Karl-Heinz Bartsch

Karl-Heinz Bartsch (25 November 1923 – 19 July 2003) was a German agronomist and university teacher who became an East German politician (SED). He rose through the ranks, becoming a Deputy Minister for Agriculture and, more briefly, a member of the powerful ruling party Central Committee. He was even listed as a candidate for politburo membership. In 1963 he was stripped of his functions and his party membership was withdrawn after it was determined that he had been lying about his membership of the Waffen-SS during the Nazi period.

Life Karl-Heinz Bartsch was born in Löblau (Lublewo), a suburb in the Danziger Höhe region, near the German northern coast. His father was a farm-estate manager. Karl-Heinz attended school in Danzig, successfully completing his school career in 1940/41 at the city's "Horst-Wessel-Gymnasium" (secondary school). He was a Hitler Youth member. On leaving school he enrolled in a land management traineeship on the Schwikow estate, while also working as a farm labourer. The country had by this time been at war for a year and a half, and in April 1941 he volunteered to join the Waffen-SS. He was accepted and sent for a five-month training with the so-called "Death-head" 3rd SS Tank Division. He later joined the "Götz von Berlichingen" SS Division. In Autumn/Fall 1942 he was posted to France. In June 1943 he was sent to the Russian front where he took part in and survived the Battle of Kursk. He was nevertheless wounded in August 1943 and was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class. Between August 1943 and January 1944 he was recuperating in a military hospital at Weiden in der Oberpfalz. He then rejoined the "Götz von Berlichingen" division, now promoted to the rank of Unterscharführer (loosely "junior squadron leader"), and was sent back to France. War ended in May 1945, and that same month Bartsch was captured and held as a Prisoner of war by the Americans. During May/June 1945 he was held in a large "Displaced persons' camp" at Saalfelden (near Salzburg) in Austria.

In 1952 Bartsch was appointed to take charge (as "business leader" / "Betriebsleiter") of VEG Clausberg, till recently a large landed estate and now, following the land reforms of the late 1940s, a large agricultural co-operative in the countryside to the west of Erfurt, in the south of the country. Under the highly centralised Leninist constitutional system being rolled out across East Germany, structural links between industry – including farming – and the ruling party were very close: between 1954 and 1960 Bartsch was a member of the party's district leadership team ("Bezirksleitung") for the Erfurt region. Central Committee membership had by now grown to 121. Nevertheless, the fact that Bartsch, still aged only 39, was at the same time elected as a candidate for membership of the Central Committee's inner caucus, the Politburo, indicates that within the nation's power structure his career trajectory was still strongly on the up. Indeed, on 21 January 1963 he took part in a closed meeting of the politburo. The next month, between 7 and 9 February 1963, he served as chairman of the newly created "Agriculture Council" of the Council of Ministers to which he had also now been appointed. The appointment led to him being described by one (unsympathetic western) commentator as the boss of East Germany's "newly founded Supreme Agricultural Authority" ("neugegründeten obersten Landwirtschaftsbehörde").

Removal from power At this point reports appeared in the Berliner Zeitung, a West Berlin daily newspaper, that in the 1940s Karl-Heinz Bartsch had spent four years as a member of the Waffen-SS. Reports appeared in western media at the same time that he had been excluded from the Central Committee of the SED and released from his position as a deputy minister "because he had concealed his membership of the Waffen-SS and thereby greatly damaged the party". ("Genosse Karl-Heinz Bartsch wurde aus dem Zentralkomitee (der SED) ausgeschlossen, weil er seine Zugehörigkeit zur Waffen-SS verschwiegen hat und dadurch der Partei großen Schaden zufügte." After his retirement from that post he continued to teach at the Agricultural Engineering College in Neubrandenburg.)