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Heinrich George | Helmut Kind | Karl Heinrich | Ewald Ernst | Kurt Müller | Alfred Weiland | Arno Wend | Helmut Brandt | Georg Dertinger | Max Fechner | Karl Wilhelm Fricke | Wolfgang Harich | Walter Janka | Walter Linse | Paul Merker | Sigrid Paul | Rudolf Bahro | Heinz Brandt | Jürgen Fuchs | Gerulf Pannach | Michael Sallmann | Hans-Joachim Helwig-Wilson | Bärbel Bohley | Freya Klier | Stephan Krawczyk | Vera Lengsfeld | Ulrike Poppe
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 The former foreign minister of the GDR, Georg Dertinger, was one of the highest-ranking political prisoners in the forty years of the East German communist dictatorship. Born in 1902 in Berlin, he studied law and political economics during the Weimar period and later worked as a journalist. hHe was politically active in the German National People's Party until it was disbanded after the seizure of power by the Nazis in 1933. After the end of the Second World War he joined in the newly formed Christian Democratic Union (CDU), where he was appointed as press officer at the party’s headquarters. Over the course of the party’s sznchronization, Dertinger became general secretary of the CDU in the Soviet zone of occupation in 1949. After the founding of the GDR in October 1949 he became Minister of Foreign Affairs. Despite his high political function he was monitored by the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) through secret informants. In connection with the preparation of show trials against high-ranking SED functionaries and government officials in early 1953, Dertinger was arrested along with several of his employees, his wife and his children. About 100 Stasi-people searched the East Berlin headquarters of the CDU party for suspicious documents. Dertinger was accused, among other things, of having worked for the French secret service. After 17 months of detention in the so-called U-boat in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, the Supreme Court sentenced him to 15 years in prison for alleged "espionage and conspiracy." After more than eleven years of imprisonment he was pardoned in 1964 and released from the special prison Bautzen II. Until his death in January 1968, Dertinger worked as a lector for the Catholic Church in Leipzig. |
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