Alois Bräutigam

Alois Bräutigam (28 April 1916 – 10 January 2007) was a German-Czech miner, policeman, politician and party functionary of the Socialist Unity Party (SED).

Born in the Kingdom of Bohemia, Bräutigam joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and was a member of a local resistance movement during World War II.

He moved to the Soviet occupation zone after the war, where he became a SED functionary. He served as the longtime First Secretary of the Bezirk Erfurt SED before being forced into retirement in 1980.

Life and career Czechoslovakia Bräutigam, the son of a miner, was born on 28 April 1916 in Grünlas, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (today Loučky, part of Nové Sedlo, Czech Republic). He completed an apprenticeship as a bricklayer from 1929 to 1932 after attending elementary school in Nové Sedlo. He then worked both in this profession and as a miner.

In 1929, he joined the Communist Youth Association, in 1932 became a member of the Combat Community for Red Sports Unit, and in 1934, he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia as well as the Union of Friends of the Soviet Union.

From 1937 to 1938, he served in the Czechoslovak Army. After a brief period of unemployment, he served in the Wehrmacht from January to April 1939. At the start of World War II in September 1939, he was drafted back into the Wehrmacht and served in an artillery regiment. succeeding Günther Röder. unlike all other industrial party organizations, as SDAG Wismut was a massive mining undertaking with dozens of locations. Fischer was demoted to chairman of the Bezirk Erfurt SED Party Control Commission.

He additionally became a full member of the Central Committee of the SED in June (V. Party Congress), serving until its collective resignation in December 1989, and of the Volkskammer in December,

In the 1960s, he also was a member of the National Defense Council of the GDR, likely due to the significant northwestern border of Bezirk Erfurt with West Germany, though he had to leave in 1972. officially for health reasons, following massive internal criticism that had been anonymously directed at Erich Mückenberger, then the Chairman of the Central Party Control Commission. On 11 April 1980, Gerhard Müller, Second Secretary of the Bezirk Neubrandenburg SED, was appointed as the new First Secretary.

Bräutigam was allowed to remain in the Central Committee, but retired from the Volkskammer in 1981 and was transferred to a politically irrelevant position at the People's Solidarity, a SED-controlled mass organization providing welfare for elderly people. Bräutigam initially joined the People's Solidarity's Central Board as deputy chairman in 1981, but became chairman in June 1982 upon the retirement of Robert Lehmann. He resigned on 11 December 1989.

After the Peaceful Revolution, Bräutigam withdrew from public life. He died in early 2007 and was buried in the main cemetery in Erfurt.