Klaus Thielmann

Klaus Thielmann (29 October 1933 – 25 January 2024) was an East German physician, civil servant and politician of the Socialist Unity Party (SED).

He served as East Germany's penultimate Health Minister, being appointed on the eve of and serving during the Peaceful Revolution. Thielmann was of Sorbian descent and the only Sorb to ever hold a ministerial position in East Germany and, to date, Germany on a national level.

Life and career Early career Thielmann grew up as the son of a family of physicians and graduated from the Sorbian High School in Bautzen, and studied medicine from 1952 to 1957 at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig and the Medical Academy in Erfurt.

In 1957, he earned his doctorate in medicine (Dr. med.), worked for one year as an assistant doctor at the district hospital in Stralsund, and from 1958 to 1959, served as a ship's doctor for the Deutsche Seereederei (DSR). With this, Thielmann was the only Sorb to ever hold a ministerial position in East Germany and Germany as a whole.

At the start of Thielmann's tenure, the East German health care system had been crumbling for several years, many hospitals being in a state of disrepair and suffering from outdated technical equipment, high workloads on medical and nursing staff and severe labor and material shortages. These problems were exacerbated by the wave of refugees in the summer of 1989. In cooperation with the German Red Cross and the Federal Government, an emergency aid programme was initiated in February 1990, which saw the Federal Government providing East Germany with 500 million DM for the purchase of medicines, highly specialised medical technology, medical consumables and rehabilitation technology.

Reunified Germany After the reunification of Germany, he was employed as a full professor at the Institute of Pathology of the Medical Faculty (Charité) of Humboldt University in Berlin until October 1991.