyer , assessor and finally a lawyer in Wroclaw. In 1933 he was expelled from the Silesian Bar Association for defending against Nazi opponents . In October 1933 he emigrated together with Gerhard Kegel to the Soviet Union via Warsaw, Danzig and Prague . There he worked as a journalist (editor of the German-language Red Newspaper in Leningrad and the German Central Newspaper in Moscow ), as a teacher of German language and literature in Novosibirsk and as a teacher at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow, and from 1941 among prisoners of war at Antifa -Schools and as an employee of the newspaper Free Germany of the National Committee Free Germany . He acted as head of the Germany department, even if his articles mostly appeared unsigned. In 1947 he returned to Germany.

politics

In 1929 Bolz became a member of the KPD . After his return from emigration in 1948 Bolz was one of the founders of the National Democratic Party of Germany (NDPD) , of which he was chairman until 1972. He was then appointed honorary chairman.

Bolz was a member of the Presidium of the National Council of the National Front from 1950 and had also been a member of the People's Chamber of the GDR since 1950 . On October 12, 1949, he was appointed Minister of Construction . From 1950 to 1967 he was also Deputy Prime Minister and Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the GDR . From October 1953 to 1965 Bolz was Minister for Foreign Affairs of the GDR . His predecessor Georg Dertinger ( CDU ) was arrested on January 15, 1953.

The uprising of June 17 (1953) and the building of the Berlin Wall (1961) fell during Bolz's tenure . His successor in office was Otto Winzer (1902–1975).

Grave of Lothar Bolz in the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof in Berlin.

From 1968 to 1978 he was the successor to Johannes Dieckmann (1893-1969) President of the Society for German-Soviet Friendship . Bolz received numerous awards, including a. 1954 and 1964 the Patriotic Order of Merit (VVO), in 1965 the gold medal for the VVO, 1955 the Commander's Cross for the Polonia Restituta Order , the Great Ribbon of the Nile Order in 1965 , the Star of Friendship of Nations in 1968 and the Order of the Patriotic War in 1971 .

Fonts

• It's about Germany. Speeches and essays, Berlin 1955
• For the power of the people and peace. Verlag der Nation, Berlin 1959
• From German building. Berlin 1951, therein: The sixteen principles of town planning

literature

• Bernd-Rainer Barth , Helmut Müller-Enbergs :  Bolz, Lothar . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .

Web links

Commons : Lothar Bolz  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Lothar Bolz in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Lothar Bolz in the press kit of the 20th century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Lothar Bolz in: Christoph Wunnicke : The block parties of the GDR. Continuities and Transformation 1945–1990 , series of publications by the Berlin State Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR, Berlin 2014, pp. 112–122.

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b c} Wolfgang Leonhard : The revolution dismisses its children . 15th edition. Ullstein, Frankfurt / M - Berlin - Vienna 1976, pp. 237 .