You are bidding on one typewritten, signed letter of the journalist and anti-fascist resistance fighter Bernt von Kügelgen (1914-2002).
Addressed to Comrade Häßner in Gerawho's in for one Reading in the vocational school want to win.
DatedBerlin (GDR), 21. August 1985.
Scope: one A4 page.
On very strong paper.
The personal address information is only censored in the photos.
Condition:Folded lengthwise and crosswise; Paper a bit stained. Pleasee also note the pictures!
Internal note: KRST 210211 in EVRS 2102-5
About Bernt von Kügelgen (source: wikipedia):
Bernt von Kügelgen (* 31. July 1914 in Saint Petersburg; † 30. January 2002 in Berlin) was a German journalist.
Life:Bernt von Kügelgen came from the humanistic southern and Baltic German noble family von Kügelgen. His father, Paul von Kügelgen, was the last editor of the St. Petersburgische Zeitung, the oldest German-language newspaper published abroad at the time.
Impoverished as a result of the October Revolution, the family came to Berlin in 1921. Kügelgen graduated from high school in 1934 with “deferred costs” at the Baltenschule in Misdroy. In 1933 he became a member of the Jungstahlhelm, which transferred to the SA in June 1933, where Kügelgen remained until 1934. In Berlin he received training as an advertising specialist at the Hugenberg Group from Scherl-Verlag and then worked in their advertising department. At the beginning of the Second World War, Kügelgen was an officer candidate and promoted to lieutenant in the French campaign in 1940. In July 1942, as a result of being wounded, he was one of the few German officers to be taken prisoner by the Soviets.
He was taken to the Oranki officers' camp near Nizhny Novgorod, which had recently become home to the first Antifa school. Through interrogations that were more like discussions, Soviet officers convinced Kügelgen that he had to do his part to overthrow the Hitler regime and thus end the war. One of them was Lew Kopelew, which Kügelgen only found out about after the fall of the GDR. Kügelgen became a co-founder of a group of anti-fascist German officers and an employee of the Soviet newspaper for German prisoners of war The Free Word. From January 1943 he attended the Central Antifa School in Krasnogorsk near Moscow, where he met exiled German communists such as Walter Ulbricht, Wilhelm Pieck, Anton Ackermann and Max Emendörfer. In July 1943, Kügelgen was one of the founding members of the National Committee for Free Germany and in September of the Association of German Officers (BDO). From the end of 1943 to May 1944, the NKFD assigned him to the 2nd Division as a front plenipotentiary. Belorussian Front used loudspeaker and leaflet propaganda and interrogated German prisoners. Afterwards, Kügelgen was editor of the NKFD newspaper Free Germany.
Returning to Germany in August 1945, he worked in Berlin as an editor of the Berliner Zeitung and reported, among other things, as a correspondent on the Nuremberg war crimes trial. In 1946 he married and joined the KPD/SED. In 1949 Kügelgen became deputy editor and in 1950 editor-in-chief of the Neue Berliner Illustrierte.
In 1956, the cultural-political weekly magazine Sonntag, published by the German Cultural Association, aroused the anger of the SED leadership by publishing texts critical of the time, prompted by the de-Stalinization that was beginning in the Soviet Union. The arrest of Walter Janka in December 1956, the head of Aufbau-Verlag, where Sunday was published, was followed in March 1957 by that of Heinz Zöger, the editor-in-chief, and his deputy Gustav Just. Now Kügelgen succeeded Zöger on behalf of the SED for the “necessary line correction”. When Janka and his friends were sentenced to prison in a show trial in July 1957, Kügelgen applauded in the hall.
In May 1968, the Ministry for State Security (MfS) recruited Kügelgen as an unofficial employee (IM). It used him under the code name “Wilhelm” to work on Franz Fühmann, Ulrich Plenzdorf and Rolf Schneider, among others, and to report on the mood among writers. Kügelgen's wife Else had been working as an IM with the code name "Jenny" since at least 1961, and from 1968 to 1977 she became a full-time unofficial employee (HIM). In December 1989, the Stasi was able to destroy Bernt von Kügelgen's IM file except for a few pages.
Kügelgen, who was perceived as “exotic” in the GDR,[5] retained his position at the top of Sonntag until he left professional life in 1976. He was a member of the executive board of the GDR Cultural Association. After the fall of the Wall, Kügelgen was involved in the DRAFD association (Association of Germans in the Resistance, in the Armed Forces of the Anti-Hitler Coalition and the “Free Germany” Movement)[6] until his death on December 30th. In January 2002, Kügelgen was primarily involved as a journalist and speaker in preserving the memory of the National Committee, in particular the broad alliance policy maintained by the committee in the fight against fascism and for a democratic Germany.
Bernt von Kügelgen published the book The Night of the Decision in 1983 with his memories and description of his life up to 1946. In a manuscript written after the end of the GDR, Kügelgen broke his silence on the persecution of Emendörfer and General Seydlitz-Kurzbach, “on the inhumanity of Stalinism” and in one case described the “shabby behavior of the SED Politburo, especially Walter Ulbricht”.