Winfried Koehler

Winfried Köhler (born April 28, 1930 in Leipzig ) is a German architect and project manager who lives in Koblenz .

He was u. a. worked in South Africa as a freelance architect in residential construction and managed the construction of a marine port in Malaysia for many years . Köhler became known to the German public as a contemporary witness of a life in four German political systems ( Weimar Republic , Nazi era, GDR , Federal Republic ) through his biography "Hope gave us strength", published in 2003.

As a high school graduate in Leipzig, Köhler and eleven friends were arrested in 1949 for distributing leaflets demanding democratic freedoms and sentenced to 25 years of forced labor by a Soviet military court in a secret trial. As an unnamed "Prisoner 288 J", he served seven years in the Bautzen correctional facility with famine and psychological torture. After his release, Köhler went west in 1956.

The life story he wrote about a German fate received great attention not only because of the sober description of the circumstances of the time, but also because of the unique collection of documents that is enclosed with the book. This also includes files from the secret trial with the wording of the judgment, which has since been overturned as unlawful by the Russian judiciary in the rehabilitation process. The " Kölnische Rundschau " described Koehler's biography as a "source from which German reading and history books must be drawn".

Since his imprisonment in Bautzen prison, Köhler has also dealt with religious and existential questions and carried out extensive research on the sources of Christianity. The results are summarized in the book “Der mit dem Dogma quarrels”, published in 2008.

Fonts

• Hope gave us strength. Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-937343-00-8
• Who quarrels with dogma. Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-86805-092-9