Ehrhart Neubert

Ehrhart Neubert (2 August 1940 – 17 November 2024) was a German evangelical minister and theologian.

During its final decade he emerged as an opponent of the East German one-party dictatorship, becoming a member of the League of Evangelical Churches in the German Democratic Republic (Bund der Evangelischen Kirchen in der DDR/BEK). Since the collapse of the East German political regime in 1989/90 he has participated prominently on committees and as an author seeking to understand and evaluate it.

Biography Neubert was born into the family of a Protestant minister in 1940 in Herschdorf, a hillside village near Erfurt in central southern Germany. He grew up in nearby Großenbehringen. Between 1958 and 1963 he studied Theology at Jena. After 1964 he worked at Niedersynderstedt initially as a vicar and later as the minister in charge for the parish. From 1973 he was combining his parish duties with work as a student chaplain at nearby Weimar. he joined the CDU, in western Germany a political party of the moderate right, but in the politically and by this time physically separated eastern German state, one of the so-called "block parties" controlled by the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands/SED) party through an organisation known as the National Front (Nationale Front der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik/NF). In 1984 Neubert resigned from the CDU. He contributed to the new party's programme and served as its first vice-chairman. in January 1990 Neubert resigned from Democratic Awakening. The crunch issue appears to have been the issue of its developing political alliances, notably with the CDU (party): Merkel stayed. In 1992 the Alliance 90 group in the Brandenburg Landtag ("regional parliament") nominated him as a member of the Stolpe inquiry committee. The committee concluded its work in 1994 (although many of the matters it investigated would not be so quickly laid to rest). In 1996 Ehrhart Neubart re-joined the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands/CDU party). In 1998 the work was published, repackaged into a volume of approximately 1000 pages.

In 1997 Neubert took a post with the Stasi Records Agency (Bundesbeauftragten für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik/BStU), taking charge of the agency's research and education department. Elsewhere he has made numerous further written contributions on resistance and opposition, and the position of religious people and institutions, in former East Germany. In 1998 he was co-opted as a board member of the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship (Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur). subsequently becoming the organisation's president on the death of Bärbel Bohley.

Erhart Neubert retired in 2005, but still filled in as a Lutheran minister in the Limlingerode area. He married Hildigund (born Hildigund Falcke) in 1987: she shares his background as an East German opposition activist with evangelical church connections, also sharing his commitment since 1990 to researching and recording the dictatorship. She later served for ten years as State Commissioner for Stasi records in Thuringia.

Neubert died in Limlingerode, Germany on 17 November 2024, at the age of 84.