Helmut Brandt

Helmut Alfred Brandt (16 July 1911 - 31 October 1998) was a Berlin city councillor and a leading German politician in the Christian Democratic Union (Christlich-Demokratische Union / CDU), a political party of the centre right.

After 1945 the eastern part of Berlin, where Brandt lived and worked, was administered as the Soviet occupation zone of what had been Germany. By 1949, when the occupation zone was relaunched as the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), it was in the process of becoming a second German one-party dictatorship. Helmut Brandt opposed manifestations of this development: he was ousted from his job with the ministry of Justice and his position as a member of the CDU party leadership team. On 6 September 1950 he was arrested, although he would have to wait another four years for any sort of trial. He was accused of activities hostile to the state ("staatsfeindlicher Arbeit") and he spent the years between 1950 and 1964 in prison.

Life Early years Brandt was born in Berlin's Spandau quarter. At university he studied jurisprudence and public law, obtaining doctorates in both related disciplines, Following a brief period working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for public law (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Völkerrecht), in 1938 Brandt joined a legal firm that specialised in matters involving international civil law. also taking a part-time teaching post at Berlin University.

Soviet occupation zone / German Democratic Republic In 1945 there was a widespread assumption that the destruction of Nazi Germany should open the way for a return to multi-party democracy. Helmut Brandt was a founder member of the Christian Democratic Union (Christlich-Demokratische Union / CDU), intended as a slightly more broadly based version of the DVP that had existed before the abolition, in 1933, of parliamentary democracy. He quickly became the party's expert on legal issues. On account of his "bourgeois-conservative" propensities Brandt now found himself forced out of positions of influence within the CDU,

In October 1949 Helmut Brandt was appointed as a secretary of state in the new country's Justice Ministry. In May 1950 he protested to his minister Max Fechner (SED) and to his own party leader in East Germany, Otto Nuschke (CDU) over the Waldheimer Trials, a succession of rapid legal hearings of 3,324 of people who had survived and been released from the hitherto unacknowledged Soviet controlled concentration camps. These now had their cases "processed" and were sentenced in "fast-track" hearings at which Brandt (and others) felt that justice was poorly served.

Arrest and imprisonment In September 1950 he was arrested by people working for the Ministry for State Security (Stasi). Four years of "pre-trial detention" ensued, most of which he spent in an underground cell at the Stasi Hohenschönhausen detention centre. However, he was issued with a residency permit which required him to remain in the Dresden area. Brandt promptly relocated to the Rhineland region of West Germany, employed by various universities and working, till 1977, as an expert consultant to the government in Bonn. In the west he was prevented from resuming his political career with the CDU, but in 1977 joined its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern / CSU).

Following reunification Brandt devoted time and effort to researching the infamous Waldheimer Trials. In 1998 he died after a long illness at Königswinter, across the river from Bonn.