Albert Norden

Albert Norden (4 December 1904 – 30 May 1982) was a German communist politician, academic and journalist who held several senior positions in the ruling Socialist Unity Party of East Germany from the 1950s until his retirement in 1981. Among his responsibilities were domestic and foreign propaganda, the Party Academy "Karl Marx", and the National Front. He also edited the Braunbuch, published in 1965, in which nearly 2,000 leading West Germans were named as former Nazis.

Early years Albert Norden was born in Myslowitz, Silesia on 4 December 1904, one of the five recorded children born to the liberal rabbi he retained this position despite supporting Heinz Neumann in challenging party leader Ernst Thälmann.

In exile in Paris and New York he worked with various popular front publications. He wrote some chapters, dealing with the international linkages of the German NSDAP, in the widely read 1933 Braunbuch über Reichstagsbrand und Hitlerterror ('Brown Book on Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror'). In 1940, he married Herta Fischer (1908–1990), and their son, Johnny, was born in October 1942. In October 1946 he returned to Berlin, where he became editor of the weekly Deutschlands Stimme ('Voice of Germany').

In 1954, he became director of the National Council of the National Front for a Democratic Germany. He would also become director of the Committee for German Unity.

In 1963, Norden became a member of the National Defense Council, a post he held until 1979. In 1976 he became a member of the State Council. In April 1981, the then ailing Norden was left out of the Central Committee and Politburo at the 10th SED party congress. In the same year he left the Volkskammer and State Council positions.

Brown Book

After the war Norden argued in several publications, articles and speeches that there was a direct continuation between the Hitler and Adenauer governments. In 1965 the National Front published a work by Norden, Braunbuch ('Brown Book'), in which he accused over 1,900 politicians, state officials and other prominent persons in West Germany of having worked for the Nazi regime in the past. The book became a reference in the West German New Left, which increasingly had begun to question the official historiography on the Nazi period.

Religious identity Norden was born into a Jewish petty bourgeois family, the son of a rabbi. As an adult, Norden declined to identify himself as a Jew. He was however, one of the most prominent persons of Jewish origin in East German society.