East office of the FDP

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The eastern office of the FDP was founded in 1948 under the name "Hilfsdienst Ost" in Berlin and in 1950 it was located in Bonn as a department of the FDP federal office . The main tasks included the collection of information about the state, political, economic and cultural life in the Soviet Zone / GDR and the care of refugees , in particular of refugee members of the Liberal Democratic Party of Germany (LDPD) in the West German reception camps .

The East Office’s eastern register contains data on around 25,000 refugee LDPD members and GDR prisoners. In May 1950, the "Auxiliary Service East" section was established at the FDP federal office in Bonn and initially set up under the direction of Hans Joachim Pietsch and then continued by Karl-Heinz Naase until 1956. From 1951 to 1957, Wolfgang Schollwer , former state secretary of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Brandenburg , was the deputy and, most recently, acting head of the eastern office of the FDP .

The Eastern Office was responsible for the "Reunification" and "Care" departments, the editing of the "Eastern Service" (1952–1957) and the three branch offices established in the fall of 1950 in the federal transit camps in Gießen , Uelzen and West Berlin. The field of activity of the branch offices mainly comprised the expert work in the federal emergency admission procedure, the advisory service, the refugee check for the issuing of endorsements and certificates, the support of GDR prisoners and their relatives, the procurement of documents for the personal files of the central Bonn office and the preparation and Implementation of mail, balloon and parcel campaigns in the GDR. A special function of the Berlin branch was the medical advice and assistance service for refugees and visitors from the GDR. In 1951, so-called information points (I points) were set up near the border with the GDR, which, in contrast to the branch offices, were only responsible for obtaining information and smuggling educational material into the GDR.

The central tasks of the “Reunification” section included the preparation of a possible reunification of Germany, the educational work in East and West, the management of an information archive and the coordination of the work of the LDP Federal Advisory Board, in which former members of the LDPD are an advisory FDP expert committee had joined together. In addition to evaluating the information from the branch offices and the refugee support, the "Supervision Office" was responsible for setting up and managing the East German files with information on the political work of the LDPD members in the GDR, the refugee files and the GDR prisoners' files. The Ostbüro repeatedly issued special information "on the situation in the Soviet zone LDP and in Central Germany" as well as "analyzes of Soviet foreign policy and the SED's all-German policy".

The actual "Ostarbeit" only lasted until the end of 1956, after which the Eastern Office, which was converted into a "Unit for Reunification", had mainly advisory functions until it was finally dissolved in 1976.

The documents of the FDP-Ostbüro are in the archive of liberalism of the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung für die Freiheit in Gummersbach as a closed collection .

literature

  • Wolfgang Buschfort : The FDP-Ostbüro - difficult beginning and quick end of the covert Eastern work. In: Jahrbuch zur Liberalismus-Forschung 10, 1998, pp. 93–130.
  • Wolfgang Buschfort: Parties in the Cold War. The east offices of the SPD, CDU and FDP. Ch. Links, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-86284-027-1 .
  • Wolfgang Buschfort: The Liberal Eastern Bureau - External Resistance? In: Jahrbuch zur Liberalismus-Forschung 17, 2005, pp. 161–198.
  • Wolfgang Buschfort: The eastern offices of the parties in the 50s. 3. Edition. LStU, Berlin 2006 ( PDF; 1.1 MB ).
  • Wolfgang Schollwer : “Germany as a whole is our obligation”. Notes from the FDP East Office 1951–1957. Edited by Jürgen Frölich . Edition Temmen, Bremen 2004, ISBN 3-86108-043-5 .
  • Susanne Schulze: Archive of Liberalism. In: Der Archivar 56, 2003, issue 4, p. 320 f. ( PDF; 603 KB )
  • Susanne Schulze: files of the FDP east office opened. In: Germany Archive 36, 2003, p. 724 f.