Hermann Kreutzer

Hermann Kreutzer (3 May 1924 – 3 March 2007) was a German political activist (SPD). As a teenager, he was caught distributing anti-government leaflets and spent the final months of the National Socialist period serving the first part of a ten year prison sentence. Towards the end of 1945 he entered mainstream politics in his home region, which was then being administered as part of the Soviet occupation zone. He campaigned against the party merger between the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party. A further lengthy period in government detention followed. In 1956, following high level government negotiations, he was released and transferred from East to West Berlin.

He later came to the notice of commentators as one of the West German back-room negotiators involved in the "Häftlingsfreikauf" programme, which involved East German political prisoners being released to West Germany in return for large amounts of cash. When the programme began in 1962, it was a government secret on both sides of the border between the Germany. However, as more former East German political prisoners turned up in West Germany during the 1960s and 1970s, the realities of "Häftlingsfreikauf" became progressively a matter of public knowledge. By 1980, some of the complexities of Hermann Kreutzer's involvement in the programme were being openly discussed in the West German press.

Biography Provenance and early years Hermann Kreutzer was born into a politicised family in Saalfeld, a small industrial town in Thuringia, south of Erfurt and Weimar. Paul Kreutzer, his father, worked as a carpenter and as a master-glazier, and was a committed member of the Social Democratic Party. )

Arrest, trial and conviction When Kreutzer was arrested again, on 4 April 1949, he was not totally surprised. Kreutzer remained at the ministry after the coalition government fell in 1979, to be replaced by an SPD/FDP coalition government under Willy Brandt. Kreutzer's new ministerial boss was Egon Franke. It becomes clear that after 1979 Kreutzer quickly became disenchanted with the new West German government's more conciliatory approach to relations with the East German authorities, however.

Kurt Schumacher Circle In 1968 Hermann Kreuzer founded the "Kurt Schumacher Circle", named after the former (western) SPD leader Kurt Schumacher. This was an organisation comprising people who had been locked up by the East German authorities and / or who had escaped / deserted from East Germany to West Germany since 1949. Kreuzer himself became the principal spokesman of the "Kurt Schumacher Circle". An important concern which Kreutzer was keen to bring to the attention of the SPD party leadership was the risk of the party becoming infiltrated by younger leftwingers who were controlled by, or at least sympathetic to the political objectives of, the government of East Germany. Kreutzer believed that the entire affair was being orchestrated by Herbert Häber, an East German Central Committee member with responsibility for the west (which meant West Germany). When he went on to identify certain parliamentarians as "agents of influence", formal "Administrative Oversight Complaints" ("Dienstaufsichtsbeschwerde") were lodged against him at the Ministry for Intra-German Relations, in which at this stage he was still employed. or whether he anticipated expulsion by resigning his membership.

Later years Although 1980 marked an end to his involvement with the SPD, Kreutzer remained politically engaged. He re-organised the Kurt Schumacher Circle which now became part of the "Gesellschaft für soziale Demokratie e. V." ("Society for Social Democracy") which had been founded in 1982. Its membership was composed mostly of former SPD members who in the past had been part of the party's right wing, many of them supporters of Fritz Erler. An enduring theme remained opposition to the East German ruling SED (party). After the changes and reunification in 1990 the SED scrambled to reinvent itself for a democratic future, relaunching itself as the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). Long before 1990, Kreutzer was researching and recording the East German regime's crimes. After 1990 he remained unpersuaded that the party could have changed fundamentally.

During the 1990s and on through the new century Hermann Kreutzer continued to deliver lectures on his experiences of the East German prison system. He also co-wrote a biography of Marlene Dietrich, which was published in 2001 in which he held out the singer-actress as a consistent and uncompromising opponent of National Socialism.