Günter Glende
Günter Glende was an East German party official. Between 1964 and 1989 he served as leader of the Central Committee's department for administering the country's businesses in succession to Walter Heibich. Glende himself became a member of the powerful party Central Committee in 1960, remaining a member till the ending of the one-party dictatorship in 1989/90.
He was the husband of Gisela Glende from 1973 till his death.
Life
Günter Glende was born into a working-class family in Stolp, an industrial town a short distance to the west of Danzig. After attending school locally he completed an apprenticeship as an electrician and agricultural machinery engineer. In 1938 he was conscripted for national labour service. During 1940/41 he studied for a year at the aircraft technical schools in Berlin and :de:Altes Lager |on the edge of Jüterbog. He then undertook his military service as a pilot in the German army between 1941 and 1945.After May 1945 the western two thirds of Germany were divided into four military occupation zones. The eastern third, in which Glende had been born and grown up, had become part of Poland and ethnic Germans had been ethnically cleansed from it by Soviet and Polish forces. Glende found himself in the central part of Germany, which was now administered as the Soviet occupation zone the Soviet sponsored "German Democratic Republic". With the Hitler regime consigned to history, membership of a political party was no longer illegal, and at some point during 1945 Günter Glende joined the Communist Party.
In April 1946 a contentious merger took place between the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party. There are indications that the architects of the merger intended that it should be implemented across all four occupation zones, but in the event it never took effect beyond the Soviet zone, where it was actively supported by the military administration. Backers of the merger were determined that political divisions on the political left should never again be permitted to open the way for a seizure of power by a populist nationalist government as had happened in 1933. Günter Glende was one of hundreds of thousands of Communist Party members, no doubt using one of the pre-printed forms that the authorities had helpfully distributed to facilitate matters. Between 1946 and 1948 he supported himself as a specialist engineer, working on agricultural machinery on the :de:Hohen Viecheln|Moltow estate in the Wismar region, while simultaneously serving as the :de:Bürgermeister|local mayor. As changes in land ownership were implemented, he also secured himself a job as an " machinery officer" with the Wismar branch of the "Peasants Mutual Aid Association", one of five new Soviet style mass organisations, established in order to broaden the political power base of the ruling party, which controlled the mass organisations through the so-called "National Front" organisation. Under the :de:Bodenreform in Deutschland#Bodenreform in der Sowjetischen Besatzungszone ab 1945|land reforms of 1945 :de:Großgrundbesitzer|land owners owning more than 100 hectares of land were dispossessed of their lands. This meant that the great landed estates which traditionally had been a feature central and eastern Prussia were broken up. Unfortunately the poor quality of the relatively unproductive sandy soil remained unaffected by the changes. The land freed up was allocated to a newly identified class of :de:Neubauer |"Neubauer". In 1948 Glende was allocated a piece of agricultural land on what had been the :de:Hohen Viecheln|Moltow estate.
On 1949 Glende moved on from his position with the Wismar VdgB), becoming instead Technical Director of the "Maschinen-Ausleih-Station" and later also of the associated "Maschinen-Traktoren-Station" at Dorf Mecklenburg. During 1951/52 Glende combined his duties at the MAS and MTS with work as a :de:Fachlehrer|technical tutor at the Mecklensburg MAS Agricultural College in nearby Güstrow.
A superficially paradoxical aspect of the Leninist power structure applied in East Germany and other Soviet-bloc states, which western observers sometimes found hard to comprehend, was the extent to which the ruling party aspired to make itself ubiquitous. Evidence that Günter Glende's abilities and political reliability had been noticed came in 1953 when he was sent to Potsdam on a course of study at the :de:Akademie für Staats- und Rechtswissenschaft der DDR|"Walter Ulbricht" Academy for Civil Law and Jurisprudence. When he returned home to the north he had become secretary to the :de:Kreis Güstrow|Güstrow :de:Rat des Kreises|district council.
Additionally, between 1953 and 1958 Glende served as an instructor in the Central Committee's Mechanical engineering and Metallurgy. In 1958 he switched to the Central Committee department for administering the nations collectively owned businesses where he briefly worked as a divisional director before being switched the headship of transport services. Between 1961 and 1964 he was deputy head of the entire department and then, between 1964 and 1989, head of department in succession to Walter Heibich.
Meanwhile, in 1960 it became known that Günter Glende had become one of the 111 members of the party Central Committee. This placed him at the heart of the party's - and therefore of the country's - centralised power structure. The absence of source information on his contributions to central committee deliberations suggests that he was a quietly loyal member, and never part of the leader's inner circle. The unbroken succession of conventional honours that he received over the years tell their own story. Between 1962 and 1989 Günter Glende chaired the Central Committee's Audit Commission for Party Organisation which presumably monitored party officials for signs of political unreliability. East Germany was famously a closely monitored society, and even Central Committee members were not spared the unstinting surveillance of the Homeland Security Services. It is noteworthy, however, that when the Stasi files were accessed by researchers after 1990, it was found that although surveillance files for Glende existed, and the security services were clearly aware in considerable detail of the "personal advantages" that he amassed from his public office, the Stasi boss Erich Mielke never took any actions against Glende. The historian :de:Rüdiger Bergien|Rüdiger Bergien in his 2017 study of "The Party General Staff" between 1946 and 1989, writes of a certain "Beißhemmung des MfS" the security services respected when it came to members of the "party general staff": they indeed still collected a lot of surveillance material on the individuals in question, but they did not use it politically.
In his capacity as head of the party Central Committee's "Abteilung Verwaltung der Wirtschaftsbetriebe" Günter Glende was one of a handful of senior party officials who was able to exercise significant influence over the assets and financing of the SED. Others with similar levels of control were the wily head of the secret Department for Commercial Coordination inside the Minister for Foreign Trade, Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski, the Head of Party Finance and Business, :de:Heinz Wildenhain|Heinz Wildenhain, the Head of Planning and Finance, :de:Günter Ehrensperger|Günter Ehrensperger and :de:Julius Cebulla|Julius "Johnny" Cebulla, the top man at the Central Committee's Transport Department.