Between 1964 and 1989 he served as leader of the Central Committee's department for administering the Party Enterprises in succession to Walter Heibich.
[3] Günter Glende was born into a working-class family in Stolp (as Słupsk was known before) 1945), an industrial town a short distance to the west of Danzig.
Between 1946 and 1948 he supported himself as a specialist engineer, working on agricultural machinery on the Moltow estate in the Wismar region, while simultaneously serving as the local mayor.
[1] 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.
[5][6] 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 "Walter Ulbricht" Academy for Civil Law and Jurisprudence ("Akademie für Staats- und Rechtswissenschaft").
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.
[1] East Germany was famously a closely monitored society, and even Central Committee members were not spared the unstinting surveillance of the Stasi.
It is noteworthy, however, that when the Stasi files were accessed by researchers after German reunification, 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.