Erich Apel (3 October 1917 – 3 December 1965) worked during World War Two as a rocket engineer at the Peenemünde Army Research Center in Nazi Germany.
After his return from the Soviet Union, where he had forcibly worked for rocketry development under the Operation Osoaviakhim until 1952, he became an East German party official.
[3][4][5] Erich Hans Apel was born in Judenbach, a small town in the Franconian Forest which had once benefited from its position as a staging post on a major trade route, but which had lost out commercially following the construction of a railway line providing a direct link from Leipzig to Nuremberg.
[2][6] Directly after receiving his degree, in September 1939 Apel was conscripted into the army, becoming a member of Infantry Reserve Battalion 451, based in Gotha.
His boss, Walter Thiel, came to hear of the comment and called him aside, "Apel, you should have joined the medical service: you're too soft for the work here".
Most of the 733 people killed at Peenemünde in the first bombing raid, on 17 August, were forced labourers, but the dead also included Apel's boss, Walter Thiel and his family.
[6] By that time, however, Apel himself was far away, transferred in April 1943 with his own team of assembly specialists and administrators to the Linke-Hofmann-Werke (LHW) plant in Breslau (as Wrocław was known) before 1945).
[6] As the continuing bombing raids at the Peenemünde Army Research Center had their effect through 1943 and 1944, the LHW plant became the assembly location for the V-2 rockets.
On 1 April 1944, at the request of the LHW management, Apel was released from his employment contract with the Army High Command Weapons Agency.
Apel's resolute determination to avoid politics now seemed to catch up with him, since the new location for rocket assembly was part of the vast underground factory at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp.
[6] Even if Apel had nothing to do with setting up and running the vast deadly forced labour infrastructure, as the engineer responsible for the rockets he was naturally associated with it.
As Nazi Germany collapsed militarily and politically during the first part of 1945, Apel succeeded in getting back to his home village of Judenbach.
The entire southern region of Germany had been liberated by the United States Army, but the victorious powers had already agreed a partition of the western two thirds of the country into four military occupation zones.
After the Americans had withdrawn to their agreed positions Judenbach was included in the middle portion of Germany that would now be administered as the Soviet occupation zone.
With millions of working age Germans dead or in prison of war camps, there was a desperate shortage of teachers, and the scheme, implemented with varying levels of effectiveness in the various occupation zones, was designed to select those appropriately educated individuals who were thought to be not excessively tainted by Nazi involvement, to undergo a rapid "re-education" and set to work educating school-age children.
The merger was presented as a way to prevent divisions on the political left from opening up opportunities for right wing populists to take control as had happened after 1932.
During the chaotic closing weeks of the war Wernher von Braun had traveled to Nordhausen and met with Apel, offering to take him to America after the military defeat which by now everyone saw as inevitable.
Their ultimate destination was an island in the middle of Lake Seliger in a sparsely inhabited marshy region some 400 kilometres (250 mi) northwest of Moscow.
[6] Before crossing to the island Apel was taken to Podlipki (today Korolyov) where he was reunited with a large quantity of heavy machinery and equipment that he had last seen in Germany during the closing weeks of the war.
It was frequently indicated that during his six years in the Soviet Union Apel became a communist, but in his bones it seems reasonable to conclude that he remained a political agnostic.
Just four months after getting back, Apel was working as a chief engineer and department head at the East German Ministry for Machinery Construction.
[1][10] Under the Leninist constitutional structure in place, the Central Committee exercised a far tighter degree of control than government ministers or the National Parliament (Volkskammer).
[1] The "Chemistry Programme" was a seven-year plan, launched in 1958 under the widely communicated motto "Chemistry gives us bread, welfare and beauty" ("Chemie gibt Brot, Wohlstand und Schönheit"), and designed to double chemicals production by 1965, making it the country's second largest industrial sector after mechanical engineering.
Reparations extracted by the Soviets had bled the country of its capacity to rebuild and maintain the infrastructure necessary to support the East German government's economic aspirations.
A level of rivalry within the Party Central Committee was normal, but between Apel and Stoph there quickly emerged a particularly intense mutual antagonism.
Stoph never missed a chance to highlight a failure to meet planned objectives or to criticise Apel's actions and utterances.
"We need economics to trump politics" ( "Wir brauchen ein Primat der Ökonomie über die Politik!").
[12] There was talk of revitalising the market and allowing private trade - subject to a restrictive framework - and of moving society away from a semi-military footing towards a civil one.
[16] News of Apel's death was held back until after the Soviet signatory, Trade Minister Nikolai Patolichev had left town, later that day.
On the other hand, West Berlin's mayor, Willy Brandt was never in doubt that Apel's death had been a suicide, performed in protest over the Soviet Union's continuing exploitation of East Germany.