14 Facts About Hermann Weber

Hermann Weber was a German historian and political scientist.

Hermann Weber has been described as "the man who knew everything about the German Democratic Republic".

When Weber was 4 years old, membership in the Communist Party of Germany was banned by the Nazi Party.

Hermann Weber's hometown of Mannheim was a part of the US occupation zone, but in 1947 he headed to the Soviet occupation zone in the east of what remained of Germany and spent two years as a student at the Karl Marx Party Academy in Berlin, leaving in 1949.

In 1949 Hermann Weber was sent back to what had now become the Federal Republic of Germany, formally established in May 1949 from a combination of the three Allied occupation zones hitherto under US, British and French control.

Hermann Weber became editor-in-chief of the FDJ-Zeitung, a newspaper based at this stage in Frankfurt aimed at young West Germans.

Hermann Weber was arrested in March 1953 and taken into investigative custody after the FDJ was designated a banned organisation in the west.

Two months later, still detained, Hermann Weber spent his 25th birthday in a prison in Essen.

Hermann Weber was released later in 1953, but in 1954 he was expelled from the German Communist Party.

Between 1964 and 1968 Hermann Weber studied at Marburg and Mannheim, obtaining his doctorate after only four years.

Hermann Weber served as Professor for Political Sciences and Contemporary History at the University of Mannheim from 1975 till his formal retirement in 1993.

Hermann Weber remained a board member of the National Foundation for Re-assessment of the SED Dictatorship.

Hermann Weber was an honorary member of the Joint Commission for research on recent German Russian relations.

Hermann Weber identified a high point of his research career as the discovery, in 1968, of the text of the original minutes of the Founding Congress of the German Communist Party.