Karl-Heinz Gerstner

Karl-Heinz Gerstner (15 November 1912 – 14 December 2005) trained as a lawyer and then worked during the war for the German diplomatic service in Paris. Following the war he was released from internment as a Soviet prisoner of war after producing a number of affidavits testifying to his helpfulness to members of the French Resistance during the course of his time at the German embassy in occupied Paris. He was then able to reinvent himself as an East German journalist.

Controversy later emerged, and has persisted, as to the nature and extent of his parallel career as a Stasi informer. He attended the Kaiser-Friedrich Gymnasium (secondary school) in Berlin between 1917 and 1931. In 1921 he became a member of the Youth Association and Path finder scouting organisations, remaining a member of the latter till 1930.

In 1931 he joined the socialist "Red students group". Party membership had surged since January 1933 when the Nazis took power and lost no time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship. Nevertheless, in his autobiography published in 1999 Gerstner evidently identified an inconsistency which could not go unremarked. He had taken the step, he wrote, only "out of hatred against Hitler ... in order [to do] something against the Nazis" (nur aus "Hass gegen Hitler ...um etwas gegen die Nazis" zu tun). With half an eye on Gerstner's subsequent career as a German diplomat, there were commentators who found the explanation less than persuasive.

Nazi Germany Gerstner passed his Level 1 national law exams in 1935 and embarked on the next stage of the legal traineeship ("Rechtsreferendariat"), starting with six months at the district court in Rheinsberg. That was followed by a six-month period working at a solicitors' office in Berlin that specialised in cases that involved economics, where (despite the growing prevalence of state mandated antisemitism since 1933) two of the senior lawyers were of Jewish provenance. Gerstner stayed in Germany for around six months. During this time he met Sibylle Boden at a ski resort in the Riesengebirge (literally "Giant Mountains") in southern Silesia. Boden, who later became a highly successful fashion designer, noticed the excellent quality of the suit he was wearing. Evidently there were other mutual attractions, since the two of them would quickly become a couple: in 1945 they married.

In February 1940 Gerstner finally completed his legal training, apparently passing the necessary exams.

Wartime in Paris The foreign ministry radio department effectively introduced Karl-Heinz Gerstner to the world of wartime news journalism. Because of his subsequent career as a well-regarded journalist in East Germany Karl-Heinz Gerstner had many more opportunities than most people retrospectively to present his wartime career selectively: there have been suggestions that his enthusiastic pro-government pronouncements, which many sources play down, would have figured more prominently in the record of his wartime career if the war itself had ended differently. Reports indicate that his superiors found him to be highly competent, with a useful personal charm and excellent contacts to the local business community that enabled him to provide exceptionally reliable reports. On 21 September 1945 he was moved to "more appropriate" accommodation in Special Internment Camp 3 at Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. The statements demonstrated that Gerstner (unlike most of the staff at the Paris embassy) had never been a convinced Nazi, and they included several sworn statements attesting ways in which he had helped Resistance members during the war.

According to one source, it was only after nine rejected attempts that in 1957 Gerstner's application for party membership was accepted. Between 1965 and 1978 he appeared regularly on "Prisma", a long-running DFF television programme for which he was employed as the economic commentator, also including in his presentations some political aspects of topics covered and, on occasion hints of political criticism in his analyses. He could be - and sometimes was - described as something of an institution in the German Democratic Republic. The writer Daniela Dahn is their daughter. The couple's younger daughter, the artist Sonja Gerstner (1952–1971), died young.

Stasi In 1989 Götz Aly reacted to the appearance of Gerstner's autobiography with a powerfully critical piece in Gerstner's old newspaper, the Berliner Zeitung.

Gerstner writes in his autobiography that he was asked by the Politburo member Hermann Axen to involve himself socially with the western diplomats "in support of a peaceful future", and to provide reports for the Stasi on matters which might be relevant to government foreign policy. Surviving Stasi records indicate there may have been a little more to it than that. They refer to Gerstner having been "recruited by Soviet friends to educate former Nazi members and gather information" back in 1946. KGB handlers had shown particular interest in Trotzkyists among his contacts in the French Resistance, and in former Foreign Ministry employees. After a time, however, the KGB seem to have downgraded Gerstner's usefulness as they decided that his relevant knowledge was becoming out of date, and they passed his details across to their East German counterparts. The Ministry for State Security (Stasi) reacted by transferring some of the journalists on their books to the "Defence department". In Gerstner's case, the transfer took place at his apartment in November 1975. He was introduced to his new handler and given his new instructions. He was to establish contact with diplomats, especially from those states which were "of significance because of their political activities against the German Democratic Republic". Superfluous clarification followed: he was to concentrate his efforts on diplomats from "West Germany, the USA, England, France - above all, NATO countries". The East German security services would see to it that he would be included on the guest lists for diplomatic receptions and provide other resources to help him deepen his contacts with relevant diplomats.

Gerstner asserts in his memoires that he "did not feel he was being required to do anything dishonest. [He] knew only too well how to differentiate between what was confidential, private and nobody else's business on the one hand, and on the other what was a diplomatic message." But his reports to his Stasi handlers were not restricted to things that Günter Gaus, Egon Bahr, Otto Bräutigam and others had said at regular diplomatic receptions. Gaus' assessment, passed on by Gerstner in 1976, that the flood of applications to leave the country indicated that "the political situation in the German Democratic Republic [was] not very stable" might be seen as a simple "diplomatic report". The same could be said for the Indian ambassador's urgings concerning acceptance of educated migrants from India including the representation that "the migration policy must be made more generous". But the same cannot be said about Gernstner's string of communications about East German citizens turning up, without official permission, to take part in receptions at West German embassies, nor about his digging around to identify Wolf Biermann's contacts. There was nothing innocuous about handing over a text critical of the government drafted by Wolfgang Harich, or the details of what was said at a meeting involving Manfred Krug in the private home of a US citizen. In his defiantly self-justifying composition, the author of the autobiography recalls nothing about those reports to the East German security services.

By the time he reaches his concluding paragraph, Jochen Staadt's review of Gerstner's autobiography has become as angry as Ali's: "What is presented as factual, critical and optimistic is in reality shallow, mawkish, opportunistic and untruthful. profoundly untruthful."

Awards and honours

1982 Patriotic Order of Merit in gold 1987 Patriotic Order of Merit gold clasp