Rudolf Herrnstadt

Rudolf Herrnstadt (18 March 1903 – 28 August 1966) was a German journalist and communist politician. After abandoning his law studies in 1922, Herrnstadt became a convinced communist. Despite his bourgeois origins, he was accepted into the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1931 and worked for the Soviet military intelligence service Glawnoje Raswedywatelnoje Uprawlenije (GRU, "Main Administration for Intelligence"). As a foreign correspondent for the Berliner Tageblatt, he worked in Prague (1930), Warsaw (1931 to 1936) and Moscow (1933). He emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1939, days before the Invasion of Poland, where he was active in the fight against the Nazi state as editor-in-chief of the newspaper Freies Deutschland in the National Committee for a Free Germany from 1944 during the German-Soviet War.

After the end of World War II, Herrnstadt returned to Berlin in 1945, where he became the founding figure of the post-war press in Germany. He was editor-in-chief of the Berliner Zeitung, initially in the Soviet occupation zone and from 1949 in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and played a key role in founding the Berliner Verlag publishers and the left-wing newspaper Neues Deutschland, the central organ of the Socialist Unity Party (SED). From 1950 to 1953 he was a member of the Central Committee (ZK) of the SED and a candidate for the Politburo of the SED.

In the early 1950s, Herrnstadt campaigned for democratization within the SED, but lost the power struggle against the General Secretary of the Central Committee, Walter Ulbricht. After the uprising of 17 June 1953, where Herrnstadt had shown understanding for the protests in articles in Neues Deutschland, he and other opponents of Ulbricht lost their seat on the Central Committee for "forming anti-party factions." In the same year, he also lost his position as editor-in-chief of Neues Deutschland. In 1954, he was expelled from the SED and was not rehabilitated until the end of his life.