East office
After the parties and trade unions in the GDR had been subordinated to the primacy of the SED , eastern offices of these organizations were set up in West Germany , as legal opposition work was no longer possible. The east offices served as the organizational basis for party leaders and members who had fled or emigrated to West Germany to continue their work.
description
The main tasks of the east office were
- the coordination of resistance work against undemocratic measures and human rights violations in the Soviet occupation zone and GDR
- The care of the members and their relatives who have been sentenced to prison because of their political opinion or activities
- Continuation of political or trade union activity even after the capture ( SPD , DGB) or the loss of political independence (CDU, LDPD) in the East
- Public relations in the west and the attempt to create a counter- public in the east
- Taking care of refugees from the GDR
The work of the east offices was illegal in the Soviet Zone / GDR and the Eastern Bloc . During the time of the Soviet occupation (up to 1949) and occasionally up to the 1950s, assisted workers captured in the eastern offices were tried by Soviet military tribunals. In order to prosecute actual (or only alleged) contacts with representatives of the East German offices, the GDR had included its own section 219 in the GDR 's penal code , which made “illegal contacting” a punishable offense.
Individual east offices
Known employees or assistants in the eastern offices
- Georg Dertinger (CDU) Member of the People's Chamber and Minister of the GDR
- Wolfgang Schollwer (FDP) State Secretary of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) of Brandenburg
- Rudolf Maerker (SPD) Bonn politician
- Stephan G. Thomas (SPD) politician, editor-in-chief of Deutschlandfunk (DLF)
- Helmut Bärwald , b. as Helmut Fränzel (SPD, CDU from 1971), publicist
- Wilfred Busch (SPD) Head of Lower Saxony's Office for the Protection of the Constitution
- Richard Lehners (SPD) President of the Lower Saxony State Parliament, Minister of the Interior
literature
- Helmut Bärwald: The SPD East Office , Krefeld 1990.
- Wolfgang Buschfort: Resistance and persecution of democrats in the Third Reich and in the GDR. The case study Curt Eckhard , in: Jesse, Eckhardt and Kalitz, Steffen: Coining forces of the 20th century. Democracy, extremism, totalitarianism , Baden-Baden 1997, pp. 285–304.
- Wolfgang Buschfort: Parties in the Cold War. The east offices of the SPD, CDU and FDP , Berlin 2001.
- Wolfgang Buschfort: The eastern offices of the parties in the 1950s (PDF; 1.1 MB), Berlin, 2006, 3rd edition
- Wolfgang Buschfort : The East Office of the SPD , Munich 1990.
- Norbert Pötzl: The struggle of the systems: FAILURE AND DEADLY In: Spiegel Spezial Geschichte from July 29, 2008.
- Susanne Schulze: Archive of Liberalism , in: Der Archivar 56 (2003), no. 4, p. 320 f. Online at: http://www.archive.nrw.de/archivar/hefte/2003/Archivar_2003-4.pdf
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ulrich Weissgerber: Poisonous words of the SED dictatorship. LIT Verlag Münster, 2010, ISBN 9783643104298 , p. 233. Restricted preview in the Google book search