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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. Life Early years and education Karl-Heinz Gerstner was born in the Charlottenburg quarter of Berlin. His natural father was the diplomat Karl Ritter (1883-1968) who later became an ambassador. However, his legal father was actually his step-father, Paul Gerstner (1880-1945), an academic who taught Economics and hoped that his adopted son would grow up to become a statutory auditor. He attende ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Berlin
Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constituent states, Berlin is surrounded by the State of Brandenburg and contiguous with Potsdam, Brandenburg's capital. Berlin's urban area, which has a population of around 4.5 million, is the second most populous urban area in Germany after the Ruhr. The Berlin-Brandenburg capital region has around 6.2 million inhabitants and is Germany's third-largest metropolitan region after the Rhine-Ruhr and Rhine-Main regions. Berlin straddles the banks of the Spree, which flows into the Havel (a tributary of the Elbe) in the western borough of Spandau. Among the city's main topographical features are the many lakes in the western and southeastern boroughs formed by the Spree, Havel and Dahme, the largest of which is Lake Müggelsee. Due to its l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Soviet Occupation Zone
The Soviet Occupation Zone ( or german: Ostzone, label=none, "East Zone"; , ''Sovetskaya okkupatsionnaya zona Germanii'', "Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany") was an area of Germany in Central Europe that was occupied by the Soviet Union as a communist area, established as a result of the Potsdam Agreement on 1 August 1945. On 7 October 1949 the German Democratic Republic (GDR), commonly referred to in English as East Germany, was established in the Soviet Occupation Zone. The SBZ was one of the four Allied occupation zones of Germany created at the end of World War II with the Allied victory. According to the Potsdam Agreement, the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (German initials: SMAD) was assigned responsibility for the middle portion of Germany. Eastern Germany beyond the Oder-Neisse line, equal in territory to the SBZ, was to be annexed by Poland and its population expelled, pending a final peace conference with Germany. By the time forces of the United St ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wolf Biermann
Karl Wolf Biermann (; born 15 November 1936) is a German singer-songwriter, poet, and former East German dissident. He is perhaps best known for the 1968 song "Ermutigung" and his expatriation from East Germany in 1976. Early life Biermann was born in Hamburg, Germany. His mother, Emma (née Dietrich), was a Communist Party activist, and his father, Dagobert Biermann, worked on the Hamburg docks. Biermann's father, a Jewish member of the German Resistance, was sentenced to six years in prison for sabotaging Nazi ships. In 1942, the Nazis decided to eliminate their Jewish political prisoners and Biermann's father was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was murdered on 22 February 1943. Biermann was one of the few children of workers who attended the Heinrich-Hertz-Gymnasium (high school) in Hamburg. After the Second World War, he became a member of the Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend, FDJ) and in 1950, he represented the Federal Republic of Germany at the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stasi
The Ministry for State Security, commonly known as the (),An abbreviation of . was the Intelligence agency, state security service of the East Germany from 1950 to 1990. The Stasi's function was similar to the KGB, serving as a means of maintaining state authority, i.e., the "Sword and Shield of the Party" (). This was accomplished primarily through the use of a network of civilian informants. This organization contributed to the arrest of approximately 250,000 people in East Germany. The Stasi also conducted espionage and other clandestine operations abroad through its subordinate foreign intelligence service, the Main Directorate for Reconnaissance, Office of Enlightenment, or Head Office A (german: Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung). They also maintained contacts and occasionally cooperated with West German terrorists. The Stasi was headquartered in East Berlin, with an extensive complex in Lichtenberg (locality), Berlin-Lichtenberg and several smaller facilities throughout the c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Manfred Krug
Manfred Krug (; 8 February 1937 – 21 October 2016) was a German actor, singer and author. Life and work Born in Duisburg, Krug moved to East Germany at the age of 13, and worked at a steel plant before beginning his acting career on the stage and, ultimately, in film. By the end of the 1950s he had several film roles, and in 1960 he appeared in Frank Beyer's successful war movie ''Fünf Patronenhülsen'' (''Five Cartridges''). Many more film roles followed, with Krug often cast as a socialist hero. Krug also achieved notability as a popular jazz singer, often in collaboration with composer Günther Fischer. In 1976 the East German government (GDR) forbade Krug to work as an actor and singer because he participated in protests against the expulsion and stripping of GDR citizenship of Wolf Biermann. On 20 April 1977 he requested to leave the GDR and as soon as he got the approval he left the GDR and moved to Schöneberg in West Berlin. After moving back to West Germany he very soo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Der Spiegel
''Der Spiegel'' (, lit. ''"The Mirror"'') is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. With a weekly circulation of 695,100 copies, it was the largest such publication in Europe in 2011. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner, a British army officer, and Rudolf Augstein, a former Wehrmacht radio operator who was recognized in 2000 by the International Press Institute as one of the fifty World Press Freedom Heroes. Typically, the magazine has a content to advertising ratio of 2:1. ''Der Spiegel'' is known in German-speaking countries mostly for its investigative journalism. It has played a key role in uncovering many political scandals such as the ''Spiegel'' affair in 1962 and the Flick affair in the 1980s. According to ''The Economist'', ''Der Spiegel'' is one of continental Europe's most influential magazines. The news website by the same name was launched in 1994 under the name ''Spiegel Online'' with an independent editorial staff. Today, the content is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Berliner Zeitung
The ''Berliner Zeitung'' (, ''Berlin Newspaper'') is a daily newspaper based in Berlin, Germany. Founded in East Germany in 1945, it is the only East German paper to achieve national prominence since reunification. It is published by Berliner Verlag. History and profile ''Berliner Zeitung'' was first published on 21 May 1945 in East Berlin. The paper, a center-left daily, is published by Berliner Verlag. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the paper was bought by Gruner + Jahr and the British publisher Robert Maxwell. Gruner + Jahr later became sole owners and relaunched it in 1997 with a completely new design. A stated goal was to turn the ''Berliner Zeitung'' into "Germany's ''Washington Post''". The daily says its journalists come "from east and west", and it styles itself as a "young, modern and dynamic" paper for the whole of Germany. It is the only East German paper to achieve national prominence since reunification. In 2003, the ''Berliner'' was Berlin's largest subscr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Helmut Müller-Enbergs
Helmut Müller-Enbergs (born Haltern/ NRW 1960) is a German political scientist who has written extensively on the Stasi and related aspects of the German Democratic Republic's history. Life Müller-Enbergs studied Political sciences between 1986 and 1989, initially at the "Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität“ in Münster and subsequently at the Otto Suhr Institute (part of the Free University of Berlin). From 1986 till 1989 he was a research student, later becoming a research assistant at the Free University's Central Research Institute. Meanwhile, he turned up as a press spokesperson for the "Bündnis 90" (moderate) political grouping in the Brandenburg regional parliament, where he also provided technical support to the Stolpe committee of enquiry. Since 1992 he has been a research officer with the Federal Commission for the Stasi Records (''"Bundesbeauftragter für die Stasi-Unterlagen"''). He is a co-author of the official report on Gregor Gysi (1996) prepared ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bernd-Rainer Barth
Bernd-Rainer Barth (born East Berlin 1957) is a German historian of the modern period. Life The son of an East German diplomat, Barth spent a large part of his early life in Hungary, studying between 1977 and 1983 at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. His subject here was Hungarian studies (especially philology and history). He then worked in various academic institutions in East Germany until 1988 when he found himself banned from professional work. After the reunification of Germany, during the 1990s, he worked as an academic research assistant at the Free University of Berlin. Between May 2002 and September 2003 he was an academic research assistant focusing on the "Theory and history of power" (''"Theorie und Geschichte der Gewalt"'') at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. Since then he has worked as a freelance historian, translator and academic journalist. Output Bernd-Rainer Barth has become known, in particular, as a producer and co-author for the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
East Germany
East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR; german: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, , DDR, ), was a country that existed from its creation on 7 October 1949 until its dissolution on 3 October 1990. In these years the state was a part of the Eastern Bloc in the Cold War. Commonly described as a communist state, it described itself as a socialist "workers' and peasants' state".Patrick Major, Jonathan Osmond, ''The Workers' and Peasants' State: Communism and Society in East Germany Under Ulbricht 1945–71'', Manchester University Press, 2002, Its territory was administered and occupied by Soviet forces following the end of World War II—the Soviet occupation zone of the Potsdam Agreement, bounded on the east by the Oder–Neisse line. The Soviet zone surrounded West Berlin but did not include it and West Berlin remained outside the jurisdiction of the GDR. Most scholars and academics describe the GDR as a totalitarian dictatorship. The GDR was establish ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paris
Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. Since the 17th century, Paris has been one of the world's major centres of finance, diplomacy, commerce, fashion, gastronomy, and science. For its leading role in the arts and sciences, as well as its very early system of street lighting, in the 19th century it became known as "the City of Light". Like London, prior to the Second World War, it was also sometimes called the capital of the world. The City of Paris is the centre of the Île-de-France region, or Paris Region, with an estimated population of 12,262,544 in 2019, or about 19% of the population of France, making the region France's primate city. The Paris Region had a GDP of €739 billion ($743 billion) in 2019, which is the highest in Europe. According to the Economist Intelli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
German Military Administration In Occupied France During World War II
The Military Administration in France (german: Militärverwaltung in Frankreich; french: Occupation de la France par l'Allemagne) was an interim occupation authority established by Nazi Germany during World War II to administer the occupied zone in areas of northern and western France. This so-called ' was established in June 1940, and renamed ' ("north zone") in November 1942, when the previously unoccupied zone in the south known as ' ("free zone") was also occupied and renamed ' ("south zone"). Its role in France was partly governed by the conditions set by the Second Armistice at after the success of the leading to the Fall of France; at the time both French and Germans thought the occupation would be temporary and last only until Britain came to terms, which was believed to be imminent. For instance, France agreed that its soldiers would remain prisoners of war until the cessation of all hostilities. The "French State" (') replaced the French Third Republic that had ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
