Willy Sägebrecht

Willy Sägebrecht (21 February 1904 – 8 April 1981) was a political activist and politician from the Communist Party of Germany who was incarcerated as a resistance activist during the Nazi period. After 1945 he became a member of East Germany's powerful Party Central Committee and then, in 1957, head of the country's Military Intelligence Service.

Life Provenance and early years Willy Sägebrecht was born in Groß Schönebeck (Barnim), a short distance to the north of Berlin. His father is described variously as a farmworker, a factory worker and a brick maker. After leaving school in 1918 Sägebrecht worked in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors in Groß Schönebeck and Liebenwalde. In 1920 he joined the Free German wood workers' union and the Young Socialists. In 1923 he switched to the Young Communists and in 1925, having reached his twenty-first birthday six months earlier, he joined the Communist Party itself. Within the party he was initially drawn to the extremist Weddinger Opposition faction, but after a couple of years he turned back to the Communist mainstream of the time, becoming a member of the party's local leadership team ("Bezirksleitung") for Berlin-Brandenberg in 1927. On 24 April 1932 Willy Sägebrecht was elected to membership of the Prussian regional parliament ("Landtag"). He was involved in a significant brawl in the parliament between Communist and Nazi members on 21 May 1932. but in the event he spent the rest of the Nazi period in a succession of prisons and concentration camps, released only in April 1945.

During the early months of 1945 the Soviet army advanced relentlessly from the east, and in April the authorities in Germany desperately raced to empty the concentration camps. Sachsenhausen inmates were evicted and sent on forced marches (death marches) towards the west and north, but as discipline collapsed it was increasingly the guards themselves who fled. Sources state simply that in the course of the death march from Sachsenhausen towards Schwerin Willy Sägebrecht was freed by Soviet troops near Below. the administrative structure used by the SED to control the allocation of parliamentary seats to bloc parties and mass organisations.

Between 1946 and 1950 he sat as a member of the Brandenburg Regional Parliament ("Landtag Brandenburg"). From 1946 till 1949 he also shared the chairmanship of the regional Party Executive for Brandenburg with Friedrich Ebert Jr. In December 1948 Ebert, who was son to the first president of the German Republic, became mayor of East Berlin, vacating his position as co-chair of the regional party executive. Sägebrecht remained in post, now sharing the top job in the Brandenburg regional party executive with Paul Bismark till July 1952. Between 1949 and 1952 Willy Sägebrecht also served as first secretary of the Brandenburg Party Executive.

German Democratic Republic In July 1952 Sagebrecht was appointed a secretary of state and first deputy chairman at the State Planning Commission ("Staatliche Plankommission"). who had become suspected (correctly) of spying on behalf of "the west".

Sägebrecht himself was retired from his military intelligence responsibilities in August 1959, officially on health grounds. In the words of one source "he was not successful". His "retirement" came shortly after a senior member of his department, Siegfried Dombrowski, had fled to West Berlin. His successor, appointed on 31 August 1959, was another senior member of the department, Arthur Franke, whom he had first met in 1945 as the two of them fled from the concentration camp.

There is no indication that Sägebrecht's own loyalty to the regime was ever in question: he remained a Party Central Committee member till 1963. When he died, in 1981, his ashes were placed at the Friedrichsfelde Cemetery in the Gedenkstätte der Sozialisten ("Socialists' Memorial Garden"), alongside those of others whose memories the government celebrated and revered.

Awards and celebration

1955 Patriotic Order of Merit in silver 1964 Patriotic Order of Merit in gold 1979 Order of Karl Marx 1979 Patriotic Order of Merit gold clasp 1981 The VEB Wälzlagerwerk (Rolling-element bearing factory at Luckenwalde was renamed to include the name "Willy Sägebrecht" in its full name 1987 The "Artillerieabteilung 1 in Beelitz" artillery company was renamed as the "Willy Sägebrecht" artillery company