Gerhard Benkowitz

However, he had been captured by the Russians in 1915 and held by them as a prisoner of war.

The war ended in 1918 and the army officer from Germany had married an ethnic German descendant of the Germans settled in the area during the time of Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century.

The couple were still in Russia when Gerhard was born, but the next year they were able to return to Germany, where the family settled in Weimar.

During the twelve year Nazi period the father held a position as an Ortsbauernführer (local farmers' leader).

Gerhard Benkowitz (2 June 1923 – 29 June 1955) was a school teacher and a resistance activist against the one party dictatorship of the German Democratic Republic.

Hans-Dietrich Kogel (1925–1955) was a clerical official with the Weimar City Council: his work involved in Planning and Statistics.

The Weimar arrests coincided with others, including those of a courier called Willibald Schuster from Großebersdorf, a railway employee called Gerhard Kacher and a student called Christian Busch.

War resumed in September 1939 with an agreed joint invasion of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union.

Benkowitz was still at school, but in 1941 he deferred his School final exams and applied for a commission as an army officer.

Two years later, on 12 July 1943, he was badly wounded at the Battle of Kursk while serving in a tank-grenadier regiment.

Following a lengthy convalescence, and with a serious limp which he would retain for the rest of his life, In 1944 he studied medicine for a term at Jena.

Peace broke out, formally, in May 1945.

His home region of Thuringia had been liberated by US forces but the winning powers had already agreed between themselves occupation zones that placed Thuringia in the Soviet occupation zone, and within a month the Americans had withdrawn, to be replaced by Soviet Military Administration across the entire central third of what had been Germany.

At this time Benkowitz's father was arrested by the Soviet Secret Police: he disappeared and his fate remains unknown.

Benkowitz obtained work initially as a sales representative for a food business, and later as an officer with the town administration in Weimar.

He hoped that the KgU's Berlin contacts would enable him to learn the whereabouts of his father who had been arrested by the Soviet secret police in 1945.

Initially he delivered opinion reports to the KgU.

From the end of 1946 he was working for the Military Administration in Thuringia.

Politically there was initially a widespread belief that military defeat, by destroying the Hitler regime, had put an end to one- party government in Germany, and in the summer of 1946 Gerhard Benkowitz joined the newly established Liberal Democratic Party.

During the autumn/fall of that year he resigned his party membership, however.

As matters turned out 1946 was also the year in which the basis for a return to one- party government was established, with the contentious merger of the Communist Party and, within the Soviet occupation zone, of the more moderately left-wing Social Democratic Party, forming together the Socialist Unity Party (SED / Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands).

Within a couple of years former SPD members had been persuaded out of positions of influence within the new party which had soon become the East German Communist Party by another name.

In 1948 Gerhard Benkowitz joined the country's ruling SED (party), probably on "professional grounds".

In October 1949 Germany's Soviet occupation zone was refounded as the German Democratic Republic.

Soviet sponsorship of the new state continued to be reflected by large numbers of Soviet military and administrative personnel in positions of authority, and in the schools there was a corresponding shortage of Russian language teachers.

In 1949 Benkowitz became a Youth Development Leader in Weimar, and he also undertook a Russian course at a specialist school: in 1950 he took a job teaching Russian in nearby Buttstädt.

In 1949 Gerhard Benkowitz began working with the Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit (KgU / "Combat Group against Inhumanity"), a Berlin-based anti-Communist human rights advocacy group widely believed to be funded and supported by US Intelligence.

He was a member of the KgU ("Combat Group against Inhumanity") and became a victim of the epidemic of show trials that hit the country in the first half of the 1950s.

In Autumn/Fall 1950 he created an illegal opposition cell-group which sometimes involved carrying an illegal weapon.

In the period 1950-52 he was involved in the planning of missions involving explosives and sabotage, but none of these was ever implemented.

They appear to have been contingency plans that could be implemented if mandated by the KgU's US sponsors.

With the outbreak in 1950 of the Korean War there was a concern that something similar might blow up between the two politically polarised halves of Germany: if it had, the KgU would have been seen as a potential fifth column for the west behind the eastern front line, and the photographs accumulated by Benkowitz's Weimar based group of bridges and other installations vulnerable to sabotage would have been useful for identifying targets.

He transferred to the Karl Marx School back in Weimar in 1951, and became in 1954 a deputy head teacher at the Pestalozzi School.

After 1952 the KgU turned away from their militant strategy, however, and Benkowitz's group took to more directly political activities, such as distributing fly-leaflets, gathering information, and sending threatening letters to East German government officials.

He was executed in June 1955.

The father of Gerhard Benkowitz was an army officer from Apolda in Thuringia who had volunteered to serve in the First World War.

On 4 April 1955 Gerhard Benkowitz and his wife Erika were arrested in Weimar.

The next day Hans-Dietrich and Christa Kogel were arrested, also in Weimar.

These arrests were part of a wider Stasi operation carried out under the code name "Operation Blitz" ("Operation Lightning").

Benkowitz had probably been denounced to the Stasi by a fellow KgU member called Rupprecht Wagner who shortly afterwards left the organisation and in September 1955 joined the Stasi.