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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 SED official Heinz Brandt was one of the most famous kidnapping victims of the GDR state security service. Born in 1909 in Posen (now Poznan / Poland), he began to study in political economics at the University of Berlin in the 1920s. He could not finish because he was expelled for political reasons in 1930. A year later he joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Because of his illegal activities against the Hitler regime, he was sentenced to six years in prison by the Berlin Court in 1935. After so-called preventive detention in concentration camps Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen, he witnessed the end of the Nazi dictatorship in the Buchenwald concentration camp After his return to Berlin he worked as a party official of the Socialist Unity Party (SED). In 1952 he became secretary of the Berlin State Administration of the SED. After the death of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin (March 5, 1953), Brandt supported the announced "New Course” in June 1953, which envisioned a withdrawal of various repressive measures against the population. On his initiative, the Politburo took back the standard increase (Normenerhöhung), against the hundreds of thousands demonstrating of workers in the GDR on the 16th and 17th of June.
After the crushing of the uprising and the course of internal party purges, Heinz Brandt lost his leadership role in the SED. The revelations about Stalin's crimes at the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow (February 1956) and the fate of his emigrated siblings Lilly and Richard in the Soviet Union, accelerated his move away from communism. In 1958 he finally fled with his family in the West and became editor of the trade union newspaper "Metall". In the Federal Republic of Germany, he also maintained contact with the "East Bureau of the SPD." The Ministry for State Security (Stasi), who had supervised him for some time, attracted him to West Berlin in the summer of 1961. A young woman anesthetized him and then the Stasi took him to the towneastern part of the city. After several months of interrogation in remand prison in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, the Supreme Court of the GDR sentenced him in a secret trial to 13 years in prison in 1962 for alleged "serious espionage in coincidence with seditious propaganda and agitation in severe cases." He sat in the special prison Bautzen II for almost two years, up to an international solidarity campaign, in which the newly formed organization for political prisoners "Amnesty International" also participated, procured his pardon. After his return to West Germany, he worked again for the trade union newspaper "Metall" and advocated for persecuted critics in the GDR.was involved until his death in 1986 in Frankfurt am Main. |
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