Werner Lamberz

Werner Lamberz (14 April 1929 – 6 March 1978) was a senior politician in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

In a system under which political advancement was generally achieved only slowly and the men who reached the higher levels of government generally did so after decades of patient progression, Lamberz was unusual because of the speed of his promotion.

His father, Peter Lamberz, was a building worker and local leader ("Politleiter") in the (since 1933 illegal) Communist Party.

Peter Lamberz had been one of the first citizens of Mayen to find himself in "Protective custody" ("Schutzhaft") when the Nazis had come to power early in 1933, but had been released, subject to ongoing surveillance.

Mario Adorf encountered Peter Lamberz on his first visit to the two bedroom apartment where the family lived in Mayen's Koblenzer Straße and later recalled, "The father looked in a bad way. He was pale and coughing. One knew he had been in the [concentration] camp, but you were not allowed to talk about it".

The son became a member of the German Youth organisation, a junior version of the Hitler Youth movement, between 1939 and 1943.

One of his contemporaries in the Mayen youth group was the future actor, Mario Adorf, who got to know the family well, being particularly keen on Werner's sister, Liane.

Despite having spent three years during the 1940s attending an Adolf Hitler Leadership School, during 1967 he became a member of the important Central Committee of the ruling party, aged around 38, and after only four years on the candidate list.

In 1941 he was removed from the local school in Mayen and sent away to boarding school at the Ordensburg Sonthofen, an elite special school for those identified as future leaders of Nazi Germany.

His mother had been urged both by local party officials and by her own respectable relatives locally to go along with this step in order protect her children, Werner and Liane, from being influenced by his father, the known communist "public enemy" ("Volksfeinde"), Peter Lamberz.

Werner Lamberz switched to the Hitler Youth in 1943,

Werner Lamberz attended the elite boarding school at Sonthofen till 1944.

The final months of the war found him helping to keep his father hidden in the Mayen area, also undertaking some work for a nursery garden and for a building company.

War ended in defeat for Germany, formally in May 1945, shortly after Werner Lamberz celebrated his sixteenth birthday.

Germany was divided by her wartime enemies into military occupation zones.

Mayen would end up under French military control.

Werner Lamberz undertook an apprenticeship as a heating engineer and installer in the Mayen area.

At the beginning of 1946 his mother died and he moved to join his father, who had himself relocated to Luckenwalde, in the Soviet occupation zone as soon as the war ended, In Luckenwalde Lamberz continued to work as a heating engineer.

In 1947, now aged 18, he joined the Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend/ FDJ), which was becoming the national youth movement of the Soviet administered part of Germany.

Despite the deep mutual hatred between proponents of the Nazism with which he had grown up in Germany and of the Communism advocated by the Soviet occupier, the education that Werner Lamberz had received in a school for future Nazi leaders evidently provided appropriate training for a leadership role within the ostensibly Communist FDJ organisation.

In 1947 Lamberz also joined the newly created Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands/ SED) which would become the ruling party of a second German one-party dictatorship after the Soviet occupation zone was relaunched, formally in October 1949, as the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

Werner Lamberz achieved a series of rapid promotions within the local party hierarchy till 1949, when he took on equivalent responsibilities in respect of the occupied state of Brandenburg.

Between January and July 1950 he attended a study course at the regional party academy at Schmerwitz, after which he was employed as an assistant at the academy till March 1951.

During the 1950s he held a succession of senior positions in the permanent staff of the FDJ.

Party organisation in Brandenburg remained the focus of his employment till 1952.

Further political education came with a period from August 1952 till August 1953 at the Komsomol (Young Communist League) Academy in Moscow.

Between 1953 and 1963 he was successively a member and party secretary for its central council, then its Agitation and Propaganda ("Agitprop") Secretary, and then its Culture Secretary.

Between 1955 and 1959 he also served as the FDJ's permanent representative from East Germany to the Central Council of the Budapest based World Federation of Democratic Youth, with which he would retain links throughout his subsequent career.

A significant aspect of Werner Lamberz's long career as an official with the FDJ was the close relationship it enabled him to form and sustain with the organisation's founder and constant supporter, the country's future leader, Erich Honecker, who himself headed up the FDJ's central council till 1955.

Lamberz was listed as one of twelve membership candidates for the powerful Party Central Committee in January 1963, and in 1967, still not yet 40, he became one of its 131 members.

Between 1963 and 1966 he served under Albert Norden on the Central Committee's Agitation and Propaganda Commission, with special responsibility for Foreign propaganda.

It was sometimes claimed that Lamberz was able to speak more than twelve languages, and his fluency in Russian and French is particularly well attested.

1967 was the year in which he became the Central Committee's Agitation Secretary, which effectively placed him immediately in the ranks of the body's "top management".

Additionally in 1967, the year of his admission to the Central Committee, a seat was found for Werner Lamberz in the "Volkskammer" ("People's Chamber"), officially the national legislature of the German Democratic Republic.

He was also, in 1967, a member of the Electoral Commission which supervised the country's singular electoral processes.

During the 1970s he was sometimes seen as a possible successor to his political ally, the country's leader Erich Honecker.

Werner Lamberz was killed in a helicopter accident in Libya shortly after take-off, following a meeting in a large desert encampment with the Libyan head of government, Muammar Gaddafi.

The cause of the accident in which Lamberz and his three fellow travelers lost their lives has been a subject for media speculation ever since it happened.

Werner Lamberz was born in Mayen in the Eifel region, approximately 36 kim (22 miles) to the west of Koblenz.

He became a candidate for Politburo membership in 1970 and a Politburo member just eight months later, in 1971, the appointment being announced at the Eighth Party Conference in June 1971.