Manfred Klein (politician, 1925)

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Manfred Klein (born July 20, 1925 in Berlin ; † January 15, 1981 in Sankt Augustin ) was a Catholic youth representative on the Central Council of the FDJ . Because he campaigned against the efforts to harmonize , he was arrested in 1947 and sentenced to 25 years in a labor camp with other students.

Life

Born the son of an employee, Klein was always in internal opposition to the Nazi regime because of his Christian view of the world and was briefly arrested by the Gestapo in 1942 for his Catholic youth work . In 1943 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and was so badly wounded near Sevastopol in 1944 that he was taken prisoner by the Soviets on April 30, 1945 without being used in combat . There he attended Antifa training courses organized by the National Committee “Free Germany” in Rüdersdorf near Berlin .

After the war, he resumed the German studies he had begun in Breslau at the University of Berlin and joined the CDU . He was also a member of the Junge Union and the Catholic Youth . As part of his studies, he was involved in student representatives and joined the university's student council as a member of the CDU group. From September 23, 1945, he was a member of the central youth committee of the Soviet occupation zone as a representative of the Catholic youth . On February 26, 1946, together with Theo Wichert , Erich Honecker and Emil Ampft, he signed the license application for the establishment of the FDJ. It was later retouched from photos from this event. From then on he worked as secretary and cultural advisor in the Central Council of the FDJ and also established contacts with the American youth officer. In 1946 he attended an event organized by the CDU West Zone in Hanover, where he also met Konrad Adenauer . However, his Christian Democratic activities contradicted the totalitarian claim to power of the communists and made the Soviet occupying power aware of him. For example, he tried to get the central council of the FDJ to sign a resolution against all violence, but this met with rejection and increasingly isolated Klein within the FDJ.

On March 13, 1947, Klein was arrested by the Soviet NKVD with 15 other CDU-affiliated students and youth representatives on charges of espionage. He spent pre- trial detention in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg , Berlin-Hohenschönhausen , and Potsdam . In a closed session on December 13, 1948, he was sentenced to 25 years in a labor camp by the Soviet military tribunal in Berlin-Lichtenberg . Klein was moved to the “ Yellow Misery ” in Bautzen . There he took part in unrest and hunger strikes by prisoners against the inhumane conditions in 1950, until they were brutally suppressed. As a supposed ringleader, Klein was then transferred to Torgau and subjected to more stringent prison conditions such as solitary confinement and prison. Although his sentence was confirmed again on June 27, 1955 by the competent Soviet authorities, the Protestant provost Heinrich Grüber managed to reduce the sentence to 15 years. In the wake of the onset of de-Stalinization , Klein was released early on October 19, 1956. In return, the Federal Republic of Germany pardoned the communist functionary Jupp Angenfurth.

Event poster of the Junge Union Aschaffenburg, 1957

After his release, Klein moved to West Berlin in November 1956 and began studying law there . From 1959 to 1963 he was a member of the Berlin House of Representatives for the CDU . As a leading functionary of the Association of Victims of Stalinism (VOS) and the “Working Group of Former Political Prisoners”, he remained a target of the East German Ministry for State Security even in the West . Until his death on January 15, 1981, Klein was head of department at the Federal Agency for Civic Education .

Klein left behind his wife and five children. On September 29, 1994, he was posthumously rehabilitated by the Russian military prosecutor.

plant

  • Manfred Klein: Youth between the dictatorships 1945–1956 , Mainz 1968.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Youth after the war on  jugendopposition.de  ( Federal Agency for Civic Education  /  Robert Havemann Society  eV), viewed on March 15, 2017.
  2. ↑ Photo and description on  jugendopposition.de  ( Federal Agency for Civic Education  /  Robert Havemann Society  eV), viewed on March 15, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Klein, Manfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Catholic youth representative, MdA
DATE OF BIRTH July 20, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH January 15, 1981
Place of death Saint Augustine