Lothar Otter

Lothar Otter (born March 18, 1931 in Berlin ; † January 4, 2016 ) was a German social democrat who was imprisoned by the GDR in the Bautzen prison for his political convictions .

Before his arrest, the administration apprentice Otter lived in Berlin-Lichtenberg and was the group leader of the district's falcons . After group leader Wolfgang Scheunemann was shot on September 9, 1948 in connection with Ernst Reuter's speech , other members of the Falken were arrested. You were sentenced to 25 years in prison by a Soviet military court in 1949 . Among them were Lothar Otter, Gerhard Sperlin and Günther Schlierf. The reasons for the verdict were based on the charge of "systematically hostile propaganda" and reading "hostile newspapers". He was arrested on May 2, 1949 and imprisoned in Bautzen Prison until 1955. He witnessed the handover of the camp to the German People's Police in 1950 and the prisoner uprisings on March 13th and 31st, 1950. He was released on Easter 1955 and fled to Germany. He then worked for a Bundeswehr site administration and became a member of the SPD. Until his retirement in 1991 he was government director in the Federal Ministry for German domestic relations . In the working group of former political prisoners , he became federal chairman after Dieter Rieke and Hans-Joachim Helwig-Wilson in 2010 . Otter last lived in Bad Harzburg .

Literature and web links

• Resistance of the Berlin falcons. In: jugendopposition.de. Federal Agency for Civic Education , Robert Havemann Society (resistance to the SED dictatorship). 
• Chase under the Soviet star. Stalin's camp in the Soviet Zone / GDR. XV. Bautzen Forum of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Leipzig office, May 13 and 14, 2004. Documentation
• Lothar Otter, one of many. (pdf, 195 kB) In: avs.spd.de. (Newspaper article). 
• Lothar Otter. In: avs.spd.de .