Heinz Brandt was born in 1909 to the family of a Jewish writer and art critic in Posen, his childhood there was dominated by World War I. His parents welcomed the Russian Revolution in 1917, and their hopes for what it would mean influenced the future political life of their son. Brandt began studying economics at Berlin University in 1926 and joined the German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD). After Hitler took power in 1933, he was picked up by the Sturmabteilung, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, but was released again after a beating. He organised an illegal employee newspaper in Berlin, the “Siemens-Lautsprecher”, until the Gestapo arrested him in December 1934. At the time, he was preparing to travel to Moscow to attend the Comintern’s Lenin School. Most of the students in the programme he had planned to attend later became victims of Stalinist persecution. Brandt’s brother Richard and sister Lili were already living in Moscow. Richard lost his life in the Terror; Lili spent 17 years in exile in Siberia.

Brandt himself was sentenced in 1935 to six years of penal servitude. At the end of his sentence, he was transferred to the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen and subsequently deported to Auschwitz. There, he helped other inmates to compile documentary work about the death factory, which was smuggled out of the camp and transmitted to London via a radio transmitter operated by the Polish underground in Kraków. He survived the 1945 death march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald, where, with American troops on the way, the prisoners were able to take control of the camp.

Brandt rejoined the KPD after returning to Berlin in the summer of 1945. He worked for the municipal administration of Greater Berlin and for the Central Committee for the Victims of Fascism. The KPD was the dominant political force in these institutions. When a dispute broke out over the classification of people as “fighters against fascism” or “victims of fascism”; Brandt argued against this distinction, which was drawn by the KPD. In Leipzig in October 1945, Brandt stated that “you cannot implement a policy of education aimed at conveying the criminal essence of the Nazi ideology to the German people by pointing, inter alia, specifically to the policy of annihilation of the Jews while also declaring that you do not intend to recognise Jews as victims of fascism.”

In 1946, the KPD, with the support of by the occupying power, forced the SPD in the Soviet Occupation Zone (Sowjetische Besatzungszone, SBZ) to merge with it to form the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED). Brandt became a member of the SED although his friend Siggi (Siegmund) Neumann urged him to join the SPD in the West instead (“Heinz, there is no way you are a Stalinist”). Though he did not let Neumann change his mind, Brandt did promise to stay in touch, just as he had in 1933/34, and to keep the latter informed about what was going on in the part of Germany occupied by the Soviets. At the time, Neumann was the head of the SPD’s “Ostbüro” (eastern office); based in the West, this office kept up ties with social democrats in the SBZ, including SED members and non-members. The Communists categorised the SPD Ostbüro as a secret service organisation.

In 1950, Brandt joined the secretariat of Berlin’s SED administration. In this capacity, he witnessed officials gathering up the personnel files of SED functionaries of Jewish origin shortly before Stalin’s death. Like many others, he hoped that the “New Course” that the CPSU ordered the SED to adopt early in June of 1953 would stabilise the situation in the GDR with respect to the high refugee numbers. In his role as the secretary in charge of agitation and propaganda, he was confronted with a strike by construction workers in Stalinallee on 16 June; the workers were protesting a work quota increase which amounted to a de facto wage reduction. On Brandt’s initiative, the Berlin SED district administration sent a request to the SED Politburo asking that the quota increase be cancelled immediately. The Politburo acceded to this request, but it was already too late: by the next day, the protest movement had spread across the entire GDR.

There were strikes and demonstration in over 700 cities and communities, involving a total of about a million people. Calling for secret ballots, the ousting of the government and German unity, the popular movement raised the question of who should rule. Direct intervention by the Soviet occupying power answered this question in no uncertain terms: it was to be the SED. On 17 June, Brandt was sent to the Bergmann-Borsig plant in Berlin to sway the workers there. He did so, but not in the direction the SED would have wished: instead, he expressed solidarity with the strikers and initiated the election of a factory committee. This was the end of his career as a party official. Assessing the Popular Uprising of 17 June 1953 years later from West Germany, Brandt wrote: “The 17th of June had made it clear to the entire world that the SED did not have any popular base and could not retain its hold on power without the armed protection of the Soviet troops. It showed that the Party was hollow: it shattered when the people rose up.”

Brandt travelled to Moscow to search for his brother and sister in 1956, in the wake of the (partial) de-Stalinisation introduced at the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU. It was the stories he heard there that made him realise “that Stalinism was a million-murder regime and not that which I had previously assumed.” He broke with the SED, fled to the West in 1958 and launched himself into what he thought would be a new life as a journalist for the trade union paper “metal”. On 16 June 1961, he was kidnapped in the American sector of Berlin by agents of the GDR secret service and taken to the detention centre in the eastern part of Berlin (the Berlin Wall had not yet been built). In February 1962, the SED politburo decided to have charges drawn up against Brandt and two others, Karl Raddatz und Wilhelm Fickenscher, centring on their alleged activities on behalf of Western spy organisations. Brandt was sentenced to 13 years penal servitude at the end of a secret trial held at the GDR’s Supreme Court. He had served three years of this term when an international solidarity campaign finally obtained his release in 1964. The Federation of German Trade Unions and *Amnesty International were among the campaign’s organisers.

After returning to the Federal Republic of Germany, Brandt again took up his struggle for the dream of a just world. He continued to express solidarity with movements against Soviet-style communism regardless of where they appeared: the *Prague Spring in 1968, *Solidarność in Poland and the GDR opposition movement. 

Heinz Brandt died in Frankfurt am Main in 1986.