Gerhard Benkowitz

Gerhard Benkowitz (2 June 1923 – 29 June 1955) was a school teacher and a resistance activist against the one party dictatorship of the German Democratic Republic. He was a member of the KgU ("Combat Group against Inhumanity") and became a victim of the epidemic of show trials that hit the country in the first half of the 1950s. He was executed in June 1955.

Life

Family The father of Gerhard Benkowitz was an army officer from Apolda in Thuringia who had volunteered to serve in the First World War. However, he had been captured by the Russians in 1915 and held by them as a prisoner of war. The war ended in 1918 and the army officer from Germany had married an ethnic German descendant of the Germans settled in the area during the time of Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century. The couple were still in Russia when Gerhard was born, but the next year they were able to return to Germany, where the family settled in Weimar.

During the twelve year Nazi period the father held a position as an Ortsbauernführer (local farmers' leader).

War War resumed in September 1939 with an agreed joint invasion of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union. Benkowitz was still at school, but in 1941 he deferred his School final exams and applied for a commission as an army officer. Two years later, on 12 July 1943, he was badly wounded at the Battle of Kursk while serving in a tank-grenadier regiment. The two couples from Weimar knew each other, but had absolutely no connection with the others arrested. The show trial which took place subsequently had been planned by the Party Leadership at the beginning of 1955, but at that stage the Benkowitz and Kogel couples had not been listed as targets of "Operation Blitz". The decision to integrate their cases into the subsequent show trial appears to have been taken at very short notice. Gerhard Benkowitz vehemently denied having been issued with explosives, and after an informant introduced into the suspects' detention cell obtained no countervailing evidence, this detail was removed from the charges against Benkowitz. The party newspaper also reported a letter from his teaching colleagues at the Pestalozzi School calling for "strong punishments against the five agents" ("die strenge Bestraffung der fünf Agenten") and pledging to be "more vigilant than ever in preventing diminution of the success of our Worker-Peasant state by criminal elements of this kind".

The actual court hearings took place on 22 and 23 June 1955. On 29 June 1955 the death sentences were carried out "in the name of the people". State execution had been centralised in Germany under the previous regime: Gerhard Benkowitz and Hans-Dietrich Kogel lost their lives at the National Execution Centre in Dresden. She nevertheless survived the experience, and lived on till 2008.