Siegfried Gehlert

Siegfried Gehlert (* 19th July 1925 in Raschau , Saxony , † 29. January 2010 in Chemnitz ) was a German lieutenant general and longtime head of the district administration Karl-Marx-Stadt the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) of the GDR .

Life

The son of an administrative employee and a housewife attended elementary school and commercial school. He was drafted into the RAD in 1943 and the Wehrmacht in 1944 and joined the NSDAP in 1943 .

In 1945 Gehlert was taken prisoner by the Soviets .

After his return he became a member of the German People's Police (VP) in 1948 and a member of the SED in 1949 . In the founding year of the MfS in 1950, he switched from the People's Police to the State Security and began as a High Commissioner in the Aue office of the State Administration of Saxony. In 1952 he became head of the district office (KD) Auerbach , then KD Schwarzenberg and in 1953 head of KD Zwickau . From 1954 he acted as head of Department II (counter-espionage) of the district administration (BV) in Karl-Marx-Stadt and from 1955 as deputy head of the BV. In 1958, at the age of 33, he succeeded Hans Schneider as head of BV Karl-Marx-Stadt. From 1959 to 1989 he was a member of the SED district leadership in Karl-Marx-Stadt. From 1960 to 1965 he completed a distance learning course at the Potsdam Law School , where he graduated as a lawyer and was awarded a Dr. jur. PhD. On February 29, 1972, he was appointed major general by the chairman of the GDR's National Defense Council , Erich Honecker , and promoted to lieutenant general in 1987.

At the turnaround and peaceful revolution in the GDR he was the longest-serving head of a district administration in the MfS. After the district administration was reorganized into a district office in November 1989, he remained in office for the time being and was replaced as head of the district office on December 7th by his first deputy, Colonel Schaufuss. In February 1990 he was released.

Awards in the GDR

• 1963 Patriotic Order of Merit in bronze and 1979 in gold

literature

• Roger Engelmann , Bernd Florath , Helge Heidemeyer, Daniela Münkel , Arno Polzin, Walter Süß : The MfS Lexicon. 3. updated edition, Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-86153-900-1 , page 104, bstu.de .
• Jens Gieseke :  Gehlert, Siegfried . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .

Web links

MfS lexicon: Siegfried Gehlert

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Harry Waibel : Servants of many masters. Former Nazi functionaries in the Soviet Zone / GDR. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2011, ISBN 978-3-631-63542-1 , p. 99.
2. ↑ Neues Deutschland , March 1, 1972, p. 1.