Johannes Chemnitzer

Hans Chemnitzer (born Wildenfels 24 March 1929 – 1 November 2021) was a former East German national and regional politician. He was relieved of his party duties on 10 November 1989 and then expelled from the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) on 13 December 1989.

Life Chemnitzer was born into a working-class family near Zwickau in the southern part of what was then central Germany, approximately half a year before the Great stock market Crash started across the Atlantic. The war ended when he was 16, and he completed his schooling at a business oriented school. He now found himself in the Soviet occupation zone of what remained of Germany: this, over the next four years, would be re-invented with Soviet political and military support to become a separate state, the German Democratic Republic, which was formally founded in 1949. In 1946 Chemnitzer became a member of the national Free German Youth (FDJ / Freie Deutsche Jugend) organisation and also joined the freshly created Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED / Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands), the Soviet style political party, created in 1946, that would be the ruling political party in the new one-party state. Between 1948 and 1951 he studied at the Agriculture Academy in Zwickau and Elbisbach. Chemnitzer's career progression had fallen victim to the rolling demise of the German Democratic Republic itself. As one of the political leaders on the spot, on 25 October Chemnitzer had called on a crowd of demonstrators not to look for solutions to their problems with further demonstrations: he was booed. On 9 November 1989 the Berlin Wall was breached. The German Democratic Republic was still hosting approximately 300,000 Soviet troops at this time, and after it became clear that the fraternal troops had no instructions to repress the demonstrations violently, the gate to reunification was seen to have been left open. Johannes Chemnitzer resigned his offices on 10 November and was expelled from The Party on 13 December 1989. 1979 Order of Karl Marx