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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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 From the early 1920s on, Heinrich George was considered one of Germany's leading stage figures, renowned as a charismatic character actor. Initially, he sympathised with communism but after the National Socialist's seizure of power in 1933 he adjusted to life under the Nazis and, in 1943, was appointed director of Berlin's Schiller Theatre. After the Third Reich was defeated, the Soviet People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) brought him in for interrogation several times. Finally, in July 1945, because he had performed in a number of Nazi propaganda films, he was interned in the Soviet's "Special Camp No. 3". Once in Hohenschönhausen, he initially worked in the kitchens and repair yard before being assigned to the camp's theatre. Despite his imprisonment, he managed to send a series of heart-rending secret messages to his wife, Berta Drews, depicting both the catastrophic conditions in the camp and the intensity of his despair. In summer 1946, Heinrich George was moved to the Sachsenhausen camp, where a few weeks later he died of untreated appendicitis. He was equally popular among the Soviet guards and the camp's inmates and was the only prisoner to be buried in a separate grave. After reunification in 1990, a search was instigated for the grave on the basis of prisoners' accounts of the location and it was found in an overgrown piece of woodland. In 1994, Heinrich George's remains were moved to his final resting place in the Berlin-Zehlendorf cemetery. In 1998, the Russian authorities rehabilitated Heinrich George, clearing his name entirely. |
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