Kurt Langendorf

Kurt Langendorf (11 September 1920 – 2 July 2011) was a German participant in political resistance during the Nazi years. After 1945, he chose an academic career, becoming a university professor and economist, while also engaging in the Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime and its successor organisation.

Life Early years Kurt Langendorf was born in Lörrach and grew up in the Mannheim area. His parents, Rudolf Langendorf (1894–1942) and Antonie Langendorf (1894–1969) were both founder members of the Communist Party. According to one source Kurt Langendorf received his name to honour Kurt Eisner, the murdered leader of the short-lived Munich Soviet Republic. Kurt and his brother, Hans, became conscious of their parents' activism at an early age: their childhood was a politicised one. and his mother soon afterwards. The authorities attempted to "turn him politically", but subsequent research in Gestapo files indicate an awareness that he had not been "turned". He is identified in Gestapo reports of the time as a "dog that takes orders from Moscow" , but evidently the authorities had no sufficient evidence to proceed actively against him. In 1954 he embarked on a two year study visit to China. This formed the basis for his doctoral dissertation on the socialist transformation of capitalist industry during the change-over period to socialism in the People's Republic of China. His oral defence of his work and subsequent award of the doctorate followed on 15 May 1959. The doctorate was awarded not by his university but by the Party Central Committee's Academy for Social Sciences. In 1965 he received his habilitation (higher academic qualification) from the Humboldt University of Berlin, where by now he was teaching, and where in 1964 he had been given a teaching chair. His dissertation, on this occasion, concerned wages theory and planning in the new economic system His full professorship at the followed in 1968. Subsequently he took also a professorship with the "Fritz Heckert trades union college" in Bernau bei Berlin, where he continued to work till his retirement in 1985.

Retirement left more time for activities involving former victims of the Nazi regime. He joined the local committee of the East German antifascist resistance fighters in Berlin-Weißensee. After the demise of the separate East German state, in 1990 he was a co-founder of the "Berlin Association of former participants in Anti-fascist Resistance, victims and survivors of Nazi persecution" ( / B. V. VdN), and he took on its chairmanship in 2004. He gave s succession of newspaper interviews, always keen to deal with the background and causes of German fascism.

Kurt Langendorf died in Berlin on 2 July 2011.