Gerhard Ernst Friedrich Harig (31 July 1902, Niederwürschnitz – 13 October 1966,

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as wel ...

) was a

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physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate caus ...

Marxist Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...

philosopher, professor and statesman who served as the first State Secretary of Higher and Technical Education of the

German Democratic Republic German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ger ...

Biography

Gerhard Harig was born in to the family of a physician. In the 1920s, he studied physics and mathematics, and later on received a doctorate of philosophy in Leipzig. He was an assistant employee at the RWTH Aachen University and was also a member of the Society of the Friends of New Russia. After the

Nazi Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...

seizure of power, in March/April 1933, Harig was arrested and detained. Although he was active in the

Communist Party of Germany The Communist Party of Germany (german: Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, , KPD ) was a major political party in the Weimar Republic between 1918 and 1933, an underground resistance movement in Nazi Germany, and a minor party in West German ...

(KPD), he was released in October 1933 and fled to the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...

. He started to work as a researcher at Joffe Institute and later on the

Soviet Academy of Sciences The Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union was the highest scientific institution of the Soviet Union from 1925 to 1991, uniting the country's leading scientists, subordinated directly to the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (until 1946 ...

. In 1937 he was arrested by the NKVD on accusations of being a German spy; however, he was recruited as a Soviet spy and sent back to Germany. In 1938, he was arrested by the Reich and was held at the Buchenwald concentration camp. After the end of the Nazi regime, he became head of the statistical office, including the electoral and list office, in Leipzig in November 1945/46. From July 1946 he was the main advisor for philosophy in the Central Secretariat of the Socialist Unity Party in Berlin. In 1948, he received his professorship at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the

Leipzig University Leipzig University (german: Universität Leipzig), in Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, is one of the world's oldest universities and the second-oldest university (by consecutive years of existence) in Germany. The university was founded on 2 December ...

and was appointed director of the Franz Mehring Institute at the university. In 1950 he was appointed head of the Main Department for Universities and Scientific Institutions in the Ministry of Popular Education. From March 1951 to 1957 Harig was appointed a member of the Council of Ministers and first State Secretary of the newly established State Secretariat for Higher Education. In 1958, he returned to Karl Marx University and became a professor at the faculty of history of social sciences.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Harig, Gerhard 1902 births 1966 deaths German communists 20th-century German physicists People from Erzgebirgskreis German emigrants to the Soviet Union Buchenwald concentration camp survivors Emigrants from Nazi Germany German Marxists German philosophers Socialist Unity Party of Germany politicians Communist Party of Germany politicians Leipzig University alumni Recipients of the Patriotic Order of Merit in silver Recipients of the Banner of Labor