Hermann Kreutzer

Hermann Kreutzer (3 May 1924 – 3 March 2007) was a German political activist (SPD).

As a teenager, he was caught distributing anti-government leaflets and spent the final months of the National Socialist period serving the first part of a ten year prison sentence.

In 1942, Kreutzer was conscripted for military service and sent to serve in occupied France.

Strongly opposed to Nazism, he was not a pacifist.

He idolized King Frederick The Great.

When he was injured, therefore, and was taken to a military hospital, he faced no questioning over the cause.

Other sources recall that while serving in France Hermann Kreutzer secretly maintained contact with the résistance.

Towards the end of 1945 he entered mainstream politics in his home region, which was then being administered as part of the Soviet occupation zone.

He campaigned against the party merger between the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party.

A further lengthy period in government detention followed.

In March 1945, still aged only 17, he was arrested by the authorities, found guilty of "Wehrkraftzersetzung" (undermining the war effort), and sentenced to a ten year jail term.

In the chaos of the final months of the Second World War he managed to escape, managing to get a set of civilian clothes and a bicycle.

He returned to Saalfeld in the company of United States forces.

Interviewed a year before his death, Kreutzer would recall with satisfaction that he had managed to complete his escape and return home without a shot being fired.

By 1945, the region surrounding Saalfeld had been liberated by United States 2nd Infantry Division.

The US military administration and their British allies gave Kreutzner his first post-war assignment.

He was allocated responsibility for managing food distribution in four districts.

In July 1945, the area was handed over to the Soviet administration as agreed at the Yalta Conference.

In July 1945, Kreutzer and his father, Paul, met Walter Ulbricht, who later, as General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party, became East Germany's first leader.

Ulbricht had returned to Germany from Moscow on 30 April 1945, with a group of other German exiles known as the Ulbricht Group.

At their first meeting, Kreutzer and his father told Ulbricht of their plans to create a local League of Democratic Socialists.

The Kreutzer's were co-opted as members of the Social Democratic Party regional executive.

With others, they set up a Saalfeld branch of the party.

Relations between the Kreutzers and the emerging Soviet-style communist establishment quickly deteriorated.

The push for an unequal political merger between Communists and Social Democrats was already on display.

Discussions were sometimes heated.

At the start of April 1946, Hermann Kreutzer and his father cycled over to Weimar in response to an invitation they had received to attend a lunch with other prominent politicians and activists.

From October 1949, the area became part of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

In 1956, following high level government negotiations, he was released and transferred from East to West Berlin.

He later came to the notice of commentators as one of the West German back-room negotiators involved in the "Häftlingsfreikauf" programme, which involved East German political prisoners being released to West Germany in return for large amounts of cash.

However, as more former East German political prisoners turned up in West Germany during the 1960s and 1970s, the realities of "Häftlingsfreikauf" became progressively a matter of public knowledge.

When the programme began in 1962, it was a government secret on both sides of the border between the Germany.

By 1980, some of the complexities of Hermann Kreutzer's involvement in the programme were being openly discussed in the West German press.

Hermann Kreutzer was born into a politicised family in Saalfeld, a small industrial town in Thuringia, south of Erfurt and Weimar.

Paul Kreutzer, his father, worked as a carpenter and as a master-glazier, and was a committed member of the Social Democratic Party.

When Hermann Kreutzer was aged 8 the Nazi Party took power and turned Germany into a one-party dictatorship.

Any sort of anti-government political activity became illegal.

As a teenager he took part in "leafleting actions", which involved distributing political material produced by or for the illegal SPD in Saalfeld.

In his 2006 interview, Kreutzer would recall receiving a friendly warning from another future East German leader at a Youth Seminar in Camburg.

Erich Honecker of the Free German Youth told him, "If you carry on like this, you'll end up back in the jail".