Werner Herbig was born in Gersdorf in Lausitz (Lusatia) on 15 April 1919 and was the only son of a white-collar worker. He attended eight years of school and then trained as a waiter. He served in the Voluntary Labour Service and was then drafted into the Wehrmacht, serving in the Berlin Guard Battalion and in an air courier squadron before being sent to the Eastern Front as a punishment. There, he was stationed in Kharkiv in Ukraine and then wounded in Alexandrovka in September of 1942. Doctors at a military hospital near the front ordered his transport back to Germany; he was in Görlitz when the war ended. He considered fleeing westward, but in the end, decided to remain in his home region in Eastern Germany and start a family.

In the immediate post-war period, Herbig worked in the municipal administration as a non-Party employee. Driven to leave this work by distaste for some of the measures that the city government was imposing (essentially aimed at enforcing political conformity), he attempted to open his own business. He ran a café in central Görlitz in the late 1940s, but municipal economic policy was aimed at discouraging private initiative and it was not long before continuing to run the café became infeasible.

After working at the food and catering union for a while, he took up a position at the agency responsible for plant pest control in the district. Herbig’s duties included educating farmers about the use of pesticides. In this capacity, he was instructed to write a newspaper article claiming that the farmers’ potato-beetle problem was caused by the Americans who, he was supposed to claim, were dropping the pests out of their planes over East German farmland. His refusal to spread such nonsense resulted in his immediate dismissal and branding as “unreliable” and a “hostile element”. Unemployed, he became acutely aware that the discontent and bitterness in the population were approaching the point of overflowing in the weeks leading up to the events of June 1953.

Rumours and information about unrest, strikes and demonstrations in Berlin and other cities spread quickly to Görlitz and elsewhere. On the morning of 17 June 1953, Herbig was in central Görlitz, where he was recognised by some workers from the locomotive and railway car factory who had formed themselves into a block to march in Berliner Straße. Knowing his views, they called out for him to join them.

Factory and office workers from many types of factories and companies marched together, their chanted slogans resounding through the alleys and streets. A strike committee formed spontaneously. Herbig was on it, as were a metalworker, an architect and a painter and others. One of the committee’s first decisions was to occupy the local Volkspolizei headquarters, disarm the officers there and seize the files and records. Before long, all of the important buildings in the city, including that of the district administration of the Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS), were in the hands of the insurgents. A citizens’ watch, identified by a white armband, patrolled the streets of Görlitz. The revolution seemed to be succeeding in Görlitz, where it was meeting with almost no resistance.

A second rally began on one of the market squares at around 3 pm. The strike committee called on the striking workers and demonstrators to remain calm and avoid bloodshed. At 5 pm, Soviet tanks headed into town from the north-east; units of the Kasernierte Volkspolizei (“barracked people’s police”, the precursor to the National People’s Army) had cautiously rolled in an hour earlier. Denounced by the ousted SED mayor, Herbig was arrested on the evening of 17 June, along with other members of the strike committee. Some of the individual members of the committee were barely acquainted with one another, but now their destinies were bound together. The Görlitz prisoners spent the first week after their arrest in the custody of the Soviet armed forces. The ordinary Soviet soldiers assigned as guards treated Herbig and his fellow detainees humanely, even showing signs of furtive sympathy in some cases. One Soviet soldier on guard duty snuck Herbig some sauerkraut and a few sunflower seeds, murmuring “You 17 June specialist, good...”.

For the prisoners, the real hell began a week later, when they were transferred to Dresden and the custody of the GDR’s State Security Service. In the detention facility, they were interrogated night and day and subjected to beatings, pressure to confess and appalling conditions, all of which were aimed at breaking any resistance. Herbig, who was unwilling to betray or inform on anyone, was interrogated by specialists who had learned their trade under the Nazi regime. He and his fellow prisoners were denied access to legal counsel and never received written notification of the charges against them. The sentences imposed for the alleged crime of being “ringleaders” ranged from a “minimum sentence” of five years to 18 years of penal servitude.

In the Waldheim prison, Herbig shared a cell with 180 other prisoners, all of whom were from Saxony. The state security service tried to recruit him to act as a “secret informer” in the prison in 1954. Herbig agreed to do so (and was issued the code name Kittler) in late January 1954, though he never had any intention of actually informing on anyone. Apparently, he was hoping for a reduced sentence, or even release, so that he could flee to the Federal Republic sooner. A great many of those detained or sentenced due to actions on 17 June 1953 pretended to agree to be informers for State Security for tactical reasons, without ever actually doing anything for the secret police. Before even two weeks had passed, Herbig, realising that agreeing to be an informer was not going to bring him any advantages, withdrew his agreement, announcing: “I now have the courage to declare to you that I am an opponent of the GDR. Until now, I was afraid I would be beaten if I admitted such a thing.” He also stated firmly that he was prepared to withstand toughening of the conditions of his imprisonment, up to and including solitary confinement, until the obligation on him was withdrawn. State Security had no other option than to declare his undertaking null and void. Herbig’s courage and honesty show that in the end, there were limits to the power of State Security even within the walls of a prison.

Concerned about the safety of his family, Herbig decided to flee to the West after his release in mid-1958. The border to West Berlin was still partially open, and he and family were able to cross. Herbig’s experiences in the refugee camp in Berlin-Zehlendorf and the stories he heard from other victims of persecution inspired him to champion the cause of those arrested and/or persecuted for their part in the 17 June uprising. Alongside his employment at the Botanical Gardens in Berlin-Steglitz and, later, as a works counsil, he was an unflagging advocate in the cause of the aims associated with the 1953 uprising. He was part of the group that prepared for the foundation of the “Working Group of 17 June”, which was officially launched in June 1962 with Herbig as its chair. The group was active within the Curatorium for an Undivided Germany (Kuratorium unteilbares Deutschland). The working group scheduled its meetings to coincide with the Curatorium’s conferences but worked on many other issues as well. Keeping alive the memory of the events and of the fates of those involved in them, civic education work and advocacy on behalf of resistance figures were among the most important activities of this group in the decades of its work. Today, it has only a few dozen active members, but there were 2100 of them in its early days.

The group continued its activities after German reunification and successfully fought to have a monument commemorating 17 June 1953 raised in Dresden’s Leipziger Straße, the historic site of the events. Herbig was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit in honour of his engagement on behalf of German unity in 2000.

Werner Herbig died in Berlin in 2008.