Klaus Sorgenicht

Klaus Sorgenicht (24 August 1923 – 22 October 1999) was a German politician and party functionary of the Socialist Unity Party (SED).

Sorgenicht served as the longtime head of the powerful State and Legal Affairs Department at the Central Committee of the SED and was notorious for the ruthlessness with which he pursued opponents of the political system of the GDR.

Life and career Early life Sorgenicht attended elementary school and commercial school in Hagen and Wuppertal and completed a commercial apprenticeship from 1938 to 1941. Until 1942 he was a commercial employee and department head at the company he had trained at in Wuppertal-Elberfeld.

Drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1942 and trained as a driver, he was deployed in the Soviet Union since January 1943. In July 1944, he deserted and became a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union. In captivity he joined the National Committee for a Free Germany and attended an Antifa school before being deployed as an agitator at the front. Sorgenicht also joined the Volkskammer in 1958, nominally representing a constituency in northeastern Bezirk Schwerin, and the State Council, the GDR's collective head of state, in 1963.

This was one of the most influential departments of the Central Committee apparatus: not only was it responsible for Politburo decisions that concerned questions of the state, law, and the structure and functioning of state and judicial organs, and to control preparations and their implementation, it also headed its parallel departments in the Bezirk SED leaderships, significant parts of the Ministry of the Interior, the State Planning Commission, the Ministry of Justice, the Supreme Public Prosecutor's Office and the Supreme Court. Sorgenicht was thus significantly involved in all interventions in the judiciary and in the decisions of the Politburo that governed the judiciary. He never abandoned his mistrust of professional jurists, whose arguments differed drastically from the "ideologically crude statements of the bureaucrat Sorgenicht."

From 1955 to 1959, Sorgenicht completed a distance learning course at the Academy for Political Science and Law of the GDR in Potsdam, de facto a Marxist-Leninist cadre factory of the SED, which he graduated with a degree in political science. In 1968, he received a doctorate (Dr. rer. pol.). including some show trials ("trials in extended public").

Prior to many trials in the 1950s and early 1960s, Klaus Sorgenicht proposed to the Politburo to impose death sentences. Once approved by the Politburo, Sorgenicht's proposals became binding for the courts, as in the trials against Gerhard Benkowitz, Heinz-Georg Ebeling and Paul Köppe, Sylvester Murau, Gottfried Strympe, Werner Flach, Karl Laurenz, and Elli Barczatis. After the death sentences were handed down against Karl Laurenz and Elli Barczatis, he recommended President Wilhelm Pieck to reject their pardon request.

In the RIAS trials, Sorgenicht proposed a life sentence for Joachim Wiebach. In this case, Ulbricht went beyond Sorgenicht's proposal and ordered the death penalty.

In December 1961, Sorgenicht proposed imposing the death penalty on a farmer who had resisted the forced completion of collectivization in the spring of 1960. The party held him and another farmer, who was also sentenced to death and executed, responsible for more than half of the farmers in their village who had declared their withdrawal from the Agricultural Production Cooperative in July 1961.

Peaceful Revolution In early 1989, Sorgenicht was involved in preparing the electoral fraud in the local elections on 7 May 1989.

On 22 and 23 October 1989, together with Stasi head Erich Mielke, Security Affairs department head Wolfgang Herger, and Interior Minister Friedrich Dickel, he drafted a submission for the Politburo on "Measures to prevent further formation and to push back anti-socialist movements," one of the last attempts by the "old guard" within the SED to end the demonstrations for freedom "by all means." This submission is preserved in several drafts, the tone of which becomes increasingly harsh. However, the SED Politburo returned the submission to the authors for further revision.

Sorgenicht resigned from the Volkskammer and the moribund State Council in late January 1990. Due to his inability to stand trial due to illness, he could no longer be held criminally accountable.

Sorgenicht died in 1999 at the age of 76 in Berlin.