German Peoples Party
Which party was Helmut Brandt (CDU politician in East Germany) a member of from 1929 to 1945?
Helmut Brandt ( CDU politician in East Germany ) Helmut Alfred Brandt ( 16 July 1911 - 31 October 1998 ) was a Berlin city councillor and a leading German politician in the Christian Democratic Union ( Christlich-Demokratische Union / CDU ) , a political party of the centre right . After 1945 the eastern part of Berlin , where Brandt lived and worked , was administered as the Soviet occupation zone of what had been Germany . By 1949 , when the occupation zone was relaunched as the German Democratic Republic ( East Germany ) , it was in the process of becoming a second German one-party dictatorship . Helmut Brandt opposed of this development : he was ousted from his job with the ministry of Justice and his position as a member of the CDU party leadership team . On 6 September 1950 he was arrested , although he would have to wait another four years for any sort of trial . He was accused of activities hostile to the state ( staatsfeindlicher Arbeit ) and he spent the years between 1950 and 1964 in prison . Life . Early years . Brandt was born in Berlins Spandau quarter . At university he studied jurisprudence and , obtaining doctorates in both related disciplines , following which he took a job with Deutsche Bank . In the meantime , in 1929 he joined the German Peoples Party ( Deutsche Volkspartei / DVP ) , undertaking secretarial duties for the party in the Reichstag from 1931 until 1933 , when a change of regime led to the DVP being outlawed . Following a brief period working at the , in 1938 Brandt joined a legal firm that specialised in matters involving international civil law . War broke out in 1939 and Brandt fought as a member of the German army on both the eastern and western fronts . For some of the time he was based in Berlin , however , working at the Ministry for Military Procurement . War ended in May 1945 and almost immediately , in June 1945 , he was able to return to Berlin and set himself up as a freelance lawyer , also taking a part-time teaching post at Berlin University . Soviet occupation zone / German Democratic Republic . In 1945 there was a widespread assumption that the destruction of Nazi Germany should open the way for a return to multi-party democracy . Helmut Brandt was a founder member of the Christian Democratic Union ( Christlich-Demokratische Union / CDU ) , intended as a slightly more broadly based version of the DVP that had existed before the abolition , in 1933 , of parliamentary democracy . He quickly became the partys expert on legal issues . The next year , however , April 1946 saw the creation of a new political party within the Soviet occupation zone , the Socialist Unity Party of Germany ( Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands / SED ) , formed through a contentious merger of the old German Communist Party and ( many of the elements of ) the more moderately left-wing Social Democratic Party . During the next few years the authorities sought to move towards a new one-party dictatorship , not by banning the other political parties but by controlling them . This was achieved by placing them all into an umbrella organisation known as the National Front and itself controlled by the SED ( party ) . In the end it was only in the Soviet occupation zone ( reinvented , formally in October 1949 , as the German Democratic Republic / East Germany ) that a return to single-party dictatorship was achieved , and even here implementation of the strategy was far from smooth , and stretched out over several years . With the CDU in his part of Germany increasingly under state pressure from without and infiltrated within , in 1948 Helmut Brandt joined the pro-Soviet District Federation ( Landesverband ) in the eastern sector of Berlin . In West Berlin this led to accusations that he was leading a split of the CDU which still saw itself as a single political party across all the allied occupation zones in what was left of Germany after 1945 . It was also in 1948 that Helmut Brandt was appointed as one of the 45 CDU members of the first and co-opted as a member of the assembly committee charged with drawing up a new constitution . By this time . however , the CDU leadership in the Soviet occupation zone was undergoing internal fragmentation , dividing those who , for various reasons , were prepared to collaborate , whether willingly or not , with the constitutional developments being implemented by the ruling SED ( party ) from those , such as Georg Dertinger and Helmut Brandt , who were less so . On account of his bourgeois-conservative propensities Brandt now found himself forced out of positions of influence within the CDU , notably by Arnold Gohr of the East German partys collaborationist wing . It was Gohr who replaced him as chairman of the District Federation ( Landesverband ) in what was becoming known as the Soviet sector of Berlin . In October 1949 Helmut Brandt was appointed as a secretary of state in the new countrys Justice Ministry . In May 1950 he protested to his minister Max Fechner ( SED ) and to his own party leader in East Germany , Otto Nuschke ( CDU ) over the , a succession of rapid legal hearings of 3,324 of people who had survived and been released from the hitherto unacknowledged Soviet controlled concentration camps . These now had their cases processed and were sentenced in fast-track hearings at which Brandt ( and others ) felt that justice was poorly served . Arrest and imprisonment . In September 1950 he was arrested by people working for the Ministry for State Security ( Stasi ) . Four years of pre-trial detention ensued , most of which he spent in an underground cell at the Stasi Hohenschönhausen detention centre . In 1953 he found himself arbitrarily linked by the Stasi with the group of conspirators connected with Georg Dertinger who was arrested at the start of that year , and in June 1954 the Supreme Court of East Germany sentenced Brandt , during a secret trial , to ten years of imprisonment for working against the state ( staatsfeindlicher Arbeit ) . The ten-year sentence was later reduced , formally , to eight years , though as matters turned out he remained in prison , apart from a few days in 1958 till 1964 . By 1958 Brandt had been transferred to the from where he was released as an act of clemency in September . However , he was issued with a residency permit which required him to remain in the Dresden area . Thirty-six hours later he was re-arrested by the Stasi while trying to escape to West Berlin : his arrest resulted from a concern on the part of the authorities that he was about to speak to western journalists . A further trial took place , this time at Frankfurt ( Oder ) on 13 March 1959 , at which Brandt received another ten-year jail sentence for crimes that included espionage , inducing people to escape from the German Democratic Republic , producing propaganda that endangered the state and treason . Freedom . After 5,095 days in prison Helmut Brandt was released in August 1964 . He was one of the first of approximately 34,000 East German political prisoners to have their by the West German government between 1964 and 1989 as part of a ( at the time secret ) scheme to try and compensate for East Germanys desperate shortage of cash . Brandt promptly relocated to the Rhineland region of West Germany , employed by various universities and working , till 1977 , as an expert consultant to the government in Bonn . In the west he was prevented from resuming his political career with the CDU , but in 1977 joined its Bavarian sister party , the Christian Social Union ( Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern / CSU ) . Following reunification Brandt devoted time and effort to researching the infamous . In 1998 he died after a long illness at Königswinter , across the river from Bonn .