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. 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 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. When the programme began in 1962, it was a government secret on both sides of the border between the Germany. 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. By 1980, some of the complexities of Hermann Kreutzer's involvement in the programme were being openly discussed in the West German press.
Biography Provenance and early years 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.
The army 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. 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.
Time to rebuild By 1945, the region surrounding Saalfeld had been liberated by United States 2nd Infantry Division. The US military administration and their British allies gave Kreutzer 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. From October 1949, the area became part of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). 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 Kreutzers were co-opted as members of the Social Democratic Party regional executive. With others, they set up a Saalfeld branch of the party.
Political tensions in the Soviet occupation zone 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. 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". 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. The invitation came from the Soviet military administrators in the region: lunch was to be served in the "officers' casino" at the Hotel Empress Augusta. The "Socis" (Social Democrats) were to sit along one side of it and the "Komiks" (comedians, as, among themselves, they called the Communists) were to sit along the other side. An unexpected feature of the way in which the room had been prepared had involved the positioning of a second chair behind each of the chairs set in place for the diners. When the guests sat down to eat, each man found himself with a Soviet officer sitting directly behind him. After the meal, the acting regional president of the Social Democrats, Heinrich Hoffmann, proposed a toast. He cited a rich tradition of pioneering Social Democratic progress in the Thuringia region, dating back to 1869. In light of this, it was no more than his duty to be the first, here in Thuringia, to "proclaim the unity" (between Communists and Social Democrats). For Kreutzer and other Social Democrats present, Hoffman's action was an appalling betrayal, but as soon as Hoffmann sat down the Soviet general next to him stood up: "We wish to toast the unity". Several Social Democrats began to protest, but behind each of them a Soviet officer came to life and ordered them to "say nothing". On the other side of the table the communist lunch guests now stood up, as one, and sang a verse extolling party unity from the song (originally a poem by the revolutionary poet Leonid Petrowitsch Radin), "Brothers, towards the sunshine, towards freedom". As far as Thuringia was concerned, the formal unification of the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party was enacted at nearby Gotha on 7 April 1946. Accordingly, the political unification did take place a couple of weeks earlier in Thuringia than in the rest of the Soviet occupation zone. "Nationally", the contentious merger took place at a special congress convened in Berlin on 21 April 1946.
On 1 May 1946, Hermann Kreutzer and Dorothée "Dorle" Fischer attended the first political rally in Saalfeld of the new Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED) in the main square at Saalfeld. The two of them had been friends since before the memorable occasion in 1933 when, aged 9 and 10, they had celebrated Hitler's successes by together discovering Kreutzer's uncle's wine collection. As the meeting in the square progressed, Dorle suggested the two of them should leave in case events turned ugly. But Kreutzer's opposition to National Socialism would never translate into opposition to military values of honour, courage and loyalty. He was loyal to the Social Democratic Party. So at night, with others, he now began to make his way through the streets of the town, sticking to the walls posters condemning the merger of the Communist and Social Democratic parties. He would pass information about the party merger and the arrests being made in order to enforce it through the still porous border West Berlin-based press contacts. He argued openly with the SPD regional party president, Heinrich Hoffmann, who had endorsed the merger. Kreutzer also maintained contacts from his Saalfeld home-base with the so-called SPD East Offices in West Berlin and Hanover, set up by leaders of the forcibly merged SPD from the Soviet occupation zone, who moved to the west because they wanted no part in the merger. The only place in the whole of Germany where it had been possible to hold a genuine member's vote among SPD members about the proposed party merger had been in West Berlin, where the idea was rejected by 82% of those voting.)
Arrest, trial and conviction When Kreutzer was arrested again, on 4 April 1949, he was not totally surprised. This time it was not the Gestapo arresting him but the Russian secret police. He was detained at Weimar, as before identified as a political prisoner. Interrogation sessions involved beatings, immersion in cold water and sleep deprivation. Fairly soon, Kreutzer reached the point at which he would "sign anything". On 31 August, with his father, his fiancée (who had been working as a typist for the town council) and three other Social Democrat activists, he faced a Soviet military tribunal which was persuaded of his guilt in respect of "anti-Soviet propaganda", "counter-revolutionary activities" and "socialist breach of faith. The military tribunal sentenced Hermann Kreutzer, his father Paul Kreutzer, and his future wife Dorothée to twenty-five years of imprisonment and, according to some sources, forced labour apiece.
Dorothée was taken to NKVD special camp Nr. 7, the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp, on the outskirts of Berlin. She was later transferred to Hoheneck women's prison in Saxony. After a brief stay at Brandenburg-Görden Prison, Kreutzer and his father were taken to the overcrowded correctional facility at Bautzen. A large hall intended to accommodate 200 inmates accommodated 400 with nothing to do except sit and, in winter time, freeze. Contact with Dorothée at Sachsenhausen was out of the question. Starvation was everywhere and tuberculosis was rampant. There were no doctors and no drugs. Dead bodies were removed just once per day, directly after the roll call was taken. On one occasion, when Kreutzer was assigned to a team digging a mass grave, they had to stop and dig a new pit in another part of the ground after reaching a large pile of bones from a previous interment.
Release and expulsion